Sidechain Compression in Ableton

Sidechain compression is one of my absolute go to top tips I recommend to all beginner producers. It is a staple of electronic music production. I can almost guarantee that if you’ve listened to any electronic music you would have heard sidechain compression in action countless times.

A classic example of early sidechain in ‘edm pop’ would have to be on Daft Punk’s “One More Time” in the classic pumping of the brass sample and vocals.

You’ll want to start by dragging in Ableton’s standard Compressor (from the audio effects sidebar) onto the channel you’ll want to sidechain. For this example we’ll want our bass to be compressed whenever our kick drum plays. So we will load this Compressor effect onto our bass track.

Then click the down arrow in the top left of the compressor to open the sidechain module.

Once the Sidechan module is open, next click the Sidechain button below the down arrow. This should turn the button yellow.

Next we’ll want to select our Sidechain trigger. By default the “audio from” source should be set to have “no input.” By clicking “no input” we can open the menu to select our Sidechain trigger. Like I said above, we’re setting up this sidechain so our bass will duck in time with our kick. So we’ll be selecting from our “audio from” menu our Kick Drum track.

(If your kick drum is inside a Drum Rack, you can set your first “audio from” to the Drum Rack and the 2nd to the Kick drum pad channel)

Now that we have the Kick Drum volume feeding into our Compressor. It’s time to dial in the settings, this can be done with the ratio, attack, release and threshold. (see my go to settings in the image)

Ratio – How much Compression (how squished)
Threshold – How much “trigger” you want to come through
Attack – How fast/slow you want the sidechain to activate
Release – How fast/slow you want the compressor to let go