sidechaining madness

[TheRealZoltan]

ok,, so here's what i do:
i have my drum tracks,,, I route them all to 1 bus (or group them).

I send the rest of my tracks to another bus on which I put a sidechain compressor
the compressor receives audio from the kick track (post mixer) which is inside the drum group,

I do this all to make the overall sound more powerful and think its helpful,,
but I was wondering:

when I for example mute the drum group,, the compressor still receives signal from the kick track,,, and still pumps

what I would like to achieve is:
as I mute the drum group the compressor stops getting signal from the kick

one way to achieve this would be: to set audio from on the sidechain compressor to the drum group (post mixer),, and filter out the kick,,,

problem with this is that in some cases I might also want to get audio for example from a clap sound,, and I cant filter it out exactly because I also have more sounds on that same frequency…

are there any other ways???

any help is deeply appreciated,, thank u!

[d-track]

there are many ways to do this,

one is very simple if you have any midi device.
assign the same midi message to speaker on/off (basically mute) and to sidechain on/off.

[d-track]

another:

route the kickdrum to a return track and select "sends only" at the output menu.
select kick route track as the compressor sc input. this is better and works without any midi controller.

[TheRealZoltan]

thanks for the ideas,, but somehow its just not coming together yet,,
the first one I have thought of that before, but I would like to have it inside live

the problem with the second one is that if I have the kick track on sends only its not in the drum bus anymore...
I have been thinking...
what I want is: the compressor should respond the drums bus,,, so the compressor needs to get audio from the drums bus,,,
I guess filtering it out is the only way to do it,,,,

+another great way is when you highlight all the drums you can move all the mixer parameters simultaneously,,, would be great to have that in permanent mode or something..

for some reason I just cant have everything :S
I figured I'll go with the compression and leave the drum bus for now

[Sage]

Mute the kick track.

[d-track]

easy to add the kick to the drum group.
crate an audio track.
group this track also into the drum group.
set the new audio input to the track that contains the kick.
set its monitor to "in".
set the original kick channels output to "sends only" but dont send it to any channel, just leave the knobs at 0.
now you can assign the new audio kick track to the sidechain input while your kick remains part of your drum group.

[TheRealZoltan]

AWESOME!
it does work

thanks a lot d-track!