 So here we are in cakewalk by BandLab and I've got a bass guitar track and a drum track. Now the problem is the kick drum and the bass guitar are masking each other or cancelling each other out and that's because they occupy many of the same frequencies. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you well. We're going to be solving this problem today by using sidechain compression or is it sometimes called ducking. So let's start off with an overview of our demo project. I'm using this free bass guitar plugin from Ample Sound. I'll put a link for that in the description down below and I'm also using this free drum kit plugin MT Power Drum Kit too. Familiar to many of you and I'll also put a link for that in the description down below. Now I'm using this drum kit not only because it's a great drum kit but also if we go to the mixer section over here you can see that we can send each drum to a separate output. That means over here in cakewalk and I'll bring up the console view here you can see that there is a kick drum channel here a snare drum channel hi-hat and cymbal etc. Now that means that I can use the kick drum independently to trigger a compressor on my bass guitar over here and that is the basis excuse the pun of sidechain compression. Now if you happen to be using something like SI drum kit which came with cakewalk or something like a drum loop which is just a stereo file then it's much more difficult for you to separate that kick drum from everything else in order to use it to trigger the compression but I will be showing you how to deal with that towards the end of this video. Do stick around for this part don't skip ahead watch this part first and then watch that part at the end to figure out how to solve that issue. So this is the track that we're dealing with. Now let's just shut these windows we don't need to see those anymore now I'm going to start off actually by freezing these tracks but you don't need to do this for sidechain compression. I'm only doing this for demonstration purposes so that we can see the waveforms of each drum and the bass guitar so I'm freezing the drums here you can see the waveforms there and I'll also go ahead and freeze that bass guitar as well. Now I'm just going to drag that kick drum down next to the bass guitar so that we can see them alongside each other let's just drag that out a little bit and we can zoom in on those and let's have a look and see the relationship between the two instruments. So we can see here the bass guitar and the kick drum happen on these first three notes here at the same time or roughly at the same time but note that the bass notes the bass guitar notes here are much much longer than the kick drum yeah that's kind of important to remember later on just for your information the kick drum note if you like or beat is around about 150 milliseconds long or so maybe up to 200 and this one the bass guitar is around about sort of 800 milliseconds long okay so it's much longer that's just important to remember for later on. So for the remainder of this tutorial I'm going to be using the console view so I'll go to its tab at the bottom here double click on it and that will bring it up to full screen so you can see what we're doing. Now as I mentioned we're going to be using the signal from the kick drum that's the fourth track in here to trigger a compressor on our bass guitar that compressor is going to reduce the volume of the bass guitar just while the kick drum is playing it will return back to normal after the kick drum has stopped playing okay so with well after each beat of the kick drum has stopped playing I should say so we need to start off by adding a compressor to the bass guitar so I'll go to effects here click on plus I'm going to go to insert audio effects and then go down to the cakewalk folder where I will select the sonatas compressor that's the free compressor that comes with cakewalk by bandab so you can follow along using that. Now if I play the track and you watch this diagonal line here on the display you'll see the dot move up and down there and that will indicate the level that the compressor is receiving or the signal the compressor is receiving. Let's have a look at that and you'll see that was corresponding to the signal from the bass guitar but of course we don't want it to be responding to the signal from the bass guitar we want it to be responding from the signal of the kick drum okay so we need to go over to the kick drum and go up to the send section here click on plus and amongst this list which will be a little bit different for you you need to go down to you find sonatas effects compressor side input bass that's that bass part is the name of the track where that compressor is so we'll click on that now there's a signal being sent from that kick drum to the compressor now another thing I like to do at this point which is quite important is to check that we have this switched off this is set so the signal will be post fader that means that the level of the signal will be affected by the fader here I don't particularly like that I want a consistent signal being sent through so that we're always triggering in the same way so I switch that off okay you can use it with it switched on but I personally prefer it to be switched off now if we play the track again and you look at that diagonal line and you look at that circle moving up and down there you'll notice that it now corresponds to the signal coming from the kick drum however there's no compression happening yet and that's because we haven't set up the basics especially ratio and threshold so I'm going to start off with the ratio it's set to one to zero at the moment I'm just going to change it to something like it doesn't really matter too much but one to four okay just so that we've got some compression happening now we need to adjust the threshold while we play it we need to drag it down until we reach a point where the compressor is actually being triggered that will show over here let's have a listen to the track and do that now okay so we can see that there is some compression happening there and it's fairly subtle which is normally the case for this kind of compression but of course your actual settings are going to depend on your track to particularly the threshold but the taste of how you want it is going to depend on the ratio how much you want that volume to be knocked down by the kick drum is kind of according to taste or what you need for the mix okay so you're going to have to play with that yourself and listen very very important to listen okay now the other two settings which are really important are attack and release normally you just want the attack down all the way down to zero just so that the compressor gets triggered right away as soon as the kick drum has some signal going to it the other the other setting here release is really dependent upon your track and the effect that you want remember earlier we looked at the length of the two instruments the kick drum normally lasted for around about 150 milliseconds in my track and the bass guitar or one of its long notes lasted for around about 800 milliseconds so obviously if I had this release up really really high up to 800 what's going to happen is it's going to crush that well not really crush depends on the ratio setting but it's going to reduce that bass guitar for that amount of time at least I mean a little bit longer than that in fact but that's roughly what we're looking at okay so that's probably not going to be the effect you want you can hear what's happening there it's just really squashing the bass guitar totally and we're not getting the sustain part of the bass guitar so you're probably going to want it to be much less than that I'm going to put it down here too I don't know even something like a hundred so that I still get a part of the initial transient of the bass guitar but I'm killing just the first transient with the kick but I'm still getting a little bit of that oomph at the beginning of the bass guitar let's have a listen still may be a little bit too much to be honest with you so I'll knock it down okay now you're going to need to play with it from there in order to get it right for your song okay it may take a while for you to get used to this but just do take into account those differences in length if you want those sustained parts of the bass guitar to come through okay you don't want to kill the whole instrument off now before we get into using this with a drum source where we can't separate the kick drum from the other drums so something like the si drums which come with cakewalk or a stereo file like a drum loop I want to tell you that I was asking my friend Morgan Freeman the other day about his favorite Facebook group and this was his reply hey Mike thanks for asking my favorite Facebook group is of course the creative sauce cakewalk group full of fine folk helping me with solutions in my favorite recording software follow the link below to join and tell them Morgan sent you so let's look at the scenario where you just have a stereo source for your drums and you can't easily separate out that kick drum to use it as a trigger it could be the case like this one where I have si drums or it could be something like a drum loop which is on a stereo file in fact I'm going to close this si drum window here and I'm actually going to freeze that track we'll just see that happen there and you can see now it actually is a stereo file just the same as if you were using one of those loops okay so I'm going to go down to the console tab here double click on it so we can go to full screen now the basis of what we're going to do here is to try and separate those low frequencies in that drum kit which mostly contain just the kick drum in this case and we're just going to use those low frequencies as the trigger for the compressor so we'll go to the same section here on the drum track we'll click on plus and we'll go down to new stereo bus that will create a new stereo bus right over on the right hand side here and I'm going to rename that to let's call it kick comp okay for kick compressor whatever you want to call it it doesn't matter now I'm going to go back over to where I did the send over here and again I'm going to switch this button over so it's pre fader so it's not being affected by this fader down here and in fact I'm going to just push that fader all the way down for the moment so that the only thing that we're going to be hearing is this bus that's just for the moment by the way we'll turn it back up later so let's just play the drums for a moment and you can see they're only coming through this bus over here so let's do some EQing here so we get rid of all of the top end of this so we're just really hearing the kick I'm going to use the built-in pro channel EQ here so I'll just click this little button at the top of the channel I'll just drag this over so quick you can actually see what's going on there and then I'm just going to double click on the EQ here like so make sure it's switched on in fact and then I'm going to go down to this LP button here this is the low pass filter okay I'm going to switch that on and I'm just going to adjust its frequency a long way down somewhere down here and in fact make it slope pretty sharp there okay now if we have a listen to this you're mostly going to hear just the kick drum in fact let's just mute that bass guitar for a moment so that we can only hear the drums I'll double click on this again so we've got rid of all of the sort of hi hat cymbals and most of the snare we've got the low end of the snare there but that should be fine because the next thing I'm going to do is just boost these this bass frequency down here so we're getting a real thud there aren't we only from the kick drum and in fact if we close this down and we look at the meters here next to the bass you'll see that the meters are mostly being triggered by that kick drum okay and it's just clipping a little bit at the moment so what we can do is just turn that send down a little bit okay so the main thing that we now have on this channel is that kick drum in terms of how much is being is triggering that meter there okay so what we want to do now we've already got our compressor here yeah on the bass guitar as we did earlier so we now need to send that bus through to that compressor just as we did before so I'll click on sonatas effects compressor side input bass okay click on that and then let's just make sure that what's happening when we look at the metering here is it's being triggered by that kick drum and you can see that is happening so let's unmute our bass guitar and let's just bring our main drum level back up on the channel over here we can turn this bus down that really doesn't matter I'll just switch that one over from post to pre so we'll turn that fader down because we don't need to actually hear that we're just using it as a trigger let's have a look again so you can see there that the signal there is just coming from the low end of the kit and we can go ahead now and again adjust our ratio to something reasonable bring down our threshold just adjust that ratio again there sorry bring down our threshold and we'll start to get some compression and again we need to adjust our attack and our release as we did before so this tutorial contained a lot of routing didn't it a lot of sending of signals through to different places in cakewalk by bandab is it routing or routing you tell me in the comments down below now I know a lot of you avoid doing these kinds of things because you find it a little bit confusing well let me end that confusion for you by pointing you in the direction of this video right here which I made all about buses and sending and routing in cakewalk by bandab I'm sure it will be helpful to you and we'll get rid of that confusion go on watch it right now