Sidechaining and Keyed Ducking for Groove and Space

Dense electronic mixes — a four-on-the-floor kick, a sustained sub bass, wide pads, a vocal riding on top — live or die by momentary space. Static EQ can’t fix a collision that only exists for 80 milliseconds around each kick hit; sidechaining can. This module builds toward one whole task: a groove that visibly breathes, where the bass gets out of the kick’s way, the pads pump against a beat the listener never hears, and the mids part like a curtain whenever the vocal enters. That is the everyday craft of club, house, and pop production, whether your rig is a DAW mixer or a live-coding setup routing buses in code.

Start supported: with the core idea that a compressor’s detector can listen to a different signal than it processes, wire the classic kick-to-bass duck, leaning on “sidechaining the bass to the kick” for concrete depth, attack, and tempo-tuned release values. Then generalize the routing pattern — same logic, new source and target — to pads keyed from a muted kick for pure pumping, and to mid instruments ducked under the vocal. The attack/release atom is your envelope-shaping drill throughout: it decides whether a duck reads as clarity or as groove. The final, unsupported stretch is choosing the tool — ducker versus keyed compressor — and rebuilding one duck with the polarity-inverted parallel gate trick, which proves you understand the routing rather than a plugin preset.

Every required atom is load-bearing for that capstone; without any one of them, a move fails or is mischosen. The supporting atoms widen the frame: frequency-selective detectors, tempo-triggered gating and pumping alternatives, expansion basics, kick/bass EQ relationships, and the reminder that manual rides still beat keyed processing for note-level masking.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

saturation-drive

d1 $ sound "bd*2" # shape 0.4

_{tidal-0033 · CC0}

{ (SinOsc.ar(110) * 5).tanh * 0.2 }.play

_{supercollider-0009 · CC0}

sidechain-pump

note("c2").s("sawtooth").duckorbit(1).duck("bd*4")

_{strudel-0017 · CC0}

~duck: imp 4 >> envperc 0.001 0.15 >> mul -1.0 >> add 1.0
out: saw 110 >> lpf 600 1.0 >> mul ~duck >> mul 0.3

_{glicol-0029 · MIT}