4 Ways to Use Sidechaining Beyond Kick and Bass

By far, the most common use case for sidechaining is ducking the bassline to allow the kick drum to punch through, thereby bringing clarity and solidity to the low end of the mix. But there are plenty of other creative and corrective tricks that I like to use the technique for – here are just a few of them…

1. Help drums punch through the mix

If you find that your beats are sounding great but are just struggling to break through the full-spectrum mix, try routing everything but the drums to a group bus and carefully sidechaining that off the kick and snare.

The Mix control on your compressor or ducking plugin is key here, since you'll want to keep the amount of ducking applied to the absolute minimum required to achieve your percussive goal, unless you're shooting for the pumping feel I cover in the next tip. Joe sums it all up in this short video:

Help your drums PUNCH through the mix

2. Full mix pumping for dynamic dancefloor grooves

Expanding on the previous tip, when taken to extremes, full-mix sidechaining can serve as a sound in its own right, as famously personified by the overt pumping effect heard in much mainroom EDM.

Applying deep ducking around the kick drum to the whole mix (or just a single key element – a bassline or heavy pad sound, for example) with a long compressor release or extended volume modulation curve creates a woozy, undulating dynamic to get the dancefloor bouncing.

In this before-and-after example, I've set Kickstart up to heavily duck a full mix:

3. Rhythmic chops with sidechain gating

Flipping the ducking concept on its head, sidechain gating sees the volume instead rise up when the sidechain is triggered. This is useful for turning pads and other sustained instrumentation into rhythmic parts, using a silent audio or MIDI clip to trigger an actual gate, or a sidechain plugin with an inverted ducking curve.

Sidechain gating can also be deployed to 'punch' in and out of a noise loop (or other constant sound) every time a kick, snare or hi-hat hits to add an extra layer of sizzle to your drums.

In this example, I've set up a noise loop to be sidechain gated off the snare drum in a drum loop, via a 'gating' curve in VolumeShaper. Over the first 12 bars, you can hear VolumeShaper’s dry/wet Mix being raised, to gradually increase the amount of gating applied to the noise layer. Then, the noise is muted for the final four bars, so you can hear how the drum loop sounds without it.

4. Clearer vocals with multiband demasking

If a vocal is getting lost in the mix, it's often because another instrument – like a guitar or synth – is masking an important part of its frequency range. A common fix is to use sidechaining to duck that competing part whenever the vocal comes in.

The trouble is, if you use standard, full-range sidechaining, you end up turning down the entire instrument every time the vocal hits, which can sound unnatural, distracting and overly obvious.

A more transparent solution is multiband sidechaining. Instead of ducking the whole signal, you target just the specific frequencies that are clashing with the vocal. That way, the vocal cuts through clearly while the rest of the instrument stays present and intact.

Here's a before-and-after example, using ShaperBox's Compressor Tool. In the first clip, no compression is applied. In the second clip, the synth is ducked by the vocal, but only in the range from 600Hz-7kHz.

As our four tips have hopefully made clear, getting your bass out of the way of your kick drum is really only the tip of the sidechaining iceberg. To try these techniques for yourself, download the fully functional Kickstart and VolumeShaper demos today.