Adding More To Sidechain Compression Effects

Sidechain ducking effects always work well but we’ve heard them before. If you’re sold on using this trick, why not enhance it with your own twist?

We’ve all heard plenty of tracks where the kick drum signal or a ‘ghost’ trigger playing a similar four-to-the-floor rhythm has triggered a compressor in the output chain to duck, providing a ‘sucky’ treatment, popular in some forms of EDM. Even if ‘whole track’ treatments are too much for your ears, you may be tempted to try this trick on a single track of your mix but even this more subtle treatment is often overused. You can personalise a version of this effect, however, by adding synth parameters to those affected by the sidechain input source. So, rather than just asking your compressor to duck every time it receives a sidechain input signal, why not get the pitch, or filter, or resonance, or pan, or any other synth parameter to respond to a sidechain input signal too? Layered treatments can be highly effective.

We start with three tracks. The first is a beat loop, the second a kick drum on its own audio track and the third a pad sound from Logic’s ES2 synth. You can use any synth, so long as it has the capacity to respond to a sidechain input source.

We set Audio Track 2 (the Kick track) as the sidechain input source to our compressor, which is inserted into the chain of the pad sound. A heavy ratio ensures that this ducks heavily every time the kick plays, which disturbs the pad every two beats.

A nice effect but one we’ve heard before. What if we double the sidechain compression treatment with other parameters too? In the ES2, we set up modulation sources to control both the pitch of the pad and pan position via the sidechain input source too.