MPA 408 Lecture 02/10/10 Side-Chain Processing

Today We Discussed Side-Chain Processing Using An External Key. To Demonstrate The Process We Mic'd A Kick Drum (D112), Snare (SM57) OverHead (At4050), E Guitar (Royer) And Bass DI (Millinia). Then Patched And Set Up A Protools Session. Next We Recorded A Drum Pattern Followed By A Short Piano Accompaniment Then Added In Electric Guitar And Bass. Once All The Audio Was Input We Followed Our Notes To Get The Effect Started:

1. Click The Key Input Selector And Select The Input Or Buss Carrying The Audio From The Reference Track.

2. Click External Key To Activate External Side Chain Processing.

3. To Listen To The Signal That Will Be Used To Control Side Chain Input Click Side-Chain Input Click Side Chain Listen To Enable It.

4. Dial In The Frequency You Want Gate To Hear

5. Playback And Adjust

Note: The Effect Was Describe As The Mechanism Dj's Use When Talking Over Music.

To Show Practical Uses For The Effect In Our Mixes, We Duplicated Both The Kick And Piano Tracks And Applied Strip Silence. Then (From The Cloned Track) The Kick (bus 17) Was Bused To The Key Input (On The Plugin Gate Along With An Added Compression Plugin) On The Piano Channel Trigging The Gate To Open Every Time A Transient Pass Through. (Hopefully That Makes Sense). The Same Was Done For Snare And Electric Guitar Tracks.

Note: This Caused A Calculated Descending Echo Effect

Then We Panned The Original Piano Hard Left And Its Gated Clone Hard Right. And Did The Opposite To The Original Guitar Track (Panned Hard Right) And Its Clone (Hard Left). This Gave The Audio Balance And An Effect That Could Only Be Obtained Artificially.

Note: We Also Learned How To Manipulate The Trigger Range In Such Manner That Only Minute Section Of The Audio Spectrum Would Open The Gate.

Note: We Also Observed How Applying A Universal Reverb Could Tie An Arrangement Together