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Something for Section III: Sidechaining: As soon as some pretentious kids from Paris discovered that you can apply compression to a sound triggered by the emergence of another sound, they stumbled upon probably one of the greatest production innovations of our time. Sidechain compression. Sounds quite complicated, right? It's really not. Since I'm not privy to all of your DAW situations, I'll try and describe it as conceptually as I can... The EQ is one of the most important tools a good producer/engineer has. A proper EQ job can change the entire quality of your sound, and your track. EQs also make producers more aware of how their different tracks relate to one another. It makes us realize that most of the time, multiple sounds exist in the same frequency range. The most common culprit? The bass and kick drum. ESPECIALLY in House music. When two loud sounds exist on the same frequency range, it causes master peaking. This is very bad, because it creates noise and makes your track sound like poo poo. The producers of the past would combat this by either turning down both sounds so they don't peak, or (in House's case) keeping the kick drum huge while syncopating the bass line so they never interact. This is why a lot of early House had syncopated bass lines. Nowadays, we can use a Compressor (used normally to prevent peaking on a track) to "squeeze" a track down so we can keep the volume on everything except the frequencies that peak. If you don't know how a compressor works, learn about compression first. It's much too in-depth to discuss here. If you do know how compression works, read on! All you need is a compressor that takes a key input. Your "key" track is the sound that you want to be over top of everything else in the mix. So if I were making a house tune, I'd probably make my kick track the "key". In Digital Performer, and in traditional studios, I would assign the kick to an Auxiliary send, which is basically a carbon copy of the track which doesn't make any noise in the audible mix. In your compressor, set the "Key Input" to either the track you want (if your DAW allows this) or the Aux Send for which you sent your kick track to. This compressor will now only function if a kick drum sound is present. Maximize your compression ratio and begin playing the track. Now, slowly lower the threshold until you get the desired amount of sidechaining. The sound that you've just sidechained should appear to "duck" out of the mix every time the kick drum is hit. Sidechaining isn't limited to one track, you can sidechain with the kick drum as a key input for every track if you'd like. There's no limits! Now, you don't have to necessarily turn the ratio ALL the way up every time you sidechain. Changing the ratio also affects the sound of your sidechain, but turning it up all the way ensures that you'll hear the effects of the compression. Now that you know what to listen for, it's easier to detect. Sidechaining also doesn't necessarily have to be with the kick. If there's too many high-ends going on in my mix, I will sidechain the snare drum so the tune doesn't clip every backbeat. I hope that was informational enough, let me know if there are any discrepancies with what I just wrote. That is the way I learned how to sidechain.
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Mar 7, 2008 08:10
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 19:35 |
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Are there any Traktor 3 users in the house? I use Traktor 3 with the Audio 8 DJ/Scratch interface. I want to map certain effects to my MIDI keyboard controllers knobs, but every time I hit "Learn" and turn a knob, nothing happens. I've tried restarting my computer, and my OS/Traktor is fully updated (Mac OS 10.4.11, Traktor 3.3.2). Maybe I should mention that my MIDI controller only has MIDI out, and MIDI Out (on my interface) is currently inactive, though it being active doesn't really fix the problem...
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Jul 8, 2008 06:57
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archie posted:yeah mate i'm running a similar setup - i have traktor scratch + got the traktor 3 upgrade and i'm running midi (trigger finger and a remote sl) I have not selected a channel, however. I've been using OMNI. Does it matter which channel I select as long as they're all the same? I've tried changing channels but it hasn't fixed my problem.
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Jul 8, 2008 17:55
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