Up to Ableton Live version 6, the software didn’t include a compressor device with side chain input. Ableton Live 7 onwards introduced the new side chain enabled native compressor. The resulting effect is also called "ducking" and in this two-part tutorial we are going to explore it’s uses and demonstrate how his method can assist and enhance your mixing experience.

We are also going to look on how to apply side chain compression to multiple signals and also how to modify the spectral characteristics of the compressed signal so that only a certain frequency range can be affected. Finally we are going to spectrally modify a "busy" input signal so that only a certain frequency range will have an effect on our compressed signal. The Ableton Live version being used is 8.0.9.

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In Part 1 of this tutorial which can be found here, we examined a couple of uses of side chain compression and demonstrated how this method can assist and enhance your mixing experience. Specifically, we looked at how we can sidechain a single signal and also used an effect rack on a return channel and a neat Utility plugin trick to apply compression to multiple signals.

In Part 2, we are going to examine two ways of ducking only a selected frequency range and also how to compress a “busy” signal. The Ableton Live version being used is 8.0.9.

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