 Recently, one of the wonderful members of my cakewalk group on Facebook asked a question about sidechain compression using the Pro channel and if it's even possible. Well, I'm very pleased to say it is possible, Joseph and I'm going to show you how right now. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Sidechain compression is really useful when you want to lower one thing in your mix depending on the level of another thing in your mix. Now many of you may know how to do it using regular inserts in a channel, but I'm going to show you today how you can actually use it using the Pro channel. Let's get started. So in order to demonstrate sidechain compression, I'm going to be using a scenario more commonly found in the audio of video production rather than music production. Why? Because it's just going to be a lot easier for you to hear what's going on. But don't worry, I will be going on to a scenario very commonly found in music production in just a moment. So here in my project, I have two tracks. Okay, the top one here in green is some background music, the kind of background music you'd often hear in a video. The second track here in blue is my voice, not my singing voice, but my spoken voice. Okay, the kind of voice server that you would commonly hear in a video. Let's play the two together so that we can hear the current problem. This is a test of sidechain compression and hopefully you will hear the music volume reduce while I'm speaking and you will have heard it raise while I was not speaking. So of course, the issue here is that the voice is not very audible at times because the background music is kind of masking, it's just too loud while I'm actually speaking. So what I want to happen here is for the background music to adjust its volume to automatically become lower in volume every time I'm speaking. Okay, this is a great use for sidechain compression. So in order to do that, I need to make sure I insert a compressor on the track where I want the volume to adjust, okay, in this case, the background music, I'm going to select that over here. Now I can see the pro channel when I have this selected over on the left hand side here because I have my inspector open. If you can't see this at the moment, then you can toggle the inspector by pressing I on your keyboard, okay? And if you do have the inspector open, make sure you have the pro channel tab selected at the top right of the inspector there, okay? So we can see the pro channel for the background music here. Now when you first open up the pro channel in its default state, there will be a compressor there, but unfortunately, that one doesn't have sidechain capability. So we're going to remove that one by right clicking on its sort of top bar there and going to remove module, okay? And then we're going to click sort of right click in this space here and go to insert module and then we're going to select this compressor, the PC4K S type bus compressor. This has a sidechain capability. So I'll click on that and that has inserted at the bottom of the signal chain down here. It's not very useful to have it right at the end of the signal chain. So I'm just going to grab it by dragging its top bar and then just drag it all the way up to the top of the pro channel, okay? Now the next thing I have to do, apart from making sure it's switched on or enabled, which is there, is make sure I have its sidechain capabilities switched on. So I will just click on this button here, says S chain, I'll just click on that to turn the sidechain on. We'll worry about all of the other parameters in a moment. But the next thing we actually have to do is make sure we send the signal from the voice to this compressor or else nothing is going to happen. So I'm going to go over to my voice channel here, that's the blue channel. I'm going to go to sends, click on plus and I can see that sidechain input there. It says built in channel effects input to backing music. That's the name, yeah, of the actual channel where I have the compressor inserted. So I'll click on that. Now what's going to happen now is the signal from my voice is going to affect the compressor which is inserted over here, okay, on my background music. Now I haven't got the settings correct at the moment, but we'll just test it just to make sure that is actually happening. This is a test of sidechain compression and hopefully you will hear the music volume reduce while I'm speaking. Now just in case you missed it, just keep an eye on this needle here, okay. That indicates when there's some compression happening. Let's try again. This is a test of sidechain compression and hopefully you will hear the music volume reduce. Okay, so it appears we have the signal being detected from the voice, but we can't actually hear much change at the moment. So let's try and mess around with some of these settings. The first thing I actually want to do is adjust this one. This is the high pass filter and at the moment it's cutting out all the sort of low frequencies. I'm just going to pull that all the way down to the bottom so we're receiving the full frequency range of the voice, okay. The next thing I'm going to do is drag the threshold down pretty low actually. So pretty much any time I am speaking, there will be some compression happening, okay. You know, you're going to have to adjust that depending on your particular input. But in this case, I almost want to catch everything even when I'm speaking a little bit quietly, okay. So we've got those two adjusted. I want to make sure the attack is pretty quick. So as soon as I start speaking, that volume adjustment happens. I've no from experience. I don't want to put it all the way down to the bottom. That can sound a little bit unnatural. So I will just sort of have it around about here or so. So it's reasonably quickly kicking in with compression when I start speaking. The next thing I want to do is just adjust the release time, okay. I'm just going to push that up a little bit, okay. Now in the real life scenario, you'll need to experiment and listen. But I happen to know because I've done a little trial run with this that around about here is going to be okay. This is a slow-ish release. I want that sort of music to more gradually come up. I don't want it to suddenly kick in every time there's a little break in my voice, okay. And the next thing and probably the most important thing in this case is to adjust the ratio. You may have noticed that the voice wasn't really, sorry, the music wasn't really dipping in volume all that much, okay. So I'm just going to push this ratio up. You could experiment here. It's two to one though. I'm just going to push it up to four to one so we get a little bit more reduction in sound. Let's have a listen now and see what's happening. This is a test of sidechain compression. And hopefully you will hear the music volume reduce while I'm speaking. And you will have heard it raise while I was not speaking. Okay, now I may need to play around with some of these values a little bit. And maybe I went too far with that ratio. But you get the idea there. You can clearly hear that reasonably naturally the music just drops out of the way to make room for that spoken word there. And that's sidechain compression working very, very well in this instance. Now, this is for video production, as I say, the most common form of sidechain compression, I would say in music production is when we want to alter the interaction between the kick drum on the drum kit and the bass. Usually a bass guitar. So the problem with kick drums and bass guitars or other bass sounds is they can kind of get in the way of each other because they share quite a lot of common frequencies. And especially I find the bass guitar can kind of mask the kick and can sort of dampen its impact. Okay, so if you want your kick to be a little bit more punchy and cut through that base, then sidechain compression is really useful for that. So we've got a very similar scenario before we're using the same compressor that we used before in the pro channel. But there's a slightly different setup here. But before we get into that, if you just want to know, just for reference, the bass guitar sound that I happen to be using is a virtual bass here. It's from Ample Sound. This is the Ample Bass P, really, really nice plug in there. And the drums I'm using are addictive drums. Now, why am I using addictive drums rather than the built in SI drums that come with Katewalk? The issue with the built in drums with Katewalk is it's kind of very difficult to get each drum on a separate channel. There is a workaround which I've made a video about, which you can look at up here, I guess, but it's kind of difficult and you really do need your kick drum to be on a separate channel in the console for this to work. Now, I've done it in a slightly unusual way. You don't have to do it this way, but in this particular mix, I really just wanted my drums to be simple and have them on one channel. So I've only separated the kick drum. OK, you can see it over here. And I've done that in addictive drums just in case you've got it, but this can be done in many drum plugins. I've gone down to the kicks channel here. I've clicked on this button here, which is now in green and I've selected separate out plus master. So it's going out to its own channel, but it's also going to its master channel, which is this full drum mix over here. OK, you could have all of your drums, of course, on separate channels, in which case you wouldn't need to send them out to the master as well. But that just happens to be the way I'm doing it, not terribly important, but just of interest to you, perhaps if you wonder what's happening here. Now, the other interesting thing that's happening here is I then have it routed just like I did before with a send going to that compressor, which is on my bass guitar over here. OK, you can see that here. It's being sent to the built in channel. Sorry, built in channel effects input to, which is base. OK, that is set up all over here on the base guitar. Just to jog your memory or click on the base guitar. You can see that compressor at the top there. OK, just as we had in the last scenario. Now, the more interesting thing probably here with this particular channel is the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that the failure is all the way down to the bottom. That's just my unusual way of doing things. And the reason I'm able to do that is because with this send, I have it set to pre-fader. Now, normally when you first initiate a send, this button will be on, so it's post-fader. That means the level of the send is being affected by the fader. OK, I don't want it to be affected by it. So I'm just going to have that off. So it's in a pre-fader sort of situation. Now, the level is just controlled here only isn't affected by the fader and indeed isn't affected by the fact that I may mute this channel. So whatever happens, the compression is still going to be affecting the the bass guitar, regardless of the actual final volume of the kick in terms of the mix here. OK, so it's like a control channel, I guess you might call it. My unusual way of doing things, like I say, if you had all of the drums out to separate channels, you probably wouldn't do it this way at all. OK, let's switch that off. And then let's just simply go over to our bass guitar channel and have a look at this compressor and take a look at the needle. You'll see that the compression is only happening when the kick drum is sounding here. OK, let's have a listen. Now, hopefully you can't hear what's happening there. Hopefully you went, well, what's going on? I can just hear a bass guitar and some drums. And that's because I like to keep this fairly subtle. OK, I don't think this should be something that you will hear. If I switch it off now and have a listen again. Now, it is subtle, but have a listen again, I'll switch it on. But it is actually happening. I can hear the difference there, but as I say, it's subtle. Now, this is not the only method of getting the kick and the bass out of the way of each other. You can also use EQ for this or a combination of the both. But this is the basic setup that you will need if you want to use this method of side sidechain compression to get the bass guitar out of the way of the kick drum. You know, it's always helpful to me to know if this was helpful to you. Let me know in the comments down below if this cleared some things up for you. Now, it may be that you were confused by some of the terminology about compressors, threshold, ratio, attack, release. If that's the case, then I highly recommend you check out this video here where I explain all about compression.