J. Anthony Allen shows how to use sidechaining in Ableton Live 12 to make one track control another. He walks through inserting a compressor on a synth, routing a kick drum as the sidechain input, and creating rhythmic pumping effects where the synth's volume ducks in time with the kick.
Okay, so what is sidechaining? Sidechaining is basically using one track to affect another track. Okay? So there's a lot of different ways you can do this and a lot of different effects you can use it on. But the most common way this is done is with a compressor. So let's go to one of our synths here. Let's see. Not that one, not that one. Something with some sustain to it. So maybe this one? Yeah, that'll work. I'm gonna turn it up a little bit. Okay, we'll do it on this one. So what I'm going to do is put a compressor on this track, Okay? Now remember what I just said about what a compressor does. A compressor is going to squash or compress the signal and then boost it, but it's going to squash it based on some parameters that we tell it. And what we're going to tell it here is squash the sound based on the volume of another track. Okay? So first let's set up this just to do kind of a lot, okay? Do it all the way wet. That works. Whatever. Now we need to set up what's going to control it. So the way we do that is our com. Our sidechaining settings are hidden in this little arrow right here. So if I open that up, we can select what's going to. What we're going to sidechain it to. You can choose whatever you want here. You can choose a different track. One thing that I like to do, sidechain to, like, rhythmic things. And you can actually make, like, add a lot of rhythm to this track. But the more common way to do it is to sidechain to your kick. This is like Sidechain 101. This is what people do a lot of the time. So let's listen to this beat. Okay? That's not what I want. Let's do this one. Okay, so I want this kick, I want this four on the floor kick that we set up, but I don't want to sidechain it to everything else. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to duplicate this track. I'm going to go in here and I'm going to get rid of everything that's not the kick. Okay? And now I'm going to delete all the rest of this and just duplicate this out. Okay? So now what we have on this track is just this. Delete this just so I don't screw that up. Okay, Cool. Just a thump. Alright, so now let's go back to where we're sidechaining.
