To accomplish this, we will pan each of the tracks in opposite Left and Right channels. Seeing as we are emulating the Side Chaining process, we somehow need to differentiate between which of the tracks is the carrier and which is the receiver. Select the “ Pad” track and route it to “ Bus A” by clicking on the blue square button as illustrated in the screenshot. Now that we have assigned the Side Chain Compressor effect to Bus A, we will draw our attention to the two tracks we added to our project earlier. We will adjust the other settings a little later. The Attack is set to 0.1 and the Release set to roughly 200 milliseconds. In the above screenshot, you’ll see I adjusted a few of the plug-in’s settings. Do this by clicking the “ Bus FX” button on Bus A and selecting the Sidechain Comp Mono VST in your 3rd party plug-ins list. Now that we’ve created a new bus for our project we need to assign the SSS Slide Chain Compressor to it.
The new bus appears next to the master bus and is labelled “ Bus A” Click the “ insert bus” button in the mixer window. Now we need to create a bus in the Acid Pro Mixer window. I’ll discuss the purpose of the 3rd track (a drumloop) later in the tutorial Add two tracks to your project Ī pad or lead instrument (this track will later be the receiver)Īnd a short kick or short percussive sound (this track will become the carrier or modulator)
I used the SSS Side Chain Compressor which you can download here for free: Īfter you have downloaded and extracted the SSS compressor to your VST(i) folder, run Acid Pro and start a new project.
So, what do we do when we encounter such a problem? We improvise and emulate! In this tutorial, I will show you how to create the Ducking effect in Acid Pro by emulating the Sidechain process.įirstly, you will need a Sidechain compressor VST. As an Acid Pro user, I found it a difficult task finding tutorials and methods to achieve this effect, with many producers claiming that it is simply impossible due to Acid Pro’s lack of built in Sidechaining facilities.
(Cool Edit Pro and Acid are using the same playback device, so I don't think it's a soundcard driver issue).Ducking or Breathing is a very prominent sound in almost every form of electronic dance music today. It's frustrating because to hear a mix I'm having to guess at the mix of the channels in Acid, then render to a wave, then normalize and compress in Cool Edit Pro, then listen to the wave, then repeat the whole process if a track in the mix is too loud or soft. It's like the meters on the main channel in Acid are incorrect. (I'm not using overly extreme compression either). This gives me a huge volume increase with no clipping. I am normalizing and then compressing in Cool Edit Pro. wav) and open them in Cool Edit Pro, I see the wave file is nowhere near being too loud.
I've tried both the track compressor and the 'Graphic Dynamics' effects. However, I find it very difficult to get any volume increase with this. I've tried adding a compressor on the Master channel to boost the signal a bit. If I push it past 0 dB there is some clipping, but not very much. I'm watching the Master meter, and making sure it doesn't go past 0 dB. However, I'm having a problem getting reasonable volume out of it. I just got Acid 3.0 and so far I'm happy with it.