What are the desired results from sidechaing?

[Ice Man]

So, yeah. I searched for sidechaining and from it I can see how to do it, but not why, per se. I've seen it pop up a lot in clearing up electronica mixes, but what are its perks for live music? I've seen gating and I've seen ducking. Gating I'm assuming would be so that not so much ring is left in certain tracks like drums? Also, ducking seems like it's used to make sure a certain element is always heard. How do the bass drum and bass guitar correlate and also how does one approach the snare? Which things are heard and which ones are pushed back? Forgive the ignorance.


Thanks!
Regards,
Daniel

 

[KnifeVariable]

Let's say you record drums in a conventional way - that is you mic up a drumset and have someone play it - you get lots of unwanted bleed. That means that (for example) snare tracks will record plenty of the cymbal/hihat/kick action which you don't really want in your snare tracks, since you want your snare nicely compressed to hell and back. If you however do compress the snare tracks with so much of that noise going on in the background , you'll be amplifying the cymbals as a side effect as well! Ta-daaaa enter the almighty noise gate in sidechain mode on the snare, so you can have the top mic open the gate for the bottom mic and lose a shitload of noise this way. Other uses would be use to sidechain compress the bass and kick drum, or overheads and snare if there's too much snare in the OHs and so forth... ok quite a blurb, hope I got my point across though!

 

[elmuchoescadawg]

Sidechaining lets you trigger the comp or gate on one channel from another channel. For example you can have a comp on a bass and feed the side chain with the kick drum so that when the kick strikes the bass guitar ducks slightly. You could also have a gate on a snare channel and have the sidechain fed from a copy of the same track thats been edited and moved forward so that the gate on the original snare channel only opens in the right place. Other clever uses Ive seen have includes a floor mat which triggers an ocisator which in turn feeds a gate on a backing vocal so that the vocal channel is only open when the guitarist steps upto the mic and on the mat.

Does that help?

 

[trym^^]

easiest way to do it in nuendo ?

 

[Skyweaver]

hmm the idea of using it for the OH is appealing as theres way too much bleed in them at the moment, maybe a silly question but doesnt drumagog provide another option for cleaning up kick and snare if you use 100% replacement ?

 

[Ice Man]

easiest way to do it in nuendo ?

Search for "sidechain" or "sidechaining." A forumite posted a pic-by-pic description on how to do it.

 

[Ice Man]

Thanks for the replies, guys! For some reason I knew of its viability, but not how to approach it or what I should use it for. It's brought up a lot, so I figured what the hell. I guess it's down to experimentation.

 

[cameltoe]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4680971900968834846&q=CUBASE

Heres a nice little video of this in action

 

[Ice Man]

Sweet, dude. That's even better! Good find.

 

[zmetallica]

cameltoe, thats totally what i need for this kinda stuff! thanks alot!

This really makes a big difference in the mix!

also why was it done with quad sound? only part of it don't really get...