Tight side-chain triggering

Side-chain triggering is a powerful tool to use for many things. Compressors and gates have this feature and there are many creative uses for them.

Using the noise gate is not only useful for reducing bleed from drums or taking out background noise between phrases of a vocal track. It can be useful in many musical ways as well, using side-chaining. 

One trick for tighter bass is triggering the bass note to the kick drum, so it only sounds when the kick drum is playing. Of course, this doesn’t work in all styles or for every song, but it can come in useful if you just need the bass note to give the fundamental root note of the chords used.

And you can do it all without a bass-guitar or a keyboard, if you know which notes you want the bass track to play.

Easy triggering

Say you have an eight bar verse that you want the chords to change very two bars:

• Write in long whole notes in your piano roll that change every two bars for example.

• Then when listening to the sustained notes you can insert a gate to gate them completely.

• Use the sidechain to trigger it so it sounds every time the bass-drum hits. You may need to use the filter in the gate if you are using a loop so it doesn’t sound when the snare drum hits as well.

• Fiddling with the parameters you can get a pretty tight, although basic bass track.  

As I said before, not only good for tidying up, but also for tightening up. I have a great tutorial at the highly successful audiotuts website where I show how to trigger a sine wave to a kick drum, thickening up the sound. Read that one for a more detailed explanation

Related articles:

Using buss compression for tighter and punchier drums

Quick tips on using the knee on compressors.

How to make a gated reverb sound.

Simplify your mix by routing your overdubs to one track.

If you're done using the side-chain, Click here for more mixing tips