Sidechaining in MOVEMENT is a cheat code for your creative process. It’s a common sound design technique we borrowed to add more, well, movement to MOVEMENT’s rhythm modules. Let’s use a 4/4 kick drum as a sidechain trigger for MOVEMENT in Logic Pro.
Sidechaining is quite simple. It’s when you use the output of one channel to activate compression in another. It’s used a lot to make space when there are multiple sounds in frequency conflict with each other. In many styles of electronic music, producers sidechain the bass to the kick drum. This way, the bass volume ducks when a kick drum plays and makes it feel louder and more present.
To start, you first want to select the kick drum track as the sidechain source in MOVEMENT’s dropdown menu. Once that’s done, you can set any rhythm to sidechain and start modulating by dragging a rhythm number to a knob.
If your sidechain source is another VST, use a bus to route the sidechain signal to MOVEMENT. Select the bus number on the VST channel. When you do this, be sure to attenuate the level on the bus aux return to prevent doubling. Then, select the bus number on MOVEMENT’s dropdown menu.
The sidechain can then be routed to the volume and pan knobs. The knobs can also be automated to play around with the sidechain intensity and stereo field. Noodle with the filter parameters to see how wild sounds can get.
For an extra kick (pun definitely intended), play with the modulators and see how they can drastically change the sound. The modulation engines easily switch between step, LFO, and sidechain, leading to endless varieties of pulsing, pumping rhythms.
To hear more of what MOVEMENT can do, watch The Glitch Mob use it when working on tracks in the studio.
