You may be wondering how to implement side-chaining in your audio plugin host.
Quick answer: if you’re using Gig Performer, it’s pretty trivial.
Note: At the time of writing this article, we used Gig Performer 3. However, the same concept applies to more recent versions of Gig Performer.
What is side-chaining
I never used this technique myself. In fact I wasn’t even sure what it was for a long time. But I got forced into finding out a few days ago when a potential customer asked if it was possible to do side chaining in Gig Performer. So I read up on it quickly and it’s a way to control the effect on one stream of audio using a different stream of audio. A very popular use for this technique in EDM is to “pump” the audio level from a bass drum.
Turns out that setting up side-chaining in a traditional channel-strip based model is difficult.
First. you have to create extra aux channel strips and send the control audio over to it. Next, make sure it doesn’t get mixed into the output. Finally, you have to configure your plugins to tell it the bus number for the side chain input.
Side-chaining in Gig Performer
This is how side-chaining looks like in Gig Performer:
YouTube video
Watch this 3-minute video for an example. In this video, we use Native Instruments Battery and Gig Performer’s Audio File Player.
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Related topics:
– Gig Performer as an ultimate enhancer (blog article)
– Gig Performer’s way vs channel strip way (blog article)
– Why a graphic interface is superior to the channel strip model (blog article)