Silky-smooth sidechaining

When kicks and subs collide, it’s time to take control. Go beyond the pump and use sidechain compression in a less obvious way

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Overt sidechain compression has become clichéd but, used with care, it can still be an invaluable tool for mixing kick and bass. Carefully tweak threshold, ratio, attack and release to duck the bass when the kick hits.

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Instead of using the kick to trigger compression over your bass as a whole, use a multiband plugin to pull down only sub frequencies when the kick hits, to leave the mids/highs intact and avoid obvious up-down ducking.

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Need to get more surgical? Load a side-chain-capable dynamic EQ over your bass, key your kick into its input, then use that to trigger a narrow-ish bell cut in the bass, directly where the kick’s fundamental frequency lives.

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Waves-factory TrackSpacer is a simple but ingenious plugin that takes the sidechaining principle further. First, place it on your bass, then route the kick into its sidechain input. It’ll listen to the frequencies of your kick, and will then dynamically remove those same frequencies from the bass.

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Of course, a one-size-fits-all solution is rare, so often you’ll have to set up subtle combinations of all the above techniques (along with the other tricks we’ve covered in this feature) to get truly transparent results.