Just sharing a cool lil technique I learnt.
Let's say you want to create a busy delayed pluck sound in a song and you wanted to clean it up. First you would create the pluck sound, then you would create a delay send bus. Put the delay on the bus and then a compressor after the delay and sidechain it to the original pluck track. This will duck the delayed signal when the original is playing so that the delayed signal doesn't get in the way of the transients of the pluck. Then you can add another compressor after this on the send and sidechain it to the kick with just a few dB of compression. Then pan the delay send to the side of the mix.
Then you can also put another compressor on the original pluck track and sidechain this to the kick as well. Both the pluck and your delayed signal will be cleaner now and give you more headroom in your mix.
You can listen in the below example. First 4 bars are with sidechain compression, last 4 bars are without sidechain compression. Turn it up enough for you to hear the tail of the plucks clearly.
https://instaud.io/1SJd
It is subtle, but these small things all add up to make a clean, professional sounding mix! Notice how the sidechain compressed version sits in the background a bit more and the original transients of the pluck are clearer. The kick also sounds louder. It also has a bit more rhythm and breathes with the kick. Note that this is not something you can do only with LFO tool, as you need to actually sidechain the delay to the original pluck sound with a compressor. You can however use LFO tool instead of the other two compressors to save CPU.
Submitted March 09, 2018 at 04:15PM by HypergaMouse https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/839ae5/clean_up_your_delays_with_double_sidechain/?utm_source=ifttt