When thinking of side chain compression many of us would first think of the rhythmic pumping effects so common in dance music but there are subtler and possibly more useful applications for keying the side chain of a dynamics plugin than that. In this article we examine some examples of using external side chains to control the level of delays and reverbs.
Sidechain Delay
How many times have you used a delay or any other effect to enhance a track and it hasn't worked? In this free video tutorial from all the way back in 2016, Ben Lindell shows you one of the best tricks for containing the spray of echos and fit your delay returns perfectly into the vocal gaps, no automation required. This technique helps you keep your mix from getting too washy, cloudy, busy or over-processed.
It's easy to have too much of a good thing, especially when that good thing is delay! Automating every single second of a delay send is tedious and unnecessary work, that’s why the recording gods gave us tools like compressors and expanders with sidechain inputs to do our work for us.
In this tutorial Ben works in Presonus Studio One (and what a grey place it was back then!) but this technique applies to any DAW and you’ll learn how to:
Achieve more clarity with your delays
Easily obtain a natural sounding balance between the delays and the dry vocal
Flip the trick around to an expander and gain dynamic control over the delay tail
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Using Side Chain Compression To Control Effects Returns In Pro Tools
Ben’s example is very thorough and illustrates how to set up side chain compression in Studio One with its drag and drop approach to routing. In the example below Dan Cooper shows how to achieve a similar effect in Pro Tools using Waves plugins.
The importance of the attack and particularly the release controls when setting up side chain compression to control the level of effects is crucial to the success of this approach but exactly by how much the effects swell back up to fill the gaps between phrases isn’t quite as well defined as it would be if it was controlled by automation. The potentially confusing thing about using side chain compression like this is that it is backwards in its approach. What we are trying to do is to bring up the effects from a baseline level under the vocal to a louder level during the gaps between phrases. What we are actually doing is running the effects too loud and turning them down via side chain compression when the vocal is present. The same effect but implemented in reverse.
There are some alternative approaches which you might consider presented in the following premium tutorials:
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