#Sidechain fl studio how to#

This comes at the cost of having to manage the MIDI going to your sidechain trigger channel in addition to the MIDI of your original drum sound and making sure they line up correctly. Commonly referred to as ‘ghost sidechaining’ this method has a few benefits over the other: using very short simple signals, you can make the compressor’s gain reduction envelope shape the compression very reliably. Then you can use that signal as your sidechain trigger. So, instead of the original drum sound being used to trigger the compressor, one could use an extra channel that has a really short burst of white noise and layer it with the drum sound, making sure not to route it to the master so it doesn’t actually make an audible sound.

In that case using attack/release settings to shape the compression is close to impossible, as shorter release times will just distort the compressed audio and longer attack times will make the pumping feel less accurate.ĭue to this: another method has been found: Kick drums are usually too long and do not allow the receiving dynamics unit to respond quick enough. A common sonic characteristic of this method is extreme ‘pumping“ because the whole drum sound is being used to trigger the compressor, that means depending on your threshold, the tail of your drum will still compress the signal.

Workflow-wise this is pretty easy to do, a 2-click operation even. That signal can then be picked up by plugins in the receiving track as a separate audio stream. There are quite a few methods of achieving this in FL Studio, with the most basic one just being to route your drum sound to the sound you want to dip in volume as a sidechain (sidechains in FL are sends at -inf dB). Leo Konig highlights some effective sidechaining methods using FL Studio… It’s a method that’s used to duck one signal’s volume with the amplitude of another – and it’s everywhere in modern music. Mess around with the settings until you find something that sounds good to you.Many people find sidechain compression a difficult art to master. And the last knob “Decay” is how fast the volume of the 808 is going to come back up. You can see the curve it is making in the “Output Meter Graph”. The “Tension” know is with how much tension your 808 is going to come back in. The “Volume” knob is how hard the volume of the 808 is going to drop down. The “Base” knob is the volume of your 808. Now you can play around with the 4 knobs in the “Peak” tab. Go back to your “Fruity Peak Controller” that is on your kick. Now click on “ Accept” on the bottom right corner. Then go to the third tap “ Mapping formula” and click on “Inverted”. Go to the second tap “ Internal controller” and click on “ Peak ctrl - Peak”. Now a window “ Remote control settings” will pop up.

#Sidechain fl studio how to#

How to use Fruity Peak Controllerįirst select your kick in the mixer, then click on a FX slot and select “ Fruity Peak Controller”.Īfter that select your 808 in the mixer and right-click the volume slider and click on “ Link to controller”. This way your kick has more room in the lower frequencies to stand out. So how will sidechaining fix the problem of your kick and 808 fighting for the same frequencies? What you want to do is that when your kick hits your 808 will become more quiet. Sidechaining is simply said where an effect is activated by an audio track. Kicks and 808’s are both sounds that have very low frequencies and they have to match each other to sound good in a track. Doesn’t your kick hit as hard anymore as it did before you added an 808? Then the kick and the 808 are most likely fighting for the same frequencies.