Hello everyone.
Can you share with me your compressor settings for a good sidechain ducking effect. I’m getting a little lost… Thank you so much !
I cant provide any set and forget settings but if I want to sidechain kick, I exclude it from the compressor settings. Ratio 3 or 4, threshold so you get enough bumping, adjust attack to desired amount and release so that the needle does not fully return to 0 gain reduction before next hit.
Maybe also think about which elements to exclude from the compressor so they dont get affected. If it sounds good to your ears, it is good 
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Thank you !
Just to add to what already has been said: I’d start with a very short attack time. If you hear clicks, make it a bit longer. You want the comp to react with the kick (or whatever you’re sidechaining to) and use the release time to tune how the ducking feels (faster release times can pump very obviously, longer release times can be more grooving.
Sometimes it can be nice to have a longer attack time, so experimentation is always good.
If the ducking effect feels right, but you want it to be stronger, set the ratio higher. 3-4 is a good starting point for pads, noise textures and stuff like that. For ducking basslines to make room for the kick, you can go usually go between 6-8.
Treshold obviously also plays a crucial role, I usually set it so that the kick’s transient drives the compressor and not so much the body (can easily start to pump too much, especially with longer kicks, because the comp is driven almost by the entire lengths of the kick) and set ducking strength with the comp ratio.
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Any tips with the make up gain?
If I don’t copy the kick pattern on a pattern that not being routed to the main out when I’m muting the there’s a big volume difference
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Historically, the Elektron compressor does not seem to be particularly suitable for sidechain compression. I think that’s the reason a lot of people just give up and use LFO ducking to give the illusion of sidechain as it’s highly controllable and essentially the same effect (sonically).
It’s certainly not as flat out simple as a proper sidechain input on a normal compressor, but pretty simple none the less. Then you can just use the compressor for improving the sound of your kick drum, or whatever.
Nice little simple walk through from the lovely and talented @mpiecora on how to set up LFO ducking, if anyone is interested in trying it.
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Well, Elektron only recently added the ability to choose which track controls the sidechaining (I think it’s only on the Digitone 2 and Digitakt 2? Maybe also on the Syntakt?) So inverted exponential lfo in one shot mode was the only option to duck individual elements in most cases. I mean you certainly can use a master compressor like on the Machinedrum, Rytm or Octatrack master track and make the kick really loud so only the kick triggers the comp. This will duck all other elements, but when you mute the kick, the comp pushes up all elements in volume, because they aren’t getting ducked anymore. So not the best solution.
Lfo ducking sounds really smooth with the filter as target on the OT btw. Amp volume can be clicky…
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Yeah, I just suggested it due to the comment above mine about muting the kick and perceiving the impact on gain levels. I know that you know the LFO will give the same results regardless of the status of the kick, but I’m hoping to convey to them that there’s a way to achieve this which is not impacted by muting or unmuting the kick between patterns. Definitely been some recent progress as far as the compressor functionality, but I tried to use the qualifier “historically” to indicate this is how people did it back in the stone ages of the first gen digi boxes 
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It’s still a mystery to me why Elektron took so long with implementing it. Even the OG dinosaur, the machinedrum already had a master compressor. On one hand, it very much fits the tracker philosophy of programming events per step to use an lfo (I guess), but it’s also static and you have your ducking basically baked in (not really, but when muting your kick, fiddling with a scene to set lfo depth to 0 requires quite the hand gymnastics and not all boxes even have scenes).
Well, I’m glad they finally added it on some boxes.
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Thank you everyone for response.
Personnaly, i don’t want to sacrifice a LFO for sidechain.
I finally found a good tutorial on the compressor with different ways of using it including ducking. It works to my ears so it’s pretty cool!
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