Sidechain Ducking Techniques for Mixing Loudness

Ducking everything against the loudest framework sounds is crucial for achieving a balanced mix.

### Mastering Ducking Techniques in Music Mixing
* 🎶 In episode 14 of Mixing Loud with Clip to Zero, Bathmetrics introduces the concept of **ducking**, emphasizing its importance in **achieving a well-balanced mix**.
* 📝 The key takeaway is to **duck all sounds in the mix against the loudest framework sounds**, typically the kick, snare, and sub, to prevent audio clutter during significant hits.
* 🔊 Bathmetrics illustrates this with a visual representation of sound amplitudes, highlighting how the **kick and snare reach full scale**, forming the **core of the mix's energy**.
* 🚫 He warns against piling sounds on top of these loud hits, explaining that **proper ducking ensures clarity and preserves the integrity of the kick and snare**.
* 🎚 The duration of the ducking slice varies by genre, with **longer slices preferred in electronic dance music** to maintain the punch of the kick and snare while **shorter slices may suffice in more dynamic mixes**.
* 🎛 Producers are advised to strategically **duck at bus points** rather than individual tracks, as this **conserves resources and maintains the mix's cohesiveness**.
* 🎤 Bathmetrics also discusses vocal ducking, emphasizing the need for **shorter ducking slices** to avoid choppy syllables while ensuring **vocals remain prominent in the mix**.
* 📊 Lastly, he introduces **spectral ducking** as an advanced technique, using plugins like Smart Comp to **dynamically create space for vocals** by adjusting the mid-range frequencies in real-time.

hey everyone, this is Bathmetrics. Welcome to episode 14 of Mixing Loud with Clip to Zero. [Music] In this video, I'll be explaining and demonstrating some ideas about ducking one sound to another sound and some considerations for doing this kind of sidechain ducking in the context of the Clip to Zero method. As a quick reminder for people that are encountering this video for the first time, this is part of an entire series called Mixing Loud with Clip to Zero. It's a separate playlist on my channel, and I'm gonna assume that you're familiar with some of the other concepts and techniques I've already explained. So, we're gonna start by focusing on the subject of ducking because that's the first thing you have to take care of. I'm going to bring over a little notepad for you to look at. You can pause the video and check out these lines. I'm going to be covering these aspects of ducking. They're all pretty important in their stuff. I don't see a

lot of other YouTube videos really talk about much. The first thing to understand is you want to duck literally everything in your mix against your loudest framework sounds. And we're going to use the track I've been using for a while now in this series. I introduced around episode seven or eight. We're going to look at Sciscope Pro and just remind you what these loudest framework sounds are. I'm going to turn on every single main sound in this mix and just play it for you briefly and show you what this looks like. [Music] Okay, so orange is the kick, light blue is the snare layered on top of the kick. You can see it behind it. The green sounds are my drum tops. The purple line is my sub. The blue line is all my mid-range instruments, which in this case is pretty much just one little rolling bass. And this is how this is representing their amplitude. These white lines at the top and very bottom represent 0 dB full scale. So, as you can see, the kick and the snare

both come right up to full scale. They are literally the loudest framework sounds in the mix. The third sound that's part of the framework is a sub because it's that relationship of kick, snare, and sub that really forms the framework that most of us in electronic dance music genres mix into. As I talked about in the previous episode, um, nine, about setting your mix anchor and framework. If you're working in other genres, you may use different framework sounds, but for the purpose of this video, just consider kick, snare, and sub as my framework sounds. The kick and the snare, in particular, in dance music, are almost always stretched within an inch of their life, clipped as far as they can stand to be clipped, very loud, very up front, and they are the strongest rhythmic pulses in the entire mix. Everything is blended up into and balanced up into the maximum potential loudness that's provided by the perceived loudness of your kick and snare themselves, right? So, the problem is we don't want anything at all.

getting piled on top of these big huge kick and snare hits or some downstream clipper or limiter is going to have to crush and clip those transients even more, and it will eventually ruin the sound of the kick and the snare. We've already sound-designed these to within an inch of their lives; they can't stand anything else being piled on top of them, not a thing. So, that's why you see this very clear ducking happening, like nothing happens on top of the kick, nothing happens on top of the kick, right? All these other sounds don't start, you know, cross-fading back in until after a big ducking slice through this whole region, and then they slowly, you can see the sub is slowly starting to come back here, and then finally, you know, ramps up the blue mid-range sound, you know. If I really dive in here, you can see it's starting to wiggle in right around this point of the kick, you know, and then the high, the green drum high tops, they just stay completely

out of the way of the kick, right? They're all being ducked, and the same is true of the region where the kick and the snare hit together. Again, the sub doesn't start coming back until this part of the kick and snare tail and so on. So, this kind of side chain ducking is very important. You want everything being removed from where your big, loud maximum energy hits are happening on the kick and snare. And as I talked about in the previous episode, episode 13, where I talked about structured busing, I also made a big point about that. It also includes all your FX returns or aux returns, which producers commonly don't think about if they're new. It's usually sitting over in a different part of your project, way over here at the very end. There's a whole bunch of return tracks over here by your master, and they're a whole entirely set of parallel tracks by default in most DAWs. And they don't get added into or summed together with all of your normal tracks and buses until the very end of the

project right on the master track. It's like two completely different parallel sets of sounds, and they don't get summed until the very end by default. In the previous video, I talked about some alternative strategies for handling those, but one way or another, you also need to remember to duck all those aux returns against your kick and snare. And then another thing producers tend to not think about too much is ducking their top sounds against their kicks and snares. So, you know, in previous videos where I talked about my project template, I divide up my kick, snares, and tops into their own little sub-busses inside of these drums group. And you'll notice I have a kick ducker and a snare ducker sitting right here on my tops sub-bus. So, what that means is even my green top sounds, my symbols, my weird glitchy spicy percussive sounds, they're all getting ducked out completely out of the way every time the kick and snare hits too. Because you don't want any of these

adding on top of the kick and snare, so the main thing I want you to take away from this whole section about ducking is you gotta duck everything against your loudest framework sounds that are typically having to eat up full scale. Okay, now how long that ducking slice is, how long the duration is, is gonna differ from song to song, and it's going to differ depending on how loud a target you're trying to shoot for with your final mix. In super loud genres like electronic dance music, you're probably going to need a much longer ducking slice, a longer duration of the duck, to keep things out of the way of the kick and the snare. If I were working at a much more dynamic volume like negative 10 fluffs, and I wanted to emphasize a little more of a natural transient punch and snap to my kick and snare, and they were a little more relaxed sounding, I might be able to get away with a much shorter ducking slice that only avoids the very transient parts of the kick and

the snare, like you know, every kick has this transient section followed by kind of a pitch drop into a final subby tail. And if my mix is quieter and more dynamic, I might be able to start letting sounds come back about here, right? And I'm really only trying to avoid the transient snappy part of the kick, so it all just depends on the genre how long your ducking slice needs to be, but it needs to be there to some degree. So the next thing to talk about with regard to ducking is you don't want to duck individual tracks. You want to conserve your ducking, and you want to do it strategically at certain bus points, okay? So again, with my drum tops in this mix, I have symbols, and I also have these spicy glitchy sounds that sound like this, right? And both of those sounds, the symbols and those sounds, are being bussed together into a single tops bus, and I don't duck these individual sounds. I duck the combined result at the bus where they come together, right?

and the same is true for my subs. It's common in some EDM style songs to have different subs for different sections of the song. And again, you wouldn't want to duck each sub track individually if they're going to come together on a single bus, and they're all going to be sort of interleaved and happening at different times. It's easier to just duck the entire sub bus. So here's where my kick and snare duckers are for the subs, and then all my mid-range sounds, which in this case is really just one sound in my drop bus. But I don't duck the specific roller bass; I don't even duck its parent drop sub bus, right? I duck all the way up at the midline here. This is where I put my kick and snare duckers because all my mid-range sounds, whether it's a piano chord or some kind of backing chord, whether it's going to be some aggressive lead synth or pluck or arpeggio or rolling bass or aggressive drop sound of some sort, growls and joys and stabs.

All those kinds of sounds, they all live in the mid-range, and I'm going to want to just duck all of them pretty much the same way, with the same shape and the same slice, at a single bus where all those sounds come together. And then vocals, right? Vocals are a different story too. You can't duck your vocals too intensely, or the vocals will start sounding choppy on the front end of syllables that happen right around your kick and snare. You can't over-duck those; they have to be super short ducking slices, usually just avoiding the very transient part of your kick and snare. Like, a vocal duck might literally only be about this long and no longer, otherwise the vocals will sound unnatural. And so they have their own set of kick and snare duckers on my vocal bus and so on. So you just need to think strategically about where to put your duckers, put them as high up as possible, usually on a bus, and uh, that's probably all I need to say about that. Now the next thing

Every ducker at every different type of bus is going to need a different length and crossfade shape. Now here's what I mean by that. Let's look at the subs first because that's the most common thing everyone tends to duck. Here's my kick ducking the sub, and here's my snare shape ducking the sub. And they're pretty similar. I'm going to stack them right on top of each other. They look similar in their shape, kind of, but there's some big differences here. First of all, on my kick here on the top, this entire grid, this four segments of the grid, is an eighth note. Now meanwhile down on my snare, the same four segments represent only a sixteenth note. Okay, so what that means is this slice is about half as long as this slice, even though they look like they're roughly the same length. Because this is a 16th note, it's half as long. So really, the ducking slice on my snare for my sub is much shorter than the ducking slice on my kick.

now, in this particular song, it doesn't really matter. I still set them separately by ear and by taste, but in the long run, the kick is overriding the snare duck, and it's a longer duck, so it's as if the snare deck wasn't really happening at all in this song. But I reflexively set them anyway just in case I decide later in a project to occasionally omit the kick and snare hit that's happening at the same time. This is kind of a mid-tempo-based song. It's very common to have a four-on-the-floor kick with a snare layered on the two and the four for the backbeat, but there might be a section of the song where the snare happens by itself, right? And for that reason, I still want some kind of ducking slice on the snare just in case the sub is also happening, but for some reason, I decided to take the kick out for interest or variation or whatever. So, you typically want to set up a

separate ducker for each. They're going to have a different length to work nicely with the sound, and you'll notice the shape of the curve is a little bit different too. And I'm not going to go into, I'm not going to teach you how to do ducking. You're going to have to, you know, figure out the details of ducking for yourself. You typically want something that sounds smooth and seamless. If I'm ducking the sub to my kick, I need them to crossfade in. Let's turn off some extra things here so you can see these two signals clearly. I want them to crossfade in in a way that is very seamless sounding in terms of the total energy in my sub range, in my low end. And you do that with the actual shape of the slice, the curvature of the crossfade as it ducks back in, how long it is, whether or not they're in phase, which I've done a whole earlier video on a year or two ago. It's somewhere in my production tutorials playlist, right?

need to think about these things and set them by ear, and that's just beyond the scope of this video. The point is, every different sound on every different bus will have a different ducking shape and slice. Let's show you a couple of other ones. So here's my midline bus where I'm also doing some ducking. Let's open up the kick ducker and put it here. Let's open up the snare ducker as well, and we'll just put it down here. All right, so this is a different type of sound. These are my subs on the left, and these are my mid-range bass sounds on the right. So in this case, that rolling bass, and again, you'll notice it's a different length. This mid-range sound is getting ducked in a shorter length by the kick because it's a 16th note grid across the length rather than an eighth note grid. But then again, the shape is very custom and specific to that particular total set of sounds on the mid-range bus. And then for the snare

It looks kind of the same, but you'll notice it's a little bit longer, and the curvature comes up a little faster than this one did. Well, a little slower. It's a little more of a gradual curve up, so you have to set these lengths and curves by ear, and you do it so it's smooth, and you don't hear audible gapping or pumping of the sound you ducked coming back in, unless you want to, unless that audible pumping is part of the bounce of your song, which is a very valid way to do ducking, right? But in this case, I wanted all my ducking to be very seamless, so you don't hear any of it, right? You don't notice any of these sounds pumping or gapping after the kick and snare. [Music] Okay, those are the things that will really help you get the most loudness as cleanly as possible for standard-shaped duckers like that. Um, I do want to talk about vocal ducking, though, and to do that, I probably have to

open up a different project because I don't have any vocals in that sample. So, we're going to go over to this project I did for the down moral videos. Features a very strong vocal line. So, in this particular song, I had subs, I had a midline kind of chordal instrument in the background, and I have some other lead sounds that happen in different sections. And then I had vocals. [Music] Okay, your vocals need to sit out on top of the mix and in front of the mix. They need to be clear, they need to be audible, and you do that partly with how much you EQ them and saturate them, make loud and bright and dense. Okay, but you also have to duck all the kind of sounds that tend to compete with vocals and mask vocals and conflict with the vocals and fight for space in the spectrum, right? So, vocals are a very mid-range instrument. They're very focused down in the low mid-range for the fundamental tones or notes that you hear of the melody, and then they have all these higher timbres.

that go up into the upper mid-range, and that's going to totally fight with all your chord instruments, your melodic instruments, anything that's backing those vocals and happening at the same time as those vocals, like this nice little electric road sound. So, you typically don't want to try to push the drums out of the way with your vocals, right? Drums or drums, they're also something that has to sit out loud and proud in front of the mix. And in fact, I typically duck the vocals to the kick and the snare in super short slices, like here's 16th note, a very gentle slice coming back in quickly to let the vocal come back in. And you don't hear any pumping or chopping off at the beginning of syllables when the kick and snare hit, right? [Music] Right. So, you just do that by ear, but what's important is to have the vocals also duck the midline, the mid-range instruments out of the way. So, for that, I use a special kind of ducker called a spectral ducker. Now

there's a couple of them out there. My favorite one these days is smart comp by saunable. There's another one I'll show you real quick. We'll just pop it up on this track [Music]. The one I used to use before smart comp came out was called track spacer by waves factory, and it's a similar idea, but we won't - I'm not going to show you that. I'm just going to show you what it looks like. So, this is a compressor, but it has a special mode called spectral ducting. Okay, and so if you turn on spectral ducting mode and you feed the side chain into this, if we actually look at the midline track and we look at this ducker here, the vox ducker, you can see it's got a side chain input that's coming from my vocals bus. My entire vocals bus is feeding the side chain input on this, and the side chain is turned on, and here you can listen to the side chain if you wanted to, but what it looks like when it's

actually doing its spectral ducting. It's ignoring this compressor section. It's doing a whole different thing down here, and this is what it looks like. [Music] See all these little blotches? So, this is the frequency spectrum from all the way down in the sub-region, all the way up to 20k up here, and it's just, it's just wherever the vocal resonance and energy is at any given moment. It's slightly pushing down that same spectrum region of the midline, so it's like this dynamic EQ that just works across the entire spectrum all at once and just very dynamically pushes down little sections to punch a little room for what's happening on the sidechain input, which in this case is the entire vocal bus. And this just works great. I can't recommend it enough. If you do vocals, you really need to check out this kind of plug-in and see what it can do for helping the vocal sit on top of the mix. If I were to bypass this, let's see if

you can hear the difference, okay. [Music] Really listen to what's happening with that electric piano, that Rhodes piano in the background, how it changes when I bypass this on and off. It becomes much less of a thing that tries to fight with the vocals for space. [Music] So, it's very subtle, but it's there. Trust me, it helps. It helps a lot with the clarity of your vocals. So, that's all I'm going to say about this project. Let's go back to our main project, okay. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next episode. [Music] You

Mixing Loud with CTZ - Ep. 14 - Considerations for sidechain ducking

Baphometrix

Ducking is crucial in mixing, where all sounds should be ducked against the loudest framework sounds, typically the kick, snare, and sub.

The kick and snare provide the strongest rhythmic pulses and maximum loudness, making it essential to avoid piling other sounds on top of them.

The video demonstrates the importance of clear ducking, with other sounds gradually cross-fading in after the kick and snare hits.

The Importance of Side Chain Ducking in Music Production

Side chain ducking is crucial for removing sounds from the kick and snare's maximum energy hits.

It's important to also duck aux returns and top sounds against the kick and snare.

The duration of the ducking slice should vary based on the song's genre and desired mix volume, with a strategic approach to ducking at bus points rather than individual tracks.

In EDM songs, different sub tracks are often used for various sections, making it easier to duck the entire sub bus rather than each track individually.

Mid-range sounds are also ducked at a single bus to achieve a cohesive effect, while vocals require shorter ducking slices to avoid sounding choppy.

Each ducker on different buses needs a unique length and crossfade shape, with kick and snare ducking the sub tracks having different slice lengths despite their similar shapes.

Ducking is used to manage the interaction between the kick and snare in a song, with separate duckers set for each to accommodate variations.

The length and shape of the ducking slices are tailored to the specific sounds, aiming for a smooth and seamless transition.

Different sounds on each bus require unique ducking shapes and lengths, with the mid-range bass sounds being ducked in a shorter length by the kick.

Seamless Ducking Techniques in Music Production

Ducking is used to create a smooth transition in sound, with a gradual curve to avoid audible gapping or pumping.

Vocals need to stand out in the mix, requiring ducking of competing sounds to maintain clarity.

A spectral ducker is used to effectively duck mid-range instruments, allowing the vocals to sit prominently in the mix.

Smart Comp by Saunable is a favorite tool for spectral ducking, using a unique mode to dynamically push down frequency sections in the midline track.

The plugin operates by taking a sidechain input from the vocals bus, creating a dynamic EQ effect across the entire frequency spectrum.

This subtle adjustment helps the vocals sit on top of the mix, improving clarity and reducing competition with other instruments.