Sidechaining the C6

I recently did a tutorial for Waves on their C6. If you’re interested in checking it out, you can view it here.

One of the powerful C6 features I talk about in the tutorial is the ability to sidechain it to another source. The advantage in this is you can dynamically EQ an input relative to another source. The example I use in the tutorial is on the bass guitar keyed off the kick drum, but you can get creative with this.

For example, last year I mixed an event with some big sub drops coming from some tracks. The sub drops were great and happened in these open sections of the song, however, the low end on the rest of the tracks were a mess and getting in the way of the live bass guitar. So I inserted a C6 on the tracks and sidechained it to the bass guitar. When the bass played, C6 would filter the low end out of the tracks. When the bass stopped, I could get the big sub drops.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions over email on how exactly to set up the sidechain in the VENUE so hopefully this will help clarify things. First, you have to make sure you have the correct version of C6 loaded; there are two. You need the “Sidechain” or “SC” version for this to work.

Once you have that loaded, you need to select your key source by clicking on the drop-down menu. Next select the pickoff point for your key source; I usually use “Insert Return”. Finally, you have to select “External” on the bands you want to use the sidechain key on; this is another powerful option because you can still use the C6 as a standard C6 while only keying the band(s) you want.

One last thing I’ll leave you with is C6 is a DSP heavy plugin. A mono C6 instance will take up 48% of a VENUE DSP chip. Stereo takes up 65%. A mono C6 Sidechain takes up 63% while a stereo sidechain takes up 96%. Something I’ve learned over the years is to prioritize my plugins in the racks so that stuff that matters most to me will always load before I run out of DSP. Plugins load in each rack from top to bottom starting with Rack 1 and then move to the next rack. So I often try and get my C6’s in the first couple of racks since they are often more mission critical for me than some of my other stuff like NLS.

I hope this helps, and please let me know if you have more C6 questions in the comments.