side-chain compression not working! please help...

Question

Level 1

8 points

side-chain compression not working! please help...

I am trying to duck my es1 bass sound via the kick drum being emitted by an ultrabeat.

i have done the following after reading several guides;

ultrabeat in track 9. es 1 in track 10.
set up basic 4/4 beat purely for learning this method, set es1 to emit one long bass note. after this i put a standard compressor into track 10. pressed sidechain, clicked track9. clicked auto- gain off. set attack to nearly o. release quite short. ratio of 3 ish.

yet the gain reduction meter does not even move. its clearly not picking up any signal whatsoever...
As soon as i put "none" in the sidechain box it starts to work again, so its really baffling.

i am really frustrated by this as it is essential for me to get a clean low end sound yet this method simply won't work for me, any help would be much appreciated!

thank you.

macbook pro, Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Posted on Dec 14, 2006 5:48 PM

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Answer 1

Bee Jay

Level 6

10,900 points

Dec 14, 2006 5:56 PM in response to greena2

If you selected "Track 9" as your sidechain, then that's your problem. That's audio track 9, whereas your kick drum is coming from an audio instrument channel, and these aren't directly routable into a sidechain.

Route the audio instrument that has the drums to a bus. Now select that bus as your sidechain source on your bass track, and it will work.

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Answer 2

greena2 Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 14, 2006 6:02 PM in response to Bee Jay

seems to have done the job, thank you very much indeed!

I'm just wondering if its fine to change the output of said bus track to "none" from "output1-2" so as to not have a "doubled" bass drum? i did that and the sidechain seems to be working just fine,though i'm no expert on logic so i'm not sure if this is a wrong method...

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Answer 3

Bee Jay

Level 6

10,900 points

Dec 14, 2006 6:21 PM in response to greena2

Set the "output" of your kick audio instrument to Bus X. Set the output of Bus X to be Output 1&2. You will only hear one copy of the kick, which flows from:
Audio Instrument -> Bus X -> Output 1&2.

If you use a send instead to send to Bus X, then yes, set it's output to "No Output" as you are already sending the kick to the main output from its own channel.

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