sidechaining question

[Lunahorum]

To get movement from the pads and such, the common approach is to sidechain their compression to the kick drum or a ghost channel going 1 2 3 4 over and over to the beat.

However, I recently opened a tutorial file on how to side chain, and the threshold on the compressor was set to move with the kick amplitude. I always thought I was supposed to chain the post-gain knob to the bass. Or does it even make a difference??

Thanks

[Zephyr]

Well, if the threshold goes down, the amount of signal being affected is increased, so if you have a large ratio, then the volume will reduce with the threshold, similar to how it is with the gain method. Using the threshold way could end up almost exactly the same, but you'd have more options if you wanted to do something different. You could get different effects by changing ratio, knee, and the compression envelope. For basic sidechaining, you might as well just use the gain version though, it's simpler.