04-06-2015, 08:08 AM
To hopefully shed a little more light on the subject...
What he's talking about is inserting a ducking compressor on the bass triggered by the kick drum. Nothing special about the device. It's still just a regular ole compressor but one that has an external input to the sidechain. The name is just a short-hand way of describing the setup he outlined. Many plugins allow this sort of operation, although there's no standard way of sending the signal so they are all DAW specific and you are probably best off using the native plugins that came with the DAW. Pro-tools calls this the "key input" and uses a little key icon for the button. It's more complicated with something like SONAR (which is what I use.) With this in place, when the kick drum goes, it dips the bass guitar down just a bit (it only takes two or three dB or usually so don't be overly aggressive) and then lets go when the kick dies off. It helps the bass guitar politely step out of the way for each hit. Do it right and no one will be able to tell it's there at all! Not needed if the bass player is experienced enough to lead the kick drum by a hair so that their attacks don't step on each other but can't expect that out of every player so this is a way to help patch that up.
What he's talking about is inserting a ducking compressor on the bass triggered by the kick drum. Nothing special about the device. It's still just a regular ole compressor but one that has an external input to the sidechain. The name is just a short-hand way of describing the setup he outlined. Many plugins allow this sort of operation, although there's no standard way of sending the signal so they are all DAW specific and you are probably best off using the native plugins that came with the DAW. Pro-tools calls this the "key input" and uses a little key icon for the button. It's more complicated with something like SONAR (which is what I use.) With this in place, when the kick drum goes, it dips the bass guitar down just a bit (it only takes two or three dB or usually so don't be overly aggressive) and then lets go when the kick dies off. It helps the bass guitar politely step out of the way for each hit. Do it right and no one will be able to tell it's there at all! Not needed if the bass player is experienced enough to lead the kick drum by a hair so that their attacks don't step on each other but can't expect that out of every player so this is a way to help patch that up.
Old West Audio