Flying Lotus - Tea Leaf Dancers

[Xavy]

In Flying Lotus's track, Tea Leaf Dancers, you may notice that during/after each kick drum, the synth fades slightly.

Is there any specific way of doing this? I have acheived somewhat similar effects using limiters to cap volumes...

[Xavy]

Wait, is this something to do with sidechain compression? I remember a producer friend of mine telling be about it once...

[evil madmen]

That is exactly what sidechain compression is
but i know nothing about it

[Basic A]

Compressor > peak controller.

ez shit...

Could honestly fine tune it and link the volume to peak too... hassle though.

[back2onett]

I always thought this was just good use of ADSR envelopes

[Xavy]

My 'wrong' way of doing it consisted of putting a loud kick in the same channel as the synth, and using a limiter to cap the overall volume of the channel. This would reduce the volume of the synth, but the kick would remain overpowering.

[green plan]

What? Search sidechain compression. It is very simple and easy to do.

First million pages of results will tell you:

http://tinyurl.com/355wmr2

[staticcast]

My 'wrong' way of doing it consisted of putting a loud kick in the same channel as the synth, and using a limiter to cap the overall volume of the channel. This would reduce the volume of the synth, but the kick would remain overpowering.

= poor man's sidechain compression

Well, not quite, but you get basically the same effect.

Remember, you can feed whatever the hell you want into the sidechain input. A kick, a snare, a delayed kick, a kick with the attack cut off, or a trigger that's muted so you don't even hear it.

[Prefoma]

flylo is the king of the sidechain

without it that tune would literally just be a kick drum and a pad

[kontigobeats]

yea flying lotus is real good at using those kind of effects, i love that track!
anyone know if this is the same kind of effect in joy orbison's hyph mngo? if you listen it sounds like shakers are cut out when the kick comes in which gives it a nice effect.

[yellowhighlighter]

a lot of his tracks which sound like they utilize heavy sidechain compression sound to me like the vinyl sim compressor of the sp303. madlib does this a lot too and he's known to use the sp303. flying lotus used to use one but i think he's gone all software know so i dunno.

[Gusto]

No synth pad on that track either if I remember correctly - it's a sample. He also uses a long release on his drum compressor so the compression from the kick just before the snare squashes the fuck out of the snare.

[saha]

Compressor > peak controller.

ez shit...

for a bit of delay to the compression tweak yr gain up, works with the compressors i use.

[deadly_habit]

am i gonna be the one to come in and say different
flylo shit aint all sidechain
why this half assed wannabe deep flylo dubstep shit is getting stale

[cloak and dagger]

I wrote off sidechain compression for a long time, thinking it was mostly a tool for making maximalist tracks a bit less cluttered...but with some experimentation, you can really get some cool shit from it. Flying Lotus and Samiyam are two great examples, not just with sidechaining a kick to a pad or whatever but especially with sidechaining different percussion to each other and how it mixes with the other sidechains that are going on in the track.

[Xavy]

Well I've been using the Fruity Peak Controllor, but I don't really understand how this relates to compression. What is compression? I'm struggling to find an explination that isn't full of jargon.

[antics]

That's my favourite explanation (the picture), basically any sound over the threshold volume (see the fruity compresser) is decreased in volume by the ratio (check the graph and the difference in gradient before and after), its used for making the dynamic range of a sound smaller, i.e the difference between loudest and quietest.

The concept of sidechaining is that when your kick hits, the bass will be compressed. This means the loud bits will be quieter, so there is now room for your kick to be loud without pushing your total volume over 0db.

Its also used as an effect for other things, like if you crack it on a snare with a high ratio and low threshold then you will get a very hard hitting snare as all the sound is of a similar volume.

[narcissus]

i LOVE the way flylo uses sidechaining... hmm... actually i love everything about his tracks..

[FSTZ]

I always thought this was just good use of ADSR envelopes

yeah

youcan also get this by throwing a filter over what you want to fade

[Pedro Sánchez]

A nice automation curve on the volume of elements you want to duck for multiple elements, send to a group buss and automate the volume of the buss. Simples.