Ableton Forum

- Set up your kick, snare in one track and your hats in a separate track.
- create a return track. Mute it. Call it SC-HH (for example Sidechain for High hats)
- In your kick and snare track, set send to maximum to the return track.
- In your hats track, add a compressor, toggle sidechain ON and select audio from the return track SC-HH, post FX (you don't want to hear it, hence the return track is muted)
- Set the envelope mode to RMS preferably.
- I usually have songs around 145-170 bpm and I find the release to be nice around 70-110 ms. 150 ms should work fine for slower beats.

Now you have your hats leave some room for the kick and the snare, which gives you some room to put them louder when the main components of the beat aren't present.
Now this is how I found a good way to increase my high hats without getting a feeling of constant sizzle, and more of a back and forth sort of dynamic. But I would like to know what your tips are on the subject, regarding the compressor and where you put it. Of course using muted return tracks like me allows for adding more sources to the sidechain source later on if you decide to add other beat elements on a new track. Simply send them to the return track and the high hats will make room for them.

Best composing,

il7mago.

Great tips! thanks for sharing this information!

Thanks

Heres what I do:
I use 2 compressors. Set side chain input on comp 1 for snare and comp 2 for kick. Rack them, and set macros to treshold, attack and release for each. Now you can copy/paste it wherever you need it. I keep it in my template together with a kick and a snare track. It must be a year since last time I had to set it up, and I use it every studio day. (3 - 4 days a week)

ze2be wrote:Heres what I do:
I use 2 compressors. Set side chain input on comp 1 for snare and comp 2 for kick. Rack them, and set macros to treshold, attack and release for each. Now you can copy/paste it wherever you need it. I keep it in my template together with a kick and a snare track. It must be a year since last time I had to set it up, and I use it every studio day. (3 - 4 days a week)

This is all brilliant stuff and I may be a noob but I know one thing for sure there is nothing worse than cymbols which have seen the effects of compressors. Brillaint strategy to get around all that.

What I tend to do with hats, conversely, is gate them off the snare with only 2-3 dB of gain reduction, so they "hit" a little harder with snare.

Edit: This would be last in the effects chain.

i do kick, snare and highs all on each own channel. eq them separably and then try the compression techniques mentioned above.

i think a LOT of people on here do not eq much. eq'ing is underrated on here *thus* far. i have a LOT of reading to of old threads. but, i call them how i see them mate.

These are really brilliant tips and very useful......