Im looking at doing some more dance productions, and wanted to get into the "sidechain" dance effect on house records etc.
I have an Alesis 3630 which is great for this and am thinking of getting a small mixing desk, to route the Mac, sampler, and hook up the compressor to.
I was thinking of a very basic mackie 1202 mixer but i just thought, do i need busses? ie: 1604?
I have ableton live 6 (which has no sidechain at the moment) and there seems to be a shortage of freeware sidechain compressors for OSX going by the forums.
I want to be able to take a silent kick to "pump" various parts of audio, leave some un-touched (like the other drums), as well as getting the 3630 to compress the whole mix on the master.
Is this possible? with one 3630, and do you think i would need busses for this? thanks in advance!
h/w sidechain and mixer buss?
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- KVRAF
- 8732 posts since 24 May, 2002 from Tutukaka, New Zealand
No...at least not without recording the result to audio, and refeeding it out to the mixer.Is this possible? with one 3630
That all depends on what soundcard you use (i.e. how many outs). You can feed different busses from your host out into ordinary stereo channels on the mixer and have no need for busses on the mixer. If it's a 2-out card, it's all a moot point anyway because you'll have to feed some busses within your host to the outputs to get anything from your Alesis, and then rerecord the result back into the PC for mixing.and do you think i would need busses for this?
From another of your posts, I suspect you've been mislead anyway. Pumping usually means complete mix compression with heavy settings and the kick within the whole mix tripping the compressor over the mix. No need for a sidechain at all.
I can see your point about wanting the drums normal, but pumping other parts of the mix...that's going to be difficult to do without a multi-out card. You can do it quite easily within most decent s/w hosts, but you will need a compressor with a sidechain for what you want to do. And there are commercial comps with that facility that don't cost the earth...as you say, not many freebie ones that are any good, so you really might have to think about buying one. Kjaerhus, Voxengo, OtiumFX are 3 that spring to mind that have good comps with sidechains. I don't know Live at all...it might be possible there is no way of doing sidechains at all within Live. If that's the case, you can still sidechain with DB Audio QuantumFX and DB Procomp (DB might even have another comp that sidechains) and they will sidechain no matter what the host is capable of (they sidechain send and receive within the plugin themselves)
.But honestly...pumping house tracks just have a compressor strapped across the mix. It's not any magic with sidechaining. Some of those tracks just might use a sidechain to duck the bass with the kick (a much touted method on the net, but not actually that crucial in real life), but puming songs DO NOT need sidechains.