How to Sidechain in FL Studio (Two Stock-Plugin Methods)

Sidechain compression is an absolutely essential technique, and sidechaining in FL Studio in particular has long been a source of jokes and memes due to its less intuitive nature - at least when compared to how you would do it in Ableton or Logic.

But contrary to the memes - you don't actually need a PhD to sidechain in FL.

What sidechaining actually is

Quick recap just so that everyone is on the same page.

Sidechain compression is a technique responsible for the pumping feel that defines a huge amount of modern electronic music, and is also just a useful mix tool for stopping your kick and bass from fighting each other.

In the most general sense, sidechaining is when the level of one signal is controlled by the level of another signal.

In practice, most of the time in a music production context this means ducking the bass (or pad, lead, guitar or your other instrument of choice) every time the kick hits, so the kick can punch through cleanly.

The point is twofold:

• Avoid frequency masking. Kicks and basses live in the same low-frequency real estate. When they play at the same time, they fight. Pulling the bass down by a few dB the instant the kick hits gives it more space and allows for more punch and power.
• Create movement. In four-on-the-floor genres, the pump becomes a rhythmic feature in itself - that breathing, surging feel on pads and basses is a production hallmark of house, trance, and most big-room EDM.

You can use it for plenty of other things too - de-essing, ducking music under vocals, carving space for a lead - but for this article we'll stick to the classic kick/bass example.

Method 1: Fruity Limiter (actual sidechain)

This is actual sidechain compression. The kick signal controls a compressor on the bass, so the bass gets ducked in response to the real kick audio.

Setup

• Put your kick and your bass on their own mixer tracks.
• Select the kick mixer track. Right-click the small send arrow at the bottom of the bass track and choose Sidechain to this track only.
• On the bass track, load up Fruity Limiter in an effect slot.
• In Fruity Limiter, switch from LIMIT mode to COMP mode (top left of the plugin window).
• In the SIDECHAIN box (bottom of the plugin), click and drag the number up to 1. This tells the compressor to listen to the first sidechain input it's been given - i.e. the kick.

That's the routing done. Now the parameters.

Parameters

• Threshold: start low. You want the compressor triggering on every kick hit, not just the loud ones. Pull it down until you're getting 6-12 dB of gain reduction on each kick.
• Ratio: somewhere between 4:1 and 10:1 for a clear pumping effect. Higher ratios = more obvious duck.
• Attack: fast. You want the bass to drop out the moment the kick hits. Anywhere from 1 ms to around 10 ms.
• Release: This is what you should play around with. Too fast and there's no pump - the bass snaps back up and there's no groove. Too slow and the bass never recovers before the next kick. Start somewhere around 100–200 ms and adjust by ear until the bass has time to swell back up before the next hit.

And that's it. That wasn't so bad was it?

Method 2: Gross Beat ("fake" sidechaining)

Gross Beat isn't a compressor. It's a tempo-synced volume (and time) manipulator, so strictly speaking this is volume automation with a "sidechain" preset, not real sidechain compression - but if you're writing house and have a predictable 4x4 kick pattern that you're trying to tidy up, this can often achieve the same result.

Setup

• Put Gross Beat on the bass track (or whatever you're ducking).
• Make sure you're on the Volume tab (the lower of the two envelope displays).
• Select the "Sidechain" preset.
• Done.

If you want to tweak it, the envelope is right there in front of you - drag the points around to change the depth of the duck or the shape of the recovery curve.

The catch

Gross Beat doesn't know anything about your kick. It's just a volume pattern that loops. That means:

• If your kick skips a beat, Gross Beat still ducks on that beat. You get a phantom pump with no kick behind it.
• If your kick pattern isn't a straight four-on-the-floor, you have to redraw the envelope to match.
• If you change the groove, you have to change Gross Beat.

So if you're dealing with anything besides 4x4, then you might be better off using the actual compression method.

Summary

Sidechaining isn't complicated and you don't need to buy anything. The stock FL Studio toolkit does it just fine - one proper compressor-based method, one fast envelope-based method, both sounding great when used correctly.