Sidechain Compression between Maschine (as plugin) and Logic

Hagen Kaiser

Hi everybody,

I would like to set up Logic such that a synth track has a side chain compressor fed by the kick from Machine as a plugin.

1. I setup the multiple outputs and rout the kick to a special ext. output
2. I also can create the additional outputs in the mixer for machine. I can mix the sound and do logic fx if I want. So eve thing seems to be fine
3. Then I want to set side-chain from the other track to my ext. output. But WHERE IS IT?? ITS NOT THERE!
4. So I create a Bus (yknow like for time-based fx). I can now route the External Output to this bus.
5. Cool I can see the Bus in the drop-down menu of the sidechain and I can set it up…

However, that's a really ugly workaround. I mean have a Bus and an external output just to setup a simple sidechain comp. What if I want to setup several side chains?? This will get probably pretty complicated.

So did I miss something? Can it be done in a cleaner way?

Is this a problem in logic or a problem that NI needs to fix?

djadidai

what I do to make my life much easier is to:

1. Create an empty audio track and also mute it. Leave it muted.

2. export a wav-loop of my kick from Maschine and paste it in the newly created audio track and loop the kick to the track’s length.

3. Create a bus channel with a compressor. In the compressor select the muted kick as sidechain source up in the right corner of the compressor plugin. The compressor will detect the muted channel signal. Adjust attack/release/ratio.

4. Send all tracks you wish to sidechain to that bus, higher volume = heavier sidechain. 1 bus channel for all your sidechaining, since you can adjust with the little volume wheel on every individual channel.

djadidai

what I do to make my life much easier is to:

1. Create an empty audio track and also mute it. Leave it muted.

2. export a wav-loop of my kick from Maschine and paste it in the newly created audio track and loop the kick to the track’s length.

3. Create a bus channel with a compressor. In the compressor select the muted kick as sidechain source up in the right corner of the compressor plugin. The compressor will detect the muted channel signal. Adjust attack/release/ratio.

4. Send all tracks you wish to sidechain to that bus, higher volume = heavier sidechain. 1 bus channel for all your sidechaining, since you can adjust with the little volume wheel on every individual channel.

Hagen Kaiser

Oh wow thanks for this idea. Never have thought about using side chain comp in a bus. And I learned from your post that you can route tracks completely to busses, which I also had overlooked so far.
Seems like a nice workaround.

I just also checked with Kontakt. Generally, it seems to be a logic problem. You only can use the "main" output of any multi-output VST directly for side-chaining.

djadidai

yeah, so if you have one channel with Maschine loaded as AU, and you send that channel to the sidechain-bus all of the sounds playing within maschine will be sidechained. I always export wavloops of every individual pad from maschine to have on separate audio tracks in logic. When doing this remember to turn off maschine. Otherwise maschine will play at the same time so either select an empty scene inside maschine, mute the channel maschine is loaded in, or turn off the au.