 Hey, it's Anfa. Today I'll show you how to do sidechain compression in Ardor, an open source DAW for Linux, Mac and Windows. Sidechain compression will allow us to go from this to this. Let's get to it! Here's a little project I've prepared for this video. First let's compress the bass with a kick. So here is my kick drum and here is my bass. So in order to add sidechain compression I need to select my bass instrument and here, right-click, new plugin, plugin manager. I'm going to use the A compressor stereo, which is a built-in plugin of Ardor and it has a sidechain input so we can use it to sidechain compress the bass. Here's the plugin, let's double-click to open the interface and right now it will compress the bass with the bass of course. But we can enable sidechain input. Now you can see nothing happens because we haven't connected the kick to this compressor yet. To do that I'm going to click here on the pin-out button. It opens the pin configuration dialog and you can see we have two inputs. This is the stereo signal incoming to the compressor, to outputs and we have a sidechain input right here. It's activated. What I have to do is just click here and choose the track that I want to take this signal from. Let's pick the kick. Now I can close this and if I play you can see this moves to our kick but we still need to tweak the settings. I'm going to lower the threshold, well it's best to listen to this in context so let's un-solo the bass and play the whole thing without it and with it. That's simple. As you can see the A compressor has inline displays that will show you the incoming signal, the threshold and the amount of gain reduction which is very useful. Now I want to show you how to do the same thing using a calve sidechain compressor plugin. Let's select another bass instrument, I'm going to move to a different part of the song and let's listen. So I want to sidechain this to the kick. I have my track selected here in the Max review I can right click to add a new plugin. Let's go to the plugin manager and type in calve sidechain compressor. Let's double click it, it's added to the list, I click insert plugin and it's here. I'm going to move it above the fader so it's applied prefader but it doesn't really matter in this case. So the same thing, let's double click to open the user interface and now if I play it you can see that it reacts to the signal of the bass so we need to activate the sidechain input right here. Of course nothing happens because we need to root the kick signal into the compressor. Let's open the pinout and here we have a stereo sidechain input but it's not connected yet and this is not activated so I have to activate the sidechain input, by default it creates a single mono slot but it doesn't matter because we really need a mono signal to compress this. So let's click here, choose a kick and now I can just click and drag to connect the signal from the kick drum to the sidechain input of the compressor. Now if I play it you can see that this moves along with our kick but again we need to tweak the threshold, ratio and other settings. That sounds nice. One cool thing about Calf Sidechain Compressor is that it has filters that can emphasize different frequencies in the sidechain input. So you can enable here one of the modes, by default both filters are off and you can like do two shell filters and you can say make it only react to the higher frequencies and ignore the lower frequencies, which is quite a unique feature and sometimes it's very useful. Another plugin I want to show you is called LSP Sidechain Compressor Stereo. Let's use it on the pad. The pad is used in yet another section of the song, let me play it to you and with the rest, the pad isn't too loud on its own but I wanted to make more room for the kick. So let's make sure it's selected, right click, new plugin, plugin manager and here I will type in LSP which stands for Linux Studio Plugins, Sidechain and we have a long list, compressor and there are four variants. I'm going to pick the stereo one, let's double click, let's add it to the list, insert plugins and here it is. As you can see it also has an inline display that shows the compression function and it's also going to show the current signal level. Let's double click it to open the user interface and now this compressor is much more powerful, it has a lot more settings than the previous two but it's a little bit harder to understand. So by default, of course it works in the non-sidechain mode. To enable the sidechain input we need to change this from feed forward to external and now we're going to use the sidechain input. Of course the sidechain input is empty, we haven't connected anything to it yet so let's do that, let's enable the sidechain input, let's select our kick, drop the pins to connect, let's close it. We have the signal again we need to adjust the threshold and ratio and other things. This compressor has two thresholds, one for attack and one for release, which is by default negative infinity. This is advanced stuff, I'm not going to talk about it much. Here's our attack time, here's the release time. We can also change how the compressor interprets the signal, by default it uses the RMS, root mean square of the signal which is the effective power of the signal but it can also use peak to get faster reaction. You can hear it gives it more click if we decrease the attack all the way, it's going to create an audible click, which isn't going to be a problem because it's going to be totally masked by the kick drum which plays at the same time, so it's only going to increase the punch of the kick but I don't really like that, so I'm going to increase the attack time. There are also different modes of compression, there's upward compression, but this is not really what I want right now. As I said, LSP plugins are very advanced and they have tons of options but sometimes it's harder to understand how to set it up, okay let's listen in context. I also added some make up gain to make the pad louder. Now there's one last plugin I want to show you, which is called SC2. It's an old plugin by Steve Harris, it doesn't have a fence user interface, it doesn't even show you the gain reduction but you can still use it if you want. So let's use that to duck the vocals. I'm going to go for, yeah you didn't know there's vocals, yep so let's sidechain the whole vocal bus during the chorus. You can see I'm using the A compressor stereo in here already but not in the sidechain mode, it's just controlling the level of the whole track for the bus. So let's right-click, plugin manager and I'm going to type in SC2. It's a Latspa plugin, all the other plugins were LV2 plugins, Latspa is an older standard it doesn't support custom user interfaces. So this is the compressor, now it's pretty unusual in that sense that to root the signal in we have to do it a little bit differently and also we have to make a little trick because this plugin presses audio in mono but we can work this around. So let's play. You can hear our vocal became mono, so let's click on the pin out and you can see it has two inputs and one output. Now the inputs are not named because that's not supported by the plugin format. The first one is actually the sidechain input or the input for the compressor to analyze in order to make decisions what to do. So to make this compressor a sidechain one we need to enable the sidechain input and drag it into the first input. Let's pick our kick and play. We can't hear anything, that's because the threshold is all the way up so we need to move it down and the ratio is all the way down so we need to move it up. So it works but it's a very old plugin and not much features on it but we can use it anyway. Let's set it up, I want shorter attack, shorter release. That sounds very clean though. Now with that for that mono problem we can enter manual config and we can increase the number of instances. Now we have two instances of this plugin being run in the background using the same settings we have picked here. So now I can route the left input here, the right input here, make sure that both instances get the same sidechain input and now we need to add another audio output, route this out and I messed up the inputs. Sidechain goes to the first one, the signal goes into the second one. So that's SC2, there are many different variants like SC1, SC3, SC4. I've tried a bunch and SC2 worked the best in this case. It's like just an extra thing, I wouldn't really recommend you using it if you have Calf compressor or just a compressor stereo. Another thing you could do is use multi-band sidechain compression to for example duck or attenuate only the low frequencies of a bass when the kick hits. There's a plugin that does that from the LSP bundle. It's called LSP sidechain, LSP sidechain multi-band compressor stereo X8 and it has eight bands and it's really really complex. You can also just select every single band and tweak it, this is kind of an easier view. You can also disable many bands and just use it in a dual band configuration. So you can have like duck the lows but not duck the highs etc. Yeah, but I'll leave that for you to explore if you want to do multi-band compression, multi-band sidechain compression, it would be too much for this single video. So that's the main dish of the video. In case you'd like to get a deeper understanding of how compressors work and what are the various types of it, how do they differ and such, I've already made two lengthy videos about that, one about the basics and another one about the advanced stuff. In case you're not feeling very confident with using dynamic range compression, I would highly recommend you check them out, I'll link them both in the video description. That's all I have for today, thanks for watching, I also want to thank everyone who supports my work financially through Patreon and Liberapay, these people really make it possible for me to keep doing this channel, I also want to thank everyone who buys my music on Bandcamp. If you would like to drop me a few bucks a month to help keep this show going, please go to patreon.com slash ANFA or liberapay.com slash ANFA. Now go and make some music. Recycling compression of course.