 The video we're about to watch is a talking head video, so feel free to minimize it and just listen to it like a podcast, except for one bit where I actually show some DAW action, but you can still get the whole point without looking at it. And also, if there's some weirdness with colors and stuff, that's because I'm doing a little bit of trickery to correct the exposure, kind of doing like an HDR video, but with a very limited toolset, because Olive Video Editor doesn't have super advanced things, but it's fun nonetheless, and because of that, my face isn't blown out and the sky isn't blown out most of the time, so I had some fun. Anyway, enjoy! Hey, I'm Anfa. I'm an electronic music producer and sound designer, so I only use open source software in Linux. In this short video, I'd like to share some thoughts about sidechain compression and drums. Specifically, why sidechain compressing other instruments makes the drums feel bigger? And this goes back to how our hearing works, so let's maybe first illustrate what I'm talking about. So imagine a typical EDM banger, and if you attempted to make one, you probably realized that without using sidechain compression on other elements of your mix, like the bass or some pads or leads or actually anything other than the drums, basically the kick and the snare, because these two are usually the most powerful. I've made a little example for you. Here it is. Listen to this, and now compare it with this. Without sidechain, with sidechain, nothing was changed except for the bass and the pad were compressed when the kick hits. The kick was as loud as it was before. What changes is the proportion between the kick and everything else, because kick stays the same, but everything else gets quieter. But it's not as simple as, okay, everything else gets quieter, so it's a cleaner mix, it's a punchier mix. Yes, but also it tricks our brain into thinking that the kick is so loud that everything else is just drowned out by it, because our internal sound compression or limiting kicks in. It's a psychoacoustic trick, not just a mixing technique. And in some genres like dubstep, for example, or maybe drum and bass, not so much. Some types of drum and bass. But in some genres of electronic dance music, the kick and the snare, especially during a drop, are supposed to sound incredibly powerful. And of course, we only have so much dynamic range to work with. Basically, nothing can be louder than zero decibels. And if you make your drums like, you know, 15 decibels louder than anything else in the mix, it's not going to be a pleasant experience, because your listeners are not going to hear anything else, but the drums, it's going to, like, the only way they could fix that is by trying to turn up the volume. And at that point, the drums would be painfully loud. I mean, at the point where they could hear clearly all the instruments. The drums would be just painful. And pendulum has been using that a little bit, I think. Like, their drums were deliberately imbalanced. They were much louder than all the other instruments, so that when you turn down the volume of the whole track, you can very clearly hear that the kick and the snare are much louder than anything else. And when this is done tastefully, it can make your listeners just turn up the volume to hear all the other instruments. And then the drums are extremely powerful and they sound amazing. And I remember hearing that for the first time in my life, and I was blown away. I never heard anything like this. I never heard any music using something like that. So actually making your drums, you know, like two decibels, two to three decibels louder than they should be, could do the trick. But it's risky. So what other producers do, I think, a lot of the times, and what I have done myself, is instead mix everything so that it's balanced and that my drums are not necessarily much louder than all the other instruments. But instead, I would use a Saichin compressor to turn down the bass, the leads, the pads, everything when the kick and the snare hits to make these instruments punchier, to make them feel bigger. And of course, if you've ever watched any video talking about Saichin compression, you've probably heard the rationale behind using it that it makes mixing much easier, because your mix is going to be cleaner, because the instruments, the bass is not going to fight the kick drum. Like if you have, you know, say, a bass line tone at 60 Hertz and your kick drum resonance is at like 50 or 55, then there's going to be like a bad clash of frequencies and they're not going to sound pleasant. I'm not talking about that at all. Like that is a very, very legit reason to use, a very valid reason to use Saichin compression with your drums. But I'm not talking about this. I'm talking about something much more fundamental about our hearing. So yeah, that's, this is where I'm going to actually deliver on the hook that I've said on the beginning of this video. Now, this is unscripted. So that's just pure skill. First try. First take, first try. So have you ever used headphones, close back headphones on the go? If you haven't, you can just try it or you can just plug your ears. Plug your ears, make a sound with your mouth and then walk around, stomp around a little bit. I'm talking, what you will notice is that the sound you're making with your mouth gets quieter when you stomp. And that's because when you place your foot on the ground with your ears plugged, the low frequency vibration that that creates in your body has nowhere to escape and it bounces back into your inner ear. So you hear the low thump. And this is quite similar to a kick drum, you might agree. Of course, there's no high frequencies with this, no transient to this thump like a kick drum would have, but it kind of emulates the kick drum. And this is even better heard if you have like in your headphones and you actually walk around playing music. I've noticed that the music really ducks when I when I walk. And that is because our ears have a limiter or a compressor, maybe not specifically limiter, maybe more like a compressor, but our ears are made to protect our inner ears. So our hearing is made to protect itself from overloading. Basically, if there's a loud sound, our ears are going to clench to let less sound in to not damage our inner ear, our actual sound sensor in there with all the tiny hairs tuned to dull the different frequencies. Because if there's too much volume, that can be damaged and that can result in permanent ear damage. That's why our ears deal pretty well with short bursts of loud noise. It doesn't deal well with sustained loud noise. So if you are like using a angled an angle grinder or a drill making a hole in a concrete wall, you better wear ear protection unless you want to destroy your hearing. Could you stop doing that, please? I really like your voice, but not at this particular moment. So our ears have a limiter. When we hear a loud sound, when something explodes, actually all the other sound is going to be drowned out because of the limiting. So when our ears are like there's normal volume and something loud happens, our ears are going to turn down the volume. So when we apply sighting compression to other instruments than the drums, we are actually simulating that. We are making, of course, this is subconscious because nobody listening to the music is going to think, oh, that sounds just like when something loud happens and all the other sounds are, I hear them quieter because my ears turn down. Nobody knows that, nobody thinks about that. It's just subconscious, but it's subconsciously tell us, oh, that was loud. That's why making other sounds cut off or be quieter makes the sound that isn't cut off appear louder. And this is something I think nobody talks about when it comes to sighting compression and drums. And it also comes back if you are doing like film scores, like mixing sounds for films or mixing sounds for video games or working on the dynamic audio implementation in video games. Making other sounds duck or sighting compress when something nearby explodes is going to make that explosion appear louder than it is. It's going to give your listeners subconscious clue that that was much louder than the everything else. And of course, nobody thinks that, oh, it's the compression or limiting in my ears kicking in. And if we did that for real, like if you actually turned up your drums like 15, 20 decibels above everything else and forced your listeners to turn this up, it wouldn't be pleasant. It would be painful because our ears can only take so much of that. And it would be very tiring. If you've ever been in a rehearsal room, like with a rock band, with the drummer playing drums, or you've played acoustic drums yourself, you'll probably notice that the snare drum transient is so incredibly loud that it is painful if you hear it for more than just a single hit. Single hit when you're close by, especially if you're like, you know, you are in the drummer position, you are playing the drums, your head is right above the diaphragm of the snare. So when you hit it, most of the sound is projected directly into your head. And that's freaking loud. It's not pleasant to be, not a pleasant experience. That's why when I play drums, I always wore earplugs. And I advise you do, though, if you don't want to lose your hearing. I know a drummer who lost most of hearing, and I play with a drummer who lost most of his hearing in one ear because he played so loud without any ear protection. And my wife also lost some of her hearing while wearing headphones to protective hearing when we were playing in the same band in the same room. Don't do that. Yeah. So, and that was a kind of a thought that we need to reduce the dynamic range of sounds. If you were to record the sound of a snare drum and not compress, not limit, not clip it at all and just use that in your music, that would force your listeners to play it very loud and it would not be pleasant. So, we need to use compression and limiting to control the transients to reduce the dynamic range, to make it pleasant to listen to. But science change compression can help us bring a little bit back of this feeling of overwhelming energy, of the volume that just drowns out everything else. And I think it's useful not just in electronic dance music and, you know, people who are mixing rock or math. And that's where I run out of memory. All right. I hope you've learned something and got inspired. Thanks for watching. Also, huge thanks to all the people who are supporting my work financially. If you would like to join them, please go to patreon.com.onfa or liberapay.com. We can support my work so I can make more of these videos. Also, if you'd like to get some help or meet other people who are using free and open source software and Linux for misproduction, please go to my community chat at chat.onfa.xyz. All right. See you later.