Sidechaining--How to do it in Live?

[sweetjesus]

read shomas tutorial - well worth a read.

I'm using the waves one as we speak very nicely sidechained in a bootleg I'm doing and it sounds like pure house music

it makes alot of bloody sense really as it sorts out the number one mixing rule of conflicting frequencies not fighting. Kick and bass both have so much more power when they have their own space

I'm just amazed I havent really explored this way of doing it alot more alot sooner, I've always just done it manually

Another thing I found interesting is, that good ol' audio swiss army knife FLStudio already does it!

THat program amazes me, yet I never use it! It can do so much, I just seem to always prefer using live + plug-ins.

i know this is a dumbass workaround which should not be required, but you could automate the attack on the amplitude enevelope of whatever you are using for bass... perhaps Conny can help us with making this easier.. since he's a Plogue freak, maybe he can help make a module which cleanly converts notes to automation and envelop CC's to kind of act as a synth duck.. in fact come to think of it, you could use plogue to get the volume of a sound or the velocity of midi note from Live and convert it into messages which can be passed back to Live to automate the volume ...

still we need to be able to side chain properly..

[forge]

read shomas tutorial - well worth a read.

I'm using the waves one as we speak very nicely sidechained in a bootleg I'm doing and it sounds like pure house music

it makes alot of bloody sense really as it sorts out the number one mixing rule of conflicting frequencies not fighting. Kick and bass both have so much more power when they have their own space

I'm just amazed I havent really explored this way of doing it alot more alot sooner, I've always just done it manually

Another thing I found interesting is, that good ol' audio swiss army knife FLStudio already does it!

THat program amazes me, yet I never use it! It can do so much, I just seem to always prefer using live + plug-ins.

i know this is a dumbass workaround which should not be required, but you could automate the attack on the amplitude enevelope of whatever you are using for bass... perhaps Conny can help us with making this easier.. since he's a Plogue freak, maybe he can help make a module which cleanly converts notes to automation and envelop CC's to kind of act as a synth duck.. in fact come to think of it, you could use plogue to get the volume of a sound or the velocity of midi note from Live and convert it into messages which can be passed back to Live to automate the volume ...

still we need to be able to side chain properly..

actually using a compressor to sidechain is alot different - it has a special really nice sound and makes it breathe and pump - it's an effect in it's self, not really the same as just ducking, besides it's not really as complicated as it sounds - once all the routing is set up it's a piece of cake really

[sweetjesus]

read shomas tutorial - well worth a read.

I'm using the waves one as we speak very nicely sidechained in a bootleg I'm doing and it sounds like pure house music

it makes alot of bloody sense really as it sorts out the number one mixing rule of conflicting frequencies not fighting. Kick and bass both have so much more power when they have their own space

I'm just amazed I havent really explored this way of doing it alot more alot sooner, I've always just done it manually

Another thing I found interesting is, that good ol' audio swiss army knife FLStudio already does it!

THat program amazes me, yet I never use it! It can do so much, I just seem to always prefer using live + plug-ins.

i know this is a dumbass workaround which should not be required, but you could automate the attack on the amplitude enevelope of whatever you are using for bass... perhaps Conny can help us with making this easier.. since he's a Plogue freak, maybe he can help make a module which cleanly converts notes to automation and envelop CC's to kind of act as a synth duck.. in fact come to think of it, you could use plogue to get the volume of a sound or the velocity of midi note from Live and convert it into messages which can be passed back to Live to automate the volume ...

still we need to be able to side chain properly..

actually using a compressor to sidechain is alot different - it has a special really nice sound and makes it breathe and pump - it's an effect in it's self, not really the same as just ducking, besides it's not really as complicated as it sounds - once all the routing is set up it's a piece of cake really

yeah i know how a sidechain will sound, there's not many other solutions at the moment so i'm just adding to the pool of useless crap until ableton just give us what we need (note, not what we 'want')

[conny]

i know this is a dumbass workaround which should not be required, but you could automate the attack on the amplitude enevelope of whatever you are using for bass... perhaps Conny can help us with making this easier

Did some editing to this Bidule layout.
First part is most for creating midi notes from audio, second part of GUI is for CC creation from audio, which may target the "out" parameter in Live's compressor etc. "Invert" is an option for ducking behaviour.
Use "Quantize CC" if your CPU gets choked, kind of thinning.

http://bluemoose.greatnow.com/Bidule/en ... C_2.bidule

Example when drums are driving the overall compressor out level in master track:
http://bluemoose.greatnow.com/Bidule/En ... idule2.mp3

http://bluemoose.greatnow.com/Bidule/En ... idule2.zip

// C

[forge]

one of the lessons I read was about doing it with reaktor - I would Imagine the principle would be fairly simiar to plogue, the article said reaktor was ideal for it

I dont know myself what benefits using one of these apps - although with reaktor I think the point was it was setup up for surround - or multiple outputs - and it has it's own compressor so it can be routed to do it all through reaktor

but again, if you have a compressor that supports sidechaining then it's easy in Live, just needs routing - and Shoma's tutorial lists about 3 - I haven't tried any of them, but Martyn also mentioned "vanilla" which is one of them, I downloaded them all but then figured out how to do it with waves, so I'll just stick with that.

TBH, now I've sussed that I'm quite happy to use that and forget about it because I paid alot of money for the plug-ins and I really like them - so no point re-inventing the wheel.

[nebulae]

If you can get your hands on TC Native Bundle (no longer supported or sold), at least on the PC side, the last version is 3.1, and it comes with a little Side Chain plug that you can insert into the source track. Then the destination track can have the TC compressor as an insert and it can listen for the source track where the Side Chain is inserted. So no need for the Live workaround as described in the blog, but at least it is true sidechaining. But basically, it's a VST wormhole of sorts.

[ILTK]

I use Chunchessor from Voxengo (49$) and it works great in Live.

First make an audio track for the source signal for the sidechain, like a bassdrum, put a bassdrum or whatever you want to be the signal ducking the target.

Setup another track with a bassline on it, can be midi or audio, put chunchessor on this track.

Now go back to your source track with the bassdrum on it, from the 'audio to' dropdown select the track with the bassline on it and it will automatically route the audio to the sidechain on the chrunchessor and the bassdrum will now duck the bassline.

Real easy to setup and the crunchessor sounds great imo and uses very little cpu