Sidechaining In AtomCraft

This post explains how to perform sidechaining in the AtomCraft’s audio mixer.

 

Introduction

Sidechaining is a technique commonly used by sound engineers, mostly with compressors. The principle is very simple: the compression of a signal (A) is controlled by a second signal (B). For instance, we could easily create a ducking system which lowers the volume of a music track when a voice over is playing.

 

Sidechaining in the DSP Bus Mixer

Sidechaining in AtomCraft is a very good approach for ducking. It is an easy way to automatically lower the volume of the sounds based on their assignation to different DSP Buses in your project.

In our example we will lower the volume of all the music Cues each time a VO assigned to the VO Bus is playing.

                 

Step 1:

The first thing to do is to insert an Amplitude Analyzer on the Triggering Bus.

The Amplitude Analyzer will be used as the sidechain input of the compressor.  The input signal of the amplitude analyzer is either the input of the bus send, if it is at the top of the effect chain, or the output of the effect placed immediately before it in the effect chain. For instance, we could use a band pass filter before the amplitude analyzer to make the compressor react to the loudness in a certain frequency range.

 

 

Step 2:

Simply insert the Compressor on the Ducking Track, select the right Bus in the Sidechain Input section of the Compressor and adjust the Compressor parameters. In the example below, the Compressor will “listen” to the VO Bus and reduce the music Bus volume each time a VO will be playing.

 

Demo project

We have created a small AtomCraft project that you can download below:

 

[Note: this project requires AtomCraft 2.30 or higher]

In this project, you will see 2 Cues: Music and VO. The VO Cue will trigger the compression of the Music Cue.

You can find the sidechain system we have created in the DSP Mixer window.

This concludes our post about the sidechaining in AtomCraft. As always, let us know if you want to learn more about a specific ADX2 feature!