Sometimes you want sounds to blend and run together, but often you want separate things to sound separate. The term for that is “masking”-sounds covering each other up. As I discussed in an earlier article, if two instruments occupy the same space at the same time, you won’t be able to hear them both. What do you do? Why isn’t your kick cutting through if it sounds great on its own? You don’t have any more headroom to turn up the kick-if you do, you’ll either have to limit your mix so much that it sounds awful, or you’ll have to deal with the rest of your mix being really quiet. Let’s say your kick drum sounds great on its own, but it isn’t cutting through the mix quite enough. But what is sidechain compression, how does it work, and how can you use it in your mixes? It Goes Back To Arrangement You may have heard about sidechain compression as a tool used to get your kick drums pumping through the mix, especially in EDM. How To Use Sidechain Compression To Make Kicks Cut Through The Mix
