How To Sidechain FX Like A GigaBrain With Ableton Envelope Follower
It seems like all the YouTube influencer crowd of music producers ever want to talk about is sidechaining.
How do you make space for a kick? Sidechain.
How do you get that pumpy EDM synth sound? Sidechain.
How do you keep your dog from getting dehydrated on a hot day? Sidechain.
(Kidding do not do this, please make sure your dog has lots of clean, cool water to drink.)
But you get the idea. Today we will explain why this gets talked about so much for reasons that are legitimate as well as some silly ones. Then you will see (with video examples) how to setup a basic sidechain compressor, as well as how to connect pretty much anything to anything else in a sidechain-like way using Ableton Live's Envelope Follower instead of a compressor.
Let's dive in!
Pump My Ride, Sidechain My Heart
There are two parts to this article, the typical sidechain compression technique you see in tutorials with a compressor and sidechain input track, mostly to help a kick drum punch through a heavy bass track.
In the second part, you're going to learn how to sidechain anything to anything else with the Envelope Follower.
Really.
But first, let's look at the basics.
Why do people talk about sidechains so much? I keep hearing this come up.
"Sidechaining" is one of those music production and mixing techniques that people obsess over for a few reasons:
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It used to be hard to setup on older equipment (Ableton makes it very easy now)
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You need it to get certain sounds. Once you hear it, you notice it everywhere in modern music.
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It sounds complicated and smart to people who don't know. Like you're really doing super technical hardcore engineer type stuff. People like feeling smart, so they talk about it a lot.
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It can really make a big difference in a mix, especially in achieving low end clarity or creating dynamic-sensitive effects.
So what is Sidechaining?
Sidechain compression in ableton (or any DAW) is a "ducking" technique where you use the volume of one track to tell a compressor on another track when to compress something.
We'll explain later in the article how sidechain techniques are not limited to just compression, but usually when people talk about a "sidechain" they're referring to this explanation.
Say for example you want a guitar track to get a little quieter when a the lead vocal comes in, but get louder again when the singer stops. Or you want your synth bass track to get quiet for a short instant when the kick hits, but then goes back to normal level immediately.
Could you draw in a volume automation that creates space in the mix? Absolutely. But in a track with hundreds of kick drum hits or vocal entrances, that's a lot of manual labor. A sidechain compressor can automatically apply gain reduction when an external source triggers the compressor.
Create Space & Save Time
This can be used as a mixing technique to save you time and be more precise than automating a gain knob by hand. You can also use sidechain compression as a production technique to create a pumping effect, only apply compression based on a certain frequency range, or in more creative ways like automation reverb and delay "throws".
How Is Sidechain Compression Different From An Envelope Follower?
If we're going to define sidechaining as using one signal to trigger some change in a another place, we need to talk about the Envelope Follower in Ableton.
Think of it as a way to apply sidechaining to effects parameters. Any effect parameter you want! The envelope follower ableton has will track the level of a signal and turn a knob on whatever effect you map it to.
A basic "auto wah" setting works like this. As signal increases, a filter opens up.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg because we can use the Envelope Follower to change several effects parameters at once, to different degrees, and in opposing directions.
If you don't totally understand that last sentence, its ok! We're going to get into examples of both.
Let's start with reviewing how to setup a typical sidechain compressor on a bass sound trigger by a kick drum.
Part 1: Basic Sidechain Settings With Ableton's Glue Compressor
All the steps to do this are below, but if you're more of a video person and want to hear an audio track to get a feel for the sound, here you are:
Load Ableton's Glue Compressor onto the Track You Want to Compress
Below is a bass track and drum track. Load the Glue Compressor onto the bass track in this case.
Locate and enable the sidechain toggle button
You'll need to open the sidechain menu. Click the triangle icon in the upper left corner of the plugin, then click the button that says Sidechain.
Set a sidechain input signal
Under the Audio From dropdown menu, select the track you want to trigger the sidechain compression with. In this example, we will use the kick drum to trigger the compressor to turn down the volume of the bass synth track for the instant the kick drum plays, then it will recover back to 0 immediately after.
Enable the Sidechain EQ?
You may want to target the most resonant part of the frequency spectrum so the sidechained compressor triggers more accurately.
If you enable the EQ button, change the filter mode to the the shape that that makes the most sense (a lowpass for kick will work nicely because a kick is heavy on low end frequencies), then adjust the filter frequency and Q control (filter width), you'll be able to find the sweet spot where the compressor responds best.
We find this is best done by ear so use the blue solo button (look for the headphones icon) and listen to the sidechain input signal. If you're trying to recreate what we have here, you'll hear the kick drum when the sidechain input is soloed.
Set the Attack, Release, Ratio, and Threshold
Attack time
The Attack control sets how quickly the compressor responds. Since we're sidechaining to a drum sound, we want this to happen as fast as possible.
Optional: Lookahead
Some digital compressors even have a "lookahead" feature that can anticipate a sound before it actually happens to make the timing as tight as possible.
Release controls
The Release control sets how quickly the compressor recovers to zero. Another way to think about it is how snappy or sluggish the compressor behaves.
Generally, you will want the compressor to get back to 0 or close to it by the time the next kick plays but you'll need to adjust by ear until the timing feels good.
You can kind of control the swing of different elements by adjusting Release time, so this is an important setting on any compressor, not just sidechains.
Ratio
Compressor Ratio is one of the most important compressor settings. How much does the compressor compress? You can look up how many dB of gain reduction will happen at various ratios, but we always just work by ear. Just remember that a higher ratio number means more gain reduction.
Threshold level
Threshold controls at what level the compressor engages. You may want to re-adjust this after you have the other time based controls dialed in. A compressor with a fast attack and medium ratio has a different sound and character than a slower attack, lower ratio, but with the threshold turned all the way down.
Sidechaining For Mixing vs Production
The basic glue compressor sidechain previously mentioned is great for mixing. But what about getting that cool pumping effect we hear in so much modern electronic music, hip hop, and even rock music?
Applying Aggressive Sidechain Compression and Pumping Effects
The setup you're going to use for pumping effects is mostly the same, but we're going to to use more extreme settings.
There are a bunch of ways to do this.
The simplest methods are to crank the sidechain input signal, use a more extreme threshold level (make it lower so the compressor engages more quickly), or use a higher ratio for more gain reduction.
After you try this, you should also try using deliberately slow release times or even automate the release time, so it's less predictable.
MULTIBAND SIDECHAIN COMPRESSION
Now that you know the basics, look for the sidechain option in other plugins. This isn't limited to just the Glue Compressor.
Several Ableton Live stock devices have it, including Multiband Dynamics, which you can use to radically reshape a sound by triggering gain reduction in different parts of the spectrum with an external input.
Sidechain OTT
To start, try using the Multiband sidechain with Ableton's now infamous OTT preset. A little of this goes a long way!
Over The Top
We don't know what this stands for, but Over The Top is probably a solid description. This is a "New York" style of compression that absolutely smashes the input signal while using the EQ section to pump lots of highs and lows. Usually this is used in
parallel with the original, so you're Amount setting will only be at 10-20%. You can possibly go higher, but anything over 40% or 50% starts sounding a little insane.
Try the following settings to get started sidechaining OTT if you're curious.
Part 2: Enter The Envelope Follower
This is the second part of the article where we get into true Gigabrain territory. Why? Sidechain compression in Ableton is not a new thing. If you look at old school hardware compressors, some of them have a physical 1/4" jack that allows an engineer to feed a sidechain input track to the hardware so it can do its job.
The technique has been around for decades now.
Brave New Digital World
However, a digital envelope follower that we can map and adjust to all kind of things inside the DAW? This is a more recent invention and the good people at Ableton have made this very simple to do in Live.
It's certainly possible in other DAWs, but it can sometimes be complex or time consuming to setup. Nothing interrupts the creative flow like having to deal with some very left-brained, analytical IT task like audio signal routing.
In Ableton Live, just a few clicks and you're ready to go. It's easy to change things too.
The GigaBrain Way To Sidechain Kick, Bass, or Whatever Else You Want
Instead of using sidechain compression in Ableton which will lower the volume of the entire track, what if you wanted to only affect the part of the frequency spectrum where our issue is?
In our case the kick drum and bass are competing for low end space.
Look Mom! No Compressor!
Using only the Envelope Follower and EQ8 without any compression, we're going to duck out the frequency range causing issues.
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Start by putting the Envelope Follower on the Kick Drum track. When audio signal hits the plugin, you'll see it trace the waveform like this. Since this isn't a compressor, the Rise, Fall and Delay controls take the place of attack and release settings. Honestly the easiest way to dial this in is to play with the settings until the waveform looks correct.
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Now on your bass synth (or whatever bass track you want) put an instance of EQ8 with one band enabled. The low end shelf or a wide bell will work.
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Go back to your kick track and click the square button in the upper right corner of the plugin to access the mapping menu. Set the first slider to 45%-50% and the second one to 0%. This will keep our sidechain moving in the right range.
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Click the first Map button and it will start blinking. While it is blinking, navigate back to the bass track and click on the Gain knob of the the enabled band in EQ8.
Now when you play the audio, the EQ band should be creating a cut when the kick drum plays, but then returning back to flat right after the drum hit, totally automatically!
If you've never done this before, it's going to seem like magic.
Here's a video showing how quickly this can put together.
The crazy part is since the Envelope Follower allow you to control all kinds of Live devices like a reverb, a high pass filter, some obscure effect buried deep in a drum rack somewhere, etc. you can really dive into a whole world of sound design.
Sidechaining much more than compression
Know this you can sidechain basically anything to anything else now! This opens up a whole world of sound design that either wasn't possible or what much more difficult to setup in the past.
You may have already used this type of effect before.
Ever seen an envelope follower pedal?
An old school "auto wah" effect is simply and envelope follower circuit mapped to a filter. The filter opens up more as signal increases. So a refined guitar or bass player can control the wah-wah sound of the filter depending on how hard they play.
But in Ableton Live anything can be setup to behave like this, not just filters.
So take this knowledge and run with it! See what kind of problems you can solve or wild sounds you can make by mapping the envelope follower plugin around Live.
Do you want to learn more music production techniques?
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