Studio One: How To Do Side-chaining

Here, a Compressor plug‑in on the synth pad track is being triggered by audio sent from a kick drum track.

We talk you through the basics of side‑chaining in Studio One.

Last month, we took a look at the various compression plug‑ins that ship with Studio One. One feature that I glossed over was their ability to use an external key input. This allows the ‘side‑chain’ signal feeding the detector section of the compressor to be different from the audio signal the compressor is processing. The example you’ll probably find most familiar is using a kick drum to pull down the level of a big synth sound so that the sound of the kick comes powerfully through the mix. It can subtly emphasise the kick in the mix, or it can be pushed harder, making the track throb and pulse.

So, this month, we’re going to look at how we do that in the context of the Studio One plug‑ins. We’re going to use the example of the kick drum to see if we can rescue it from being lost in the mush. You can of course, use this to highlight or emphasise any instrument you want, or use it purely for the pumping effect it can bring to your music, but let’s keep things simple.

Setting Up The Side‑chain

There may be lots of tracks that are covering up the action of your kick drum, but we’re going to focus on a single track of synths and a kick drum so that we can get a handle on what’s going on. So, open a nice fresh song and, delving into the Studio One Loop Library, head over to Pads / Loops, grab the file called ‘154_Disco_Loop_Synth Pad 1_Cmaj.audioloop’ and drop it onto a new track.

 Next, poke around in Loops / Drums / Kick and you should find a sample called ‘Kick 90908.wav’, which is exactly the sort of thing we need. Drag that into another track. Now, this is just a single hit, so we’re going to need to populate the track with copies that run for the length of the pad. Select the single clip and press D (for Duplicate) as many times as it takes to fill the track out with kicks.

From the Effects Browser, drag the PreSonus Compressor plug‑in onto the synth pad track. Above the compressor controls, next to the preset menu, is the Sidechain button. Click to enable it and then click the arrow to the right. This brings up a list of possible side‑chain sources. In a big project, you’d have a long list of every track’s output, but here we just have the kick drum track. We have a choice between Send and Output, which largely depends on how we want to use the side‑chain source. The Send option works like an effects send, routing the signal to the compressor while the kick track continues to operate as normal. This can be pre‑ or post‑fader, so that the effect can be carried through regardless of whether the kick fader is turned up or not. With the Output option, the destination of the kick track becomes the compressor, so you’ll no longer hear the kick at all. This can be useful when you’re triggering compression from a sound source that you don’t actually want to hear, such as a click...