Side-Chains are still exciting to me

[ChrisNW]

I've always found gating toms to be a challenge. Even with careful adjustment they still sound "gated." It sucks. And manually adjusting level for drum fills also sucks (a time suck).

Today I tried putting a compressor keyed by the snare drum mic before the gate on the tom. With a little adjustment it was pretty damn perfect. No false opening of the gate by the snare and a nice slow release was possible on the gate. I can hear the attack and sustain of the tom naturally without that pesky snare drum budding in!



Source: Rack Tom

Processing:
Compressor (w/out makeup gain) with key input from Snare --> Signal Gate

Edit: "Ducking" duh!


Share your side-chain applications!

[niccolo gallio]

Wow, that's a really cool application!

[ThumpyBumper]

Sidechain ducking works great for kick/bass interaction as well, though that's not exactly secret. I've been splitting my bass into 2 bands (low and hi frequencies) and using the kick to duck the low freq's only. That way you still HEAR the bass, but you feel it less when the kick hits.

[g.a.harry]

Another couple of no secrets are gating super low sine tones to the kick, and white noise to the snare.

Old-school de-essing.

A friend of mine came up with the trick of ducking a vocal's reverb to the vocal itself. Very damned cool, especially if you've got delays and/or flangers, distortion, &tc. You get this weird swelling noise thing that happens, awesome.

An idea that just occurred to me is using a de-essing style frequency dependent ducking. So, if you find that two instruments are walking over each other (but only on particular notes) throw a tight band-pass eq centered on the note you want to get rid of to the side-comp of the channel you want to duck. Whenever the note you want gone gets hit on the track you want to keep the other track gets ducked. Probably most useful for a piano/bass combo or somesuch.

Or, I suppose, if you have a very resonant guitar that takes too much room away from other instruments but sounds great by itself. Dupe the track and have it trigger the original. But then, i suppose, for it to be useful and not just suck the entire thing out, you'd have to set up a multi-band ducking thing with duplicate or triplicate tracks filtered and sidechained. Kind of pointless, but fun nonetheless.

That last makes sense in my head, but I'm not sure how well it translates...