Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP4: Sidechaining (video, 2016)

How to get the pumping of sidechain compression on a machine with no compressor, demonstrated on a cover of deadmau5's Strobe. His definition first: a compressor fed by the kick "crush[es] the volume of every other track … so that the kick sounds more full and more present", used so widely in dance music that "it's more part of writing than sound design itself".

Key claims#

• The free half of it: on lsdj the kick and the bass usually share the wave channel anyway, "so you cannot have the kick and the bass playing at the same time" — that alone is already a sidechain. What is missing is the recovery, and that is written with E envelope commands.
• The duck, written out: after the kick, bring the bass back with envelope commands rather than at full volume — on the wave channel E02 is 50 %, E03 100 %, so a 02 then 03 on the following steps is an audible pump locked to the 16th note.
• Groove is the resolution knob. At the default groove 6 (16th notes) the recovery is coarse and obviously pumping. Halve it — "put the groove to three, that is to say double the speed" — and each step is a 32nd note, so the same two commands recover twice as fast: "it's almost as if you hear the bass being triggered at the same time as the kick, but this is an illusion being made possible by the fast groove". (shuffle-funktempo for what grooves are.)
• Sidechain the channels the kick never touches. On the pulse channel he uses an envelope command "that starts from zero and rises at the speed of A" once per beat: "this gives a little bit more of a four-to-the-floor groove to your track and it helps the kick stand out". The payoff he names is structural, not technical: "even if you have no kick playing you still have the feel of the song … you can really clearly hear when the kick is going to hit".
• Two intensities for two song sections. The verse kick is killed at 4; the chorus kick is a second patch, "longer, kill at six, and a slower pitch down", with more low end and a stronger transient, and the bass's rise after it is more gradual so the kick has room. "This could be a verse and this a chorus."
• On the noise channel the same envelope command turns hats into a pump — "in house tracks … hats are not actually hit, they're just pumping in" — which he recommends for breaks and risers.

Practical takeaways#

• Sidechaining in LSDj is three things: put the kick and the bass in one channel, write the recovery with E commands, and pick a groove fine enough for the recovery to be smooth.
• Groove 3 (32nds) is the difference between a pump you notice and a pump you only feel.
• Ducking a channel the kick does not share is what carries the four-to-the-floor feel through bars where no kick plays.

Notable quotes#

"This is an illusion being made possible by the fast groove."

"Even if you have no kick playing you still have the feel of the song."

Relevance to the wiki#

sidechain-pump's LSDj section was the table envelope column and nothing else; this is the same idea written from the dance-music side, with the groove trick that makes it work and a reason to duck channels the kick never occupies.

To verify#

• The pulse envelope "starts from zero and rises at the speed of A" and the kick kill points (4, 6) are spoken over a fast demonstration in an auto transcript (unverified).

Pages touched#

sidechain-pump · shuffle-funktempo · volume-slides · instrument-design · arrangement · lsdj · pain-perdu