Alot of users ask how to do the inverse of sidechaining the compressor put on a sustaining sound (a pad or strings etc) to make its amplitude follow the beat of a rhythmical track.

Now mostly people just say Gate sidechaining and that's it.

The funny thing is I've been unable to find any response to that solution with the comment that it will only hard and abruptly cut off and on the audio of the gated sound without any curve.
if you'd have a more organic rhythmical track than a drum machine beat (which is usually what's used in the examples the desired effect would be more obvious in my case and you'd see that the only option to do this with the Ableton effects is to use the vocoder. But now that is very tedious setting up the parameters right and often the sounds given as the external source or the vocoded sound itself are not of a character that will make the vocoder method work.

If I have.... well say a dubstep bass with an amplitude curve looking somewhat like a sinewave and I wanted to synch the amplitude curve of a sustaining voice to that curve. What would I do then? Gate won't work now will it? (or have I missed something vital?)

I can think of sidechaining a compressor and then sidechaining the result of that compressor again and that's probably what I'm going to try but I wish there would be an obvious method.

I am surprised more people do not find this effect essential to many of their electronic works.

TIA!

The gate should work in this context, you just need to play with the Attack and Release parameters to adjust the "curve" or response of the gates envelope. If this doesn't sound right, try using a different sound source to trigger the gate.

I commonly setup a sound (usually based around a white white noise generator and a simple envelope) that is only routed to the side-chain input of the Gate. If the sound source you are using to trigger the gate (a kick, for example) is causing the envelope to respond in a weird way, you can sequence this dummy sound to mimic the pattern of the kick. This way you can make adjustments to the dummy signal (signal that triggers the gate) without effecting any of the sounds in the mix.

Does that make sense?

I have found no behaviour in the Gate to allow for attenuation of the amplitude. Only hard on and off of the sound. Sorry to say I could not find any help in your response.
Would you elaborate on it or give me a rendered example (dropbox mp3? soundcloud?) clearly showing that it works the way a double dummy compressor sidechain trick would?

here is what I want which I can do just fine with the double compressor sidechaining trick but that's a stupid work-around requiring an extra dummy-channel (albeit of a simple constant default operator tone).
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5042186/inverted_compressor_sidechai ning_trick.mp3
(and that voice is sampled from rah xephon (ep1?) if you did recognise it ;))

so show me how to do this with a Gate please :)
here's the sustaining vocal sample even so you don't choose something with filter sweeps and things that may confuse me and also to give you a treat for your labour.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5042186/Mishimavoice.wav

just to clarify. those amplitude hits, or spikes are the drum hits of the sourced track (or actually a slap bass track I think) it is not the in-between drops of amplitude like an ordinary single compressor sidechaining job would produce.

Live's multiband compressor is interesting here, it does expansion (? not sure on the terminology, but compression via inverted ratio) and can be configured so the mid channel operate as one full spectrum band by turning off low/high bands.

[e] I feel like getting the most out of side-chaining really does take work to set up in a way that's really flexible during mixing (especially with freezing ...). Justin3am's suggestion is can be a lot more direct and easier to manage in a project, so IMO it's a really good option to consider for side-chain perfection.
Last edited by xh3rv on Thu May 24, 2012 4:35 pm; edited 2 times in total

Use ReaGate and omnomnom

that is good to know! thank you! always been on my to-do list to find the limits of the features of that thing. cheers!

thanks! that's just super! :)
on second hand.. should I say it's not caturday yet to that omnomnom? ;)