Once the Guitars track's compressor plug‑in's side‑chain is activated, you can access it from the Sends pane on the Vocals track's Inspector (top screen, right). Fortunately, you can set up this kind of level‑riding so that it happens automatically, a process often called 'ducking', and in this column I'm going to demonstrate a couple of different ways you can do this in Cubase. Not too tricky a concept to grasp in principle, but it'd be a pain in the arse to put into practice if you had to keep dipping the guitar faders for every vocal phrase, even if you fired up Cubase's automation facilities. One of the issues here is likely to be that the guitars need to be louder when the vocalist isn't singing (to remind everyone how much of a rock god your guitarist is), but then they need to be a little quieter when the vocals are delivering those all‑important melodic and lyrical hooks.

You've tried what you can to separate these conflicting parts with EQ, panning, and effects, but no matter what you do you can't shake the nagging urge to keep shunting one or the other fader upwards. You have electric guitars in your mix, which you want to be big, bright, and powerful, but you also want your vocals to cut through them and be audible. Let's take an example of an all‑too‑common mixing difficulty to illustrate what I mean.

However, there is a way you can, to an extent, have your cake and eat it too. The only way, in fact, that you can make the most important elements of your mix stand out is to turn down something less important to make space. more everything! Clearly, though, there's only so much space and headroom available in any given mix, so it's not really possible to just keep turning things up. In mixing these days it seems that more is always more: more vocals, more guitars, more drums, more bass. The mouse is currently hovering over the Activate Side‑chain button, which needs to be lit if signals from other audio channels are going to trigger the compressor's gain reduction. Here you can see Cubase's compressor set up to achieve the ducking effect in our demo project: note the very low Threshold and Ratio settings, and that the Make‑up control's Auto button is switched off. Learn how to avoid frequency clashes in your mix, with our tutorial on advanced ducking techniques in Cubase.

Cubase 4 sidechain