I've been messing around with this tonight, and I know a lot of people wonder how you do it, so I'll try to fill ya in. Many people say it can't be done without some special plugins, and others try to do it with the compressor, but it's quite simple to do using the Peak Controller. This is specifically for ducking, a particular type of sidechaining. I don't know much about sidechain compressors and what they are capable of, but I think ducking is the most common use.

Here's a simple step by step guide.

-put your kick on fx1
-underneath all your fx (eq, compression, etc) select the peak controller
-turn the volume on the peak controller all the way up and lift the little parabola thing up all the way
-make sure to uncheck the 'mute' box. if you don't do this you won't hear your kick
-add your bass, using long notes, as if it were a pad.
-right click the volume knob of the bass and select 'link to controller...'
-under 'internal controller' select the one that says 'peak + lfo'
*HERE'S THE TRICK*
-click the arrow to the left of 'mapping forumla' and select 'invert'. if you leave it on default the bass will get loud when the kick hits and drop out when the kick stops, which is the opposite of what you want.
-it may seem a little out of sync, so adjust it with the 'smoothing/time' knob. you won't hear the results until you hit the 'accept' button

That should do it.

There are a lot of ways you can adjust how the bass reacts to the conroller. The way I have described will make the bass volume go from 0%->100%, so the bass will turn on and off, if you want to have the bass do more of a fade in fade out then heres what you do: Create a copy of your kick drum, and give it its own fx bank. Put the peak controller on this bank instead of the original kick. Now make sure you leave the 'mute' box checked so it doesn't interfere with the original kick. Now turn the volume down on the kick until the bass sounds right. As you adjust the volume it will affect the timing, so go back and mess with the 'smoothing/time' setting again.

Here is an mp3 that shows what I've done, just using a default fruity kick and the 3osc (sorry for the crapp sounds). The first bit is without the peak controller on. The second is the first method I described and the last bit is with the adjustment I mentioned. [EXAMPLE MP3]

Hope this helps. If you need more help let me know.

tc

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Last edited by tylerc on Feb-08-2005 at 08:23