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RingMod Sidechain in Bitwig - RMSC

Tutorial | Oct 28, 2024

In this video, I explain the concept of ring mod sidechain modulation and demonstrate how to achieve it in Bitwig Studio. I discuss the potential for distortion using this method and suggest using Bitwig's audio sidechain modulator as a cleaner alternative. Additionally, I provide a more advanced setup in Bitwig's FX Grid for precise control, with both presets available in the video description.

You can watch the Video on Youtube

Summary

Maybe you don't watch the video, here are some important takeaways:

In this video, I focused on explaining the concept of ring mod sidechain modulation and how to implement it in Bitwig Studio. This topic is something I receive questions about regularly, typically about using a kick drum to sidechain the bass. Personally, I find this method introduces distortion and would recommend using Bitwig's audio sidechain modulator instead. However, I understand that modern production values often emphasize cutting sounds precisely, like carving out the bass when the kick hits, in contrast to older gluing techniques.

The technique gained traction when a video by Borrasca demonstrated using a kick drum and negatively rectifying its signal with a ring mod VST to remove bass frequencies. This, however, results in audio leaks or distortion because of the frequency differences between the kick and bass. At one point, Tilda Sounds attempted something similar in Bitwig, leading to a discussion about the method's pitfalls.

Borrasca even developed a plugin with a release feature to smooth signals, essentially mimicking an envelope follower. But for clarity, when dealing with precise frequency differences, to ensure a consistent result without distortion, perfect frequency alignment and phase alignment between the kick and bass is necessary.

To demonstrate how to achieve this effect in Bitwig, I used a simple bass track and kick drum track. I created a tool device and added an audio rate modulator, which turns audio into a modulation signal. By linking the kick drum's output to this modulator and applying rectification, I controlled the bass's volume using the kick's signal. The outcome showed how the bass is muted where the kick is present, though some frequency leakage was visible, resulting in distortion.

For smoothing, similar to Borrasca's plugin, I adjusted the smoothing parameter of the audio rate modulator, effectively acting as a low pass filter. However, it showed limitations as having a perfect cut required no smoothing, which brought back the distortion.

Instead of the complex workaround, I suggested using Bitwig's audio sidechain device, which achieves similar results with less complication. The sidechain device allows for band pass filtering and easily smooths out the sidechain effect with rise and fall controls, offering better consistency without the distortion issues associated with ring mod sidechain modulation.

For those looking for a more technical solution, I demonstrated creating a setup in Bitwig’s FX Grid using a sidechain input and envelope follower to replicate ring mod sidechain modulation in a more controlled fashion. This approach provided a cleaner, more precise cut with adjustable smoothing to tailor the effect as desired.

Ultimately, while creating such modulation is feasible in Bitwig and can be an interesting concept to explore, leveraging the native audio sidechain methods typically yields a superior, cleaner result. I provided preset links in the video description for anyone interested in experimenting with either approach. This video now serves as a reference for anyone curious about ring mod sidechain modulation in Bitwig Studio, allowing them to replicate or refine the technique with the guidance provided. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next video!

Transcription

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by AI, so it might not be perfect. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.
You can also click on the timestamps to jump to the right part of the video, which should be helpful.

[00:00:00] Hey folks welcome back to another video. Today it's about ring mod sidechain modulation. I want
[00:00:05] to explain to you what it is and how you can do it in Bitwig Studio because I get this question
[00:00:11] probably once a month. Hey Polarity did you see actually this method of sidechaining the bass
[00:00:16] with the kick drum? And I say yeah but it's actually not that great idea because you introduce
[00:00:23] a lot of distortion here and there so maybe don't do it just use the audio sidechain modulator
[00:00:29] of Bitwig Studio. But people are really obsessed with you know precisely cutting out the kick drum
[00:00:37] out of the bass channel for some reason. I guess it's modern production values. So back in the days
[00:00:45] you used actually overlapping sounds to glue them together. Today it's all about you know you have
[00:00:51] the kick drum then you have a cut then you have the bass sound then you have a cut then you have a lead
[00:00:56] sound and then you cut everything together. So for some reason this is you know something people want
[00:01:02] to do and I want to show you how you can do it in Bitwig Studio. So I think it all started here
[00:01:08] on YouTube with this kind of video here from or by Borrasca and he used the kick drum and then negatively
[00:01:17] rectified this kick drum signal and then used it in ring mod VST to cut out the bass where the kick drum
[00:01:28] is right. And you can see even here on this on his video that you have some leaking audio bits from the
[00:01:37] bass. This is the distortion because you ring modulate the kick drum or the bass sound with the kick drum
[00:01:45] right. And the kick drum has a different frequency sometimes. There's a pitch mod in there. In the
[00:01:49] beginning you have a higher pitch and then you pitch down and you can see you have a lot of leaked signals
[00:01:54] in there. At a certain point also Tildesounds did something in Bitwig here at a certain point and I
[00:02:05] commented on it because he wanted also to precisely cut out the bass here. I link to this video in the
[00:02:11] description below. Then Borrasca here also made his own plug-in. I think it looks like this. Simple RMSC plug-in.
[00:02:22] So you have a sidechain right and then use a sidechain on the bass. And he even created here some kind of release
[00:02:29] time to smooth out the signal right. Which makes it actually an envelope follower. So in my opinion people
[00:02:38] try to reinvent audio sidechain or an envelope follower with this. So in the beginning there are some clicks and
[00:02:47] pops here or let's say some distortion. It sounds really like distortion when you have a certain
[00:02:53] combination of sounds here. That's also a problem. The distortion depends on how different the frequency
[00:03:00] or the kick the frequency of the kick drum in the bass is and the more or less leaked signals you have
[00:03:06] then in the end of the bass channel right. So it's not consistent even that. So this is then this plug-in
[00:03:14] with release times here which makes it actually an envelope follower or just a normal ducking
[00:03:21] yeah ducking sidechain plug-in. Okay so in Bitwig Studio here I have just a normal track and I have here a bass
[00:03:30] sound and I have a kick drum sound right. And this is how it sounds.
[00:03:42] And you can see at the top here this is my bass channel and this is my kick drum channel right.
[00:03:49] And on the bass channel all I need to do to actually recreate this in Bitwig Studio. It's very simple in Bitwig.
[00:03:56] You just create a tool device here. And then on this tool device you create an audio rate modulator.
[00:04:06] The audio rate modulator just takes in the audio signal and converts it into a modulation signal.
[00:04:11] And the audio rate modulator here has an sidechain input. So we can take here from the drums just
[00:04:18] the output of the kick drum right. So now we have the kick drum audio signal in here. You can see this.
[00:04:24] And then we take the mid channel because we want to have just the mono part of this kick drum. It's probably
[00:04:31] completely mono. Yeah the side channel here doesn't give you anything.
[00:04:35] So we have the mono signal then of the kick drum. Then we can rectify it right. Rectifying means just to
[00:04:40] take all the negative values here and put it into the positive range. Just wrap the negative part up to
[00:04:47] the positive part right. That's all you need to do. And then you just take this output here and modulate
[00:04:53] the volume down to minus one maybe. That's all you need to do in Bitwig. And you basically recreate
[00:05:01] now ring mode sidechain modulation at least how they explain it in their videos. And you can see now here
[00:05:07] that we reduced at the part where the kick drum is the bass. But you also can see that we leak here certain
[00:05:16] frequencies right. This is what I mean here. This gives you some distortion. Because the frequency of the kick drum
[00:05:23] in the bass is not completely the same. Or at least in parts. To make this completely clean you need to have the same frequency. And you also need to face align
[00:05:33] the kick drum with the bass. So the, you know, the positive parts overlap or cancel out the negative parts
[00:05:42] of the bass and so on. So this is the idea. But in certain cases it's completely fine. If you have a lot
[00:05:49] of, you know, distorted kind of sound, then it's maybe not that prominent. I can show you how it sounds.
[00:05:55] So this is the doubt. You can see there is no ducking and now when I switch this on here.
[00:06:21] It cuts the bass away.
[00:06:26] So this is the
[00:06:28] very simple
[00:06:30] way of doing this in Bitwig Studio. Just an audio rate modulator
[00:06:34] rectifying the signal and then modulating the volume down. And this is the
[00:06:38] the ring mod part basically here.
[00:06:42] So in Bitwig Studio, this is very, very simple.
[00:06:45] Okay. So now, now the idea is how can I smooth this out, right? How I can get rid of these
[00:06:51] in-between parts here.
[00:06:54] And like I said here in this video, he introduced a release thing, which is just smoothing the signal.
[00:07:03] I guess it's probably a low pass, something like this. So we can also do this here in this
[00:07:11] audio rate modulator. So we can just pull this down and get rid of some
[00:07:16] top frequencies of the kick drum and then smooth this, smooth this a bit out. You can see it's more clean.
[00:07:25] right? So we get, yeah, get similar things. But you can see here, there's also some overlap,
[00:07:35] overlapping parts. I guess it's because of the, um, the smoothing now.
[00:07:40] Yeah, it's because you smooth this out, right? The low frequencies are a bit too, too late here.
[00:07:51] So you have this all the way up to actually make it very lean, a clean cut here. So that's the problem,
[00:07:59] right? But in my opinion, um, you can just use the audio side chain probably. Let me remove this here.
[00:08:06] Of course the audio side chain is, oh, that's, that's the wrong one. Sorry.
[00:08:14] Audio side chain.
[00:08:20] So the audio side chain gives you here also a band pass filter.
[00:08:24] And when you pull down the rise to zero and the fall to zero, it's almost the same thing. It's almost
[00:08:32] also audio rate modulation, right? And then you have the fall time to smooth the signal out. The more you
[00:08:38] smooth it out, the more it becomes smooth, but you also lose timing, right? So let me put this down here.
[00:08:48] Side chain is drums, the side chain is drums, the kick post. Okay.
[00:08:52] So you can see here the audio side chain is also pretty spot on, right? And then you make it a bit smoother.
[00:09:03] Then it becomes clean here.
[00:09:11] So my opinion, this is the better option. Um, but you know, people will see it in videos. They see it
[00:09:19] from big artists doing this, and then I want to clone it in Bitwig studio. So that's how it is. So you
[00:09:25] can just use also your audio rate modulation. Um, so these are the simple options. We can also
[00:09:31] make this a bit more complex. So let's say we use an FX grid
[00:09:35] in here. Let's open this up and maybe I make this here a bit smaller for the moment.
[00:09:42] So in here we have now base in base out, right? That's, that's how it is. And then we can use here
[00:09:51] a side chain input and then just bring in the kick. So now we have here the kick drum and I would say
[00:09:58] just use here in there also an envelope follower, which gives you also already a rectified signal.
[00:10:10] put this here on slow and when we bring this down, you also get here
[00:10:15] an audio rate signal. So you can see here all the different up and downs
[00:10:24] of the signal of the kick drum. So it's pretty much audio rate modulation. If you pull this down
[00:10:30] here all the way and then you can smooth it out, right?
[00:10:36] So what we can do then is we can slow this down here and maybe use this as a trigger
[00:10:43] and use pitch
[00:10:47] is it possible?
[00:10:49] Yeah, you can see the kick drum here, right?
[00:10:53] Okay, so with this
[00:11:02] we can go into a transfer curve
[00:11:06] and then just reset this here and maybe set the transfer curve to
[00:11:13] unipolar. Looks like this. We go in here
[00:11:17] and then use a second oscilloscope here. So with this now we can completely
[00:11:31] kind of invert this.
[00:11:32] So if we like this
[00:11:35] do something like this and then maybe smooth it out
[00:11:46] and we get a nice signal then here. Here is zero and to multiply this with the audio signal here.
[00:11:59] Let's see how this sounds.
[00:12:12] So, um, with the audio follower here, with the audio, yeah, with the follower mode, you
[00:12:42] can kind of smooth out the signal and with the transfer curve, you can, um, bring a stand
[00:12:49] to a very narrow kind of cut if you want to, right?
[00:12:55] So you can, can completely cut out here certain things.
[00:13:08] So you can cut out pretty early.
[00:13:10] Um, as soon as you get a signal here, you, uh, force it to zero and you can see here, you
[00:13:18] can completely, precisely, completely cut out the signal.
[00:13:24] So this is very, very clean in my opinion.
[00:13:29] Look at this here.
[00:13:30] It's, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's super clean and with the transfer curve, you can then
[00:13:36] amplify the signal or like I said, as soon as you get here a minimal value, you pull down
[00:13:43] the zero and then pull down the volume of the base.
[00:13:47] And with the fall time here, you can smoothly go from audio rate modulation, which gives you
[00:13:53] these clicks and pops to slightly smooth it out and have an envelope follow here and make
[00:13:59] everything clean, right?
[00:14:00] But this is a very clean solution.
[00:14:03] You don't even need to hear the oscilloscope.
[00:14:05] Right?
[00:14:07] That's all you need.
[00:14:08] So the side chain here from the kick drum base comes in based and is multiplied here with
[00:14:14] the signal and you have all the control here with the smoothing and the transfer curve.
[00:14:19] So my opinion, um, that's a very clean and simple solution.
[00:14:24] I put you to preset here in the description below and the audio rate modulation side chain,
[00:14:31] in my opinion, is the easiest way is you're just to use a tool device and then, uh, use an
[00:14:38] audio rate modulator, audio rate, pull the kick drum in, pull this down, rectify, use the mid
[00:14:48] channel and then negatively apply here the modulation amount.
[00:14:53] So this is how I would do it.
[00:14:55] So this is the ring mode side chain modulation.
[00:14:57] This is a more fancier version here of this and you have more options there.
[00:15:03] Okay.
[00:15:03] So both presets are in the description below.
[00:15:06] I hope I could help you.
[00:15:07] And this is also a video for the future.
[00:15:10] When people ask me to say, polarity, did you see actually this ring modulation side chain
[00:15:14] video, then I can point at this video and you can replicate it.
[00:15:19] Okay.
[00:15:19] Thanks for watching.
[00:15:20] See you on the next video.
[00:15:22] Have fun.
[00:15:24] See you on the next video.