Why Sidechaining: Balancing Vocals and Music in Your Podcast Mix
In the world of podcasting, finding the equilibrium between music and vocals is pivotal for an immersive aural experience. Every podcast has music; but without proper balancing in your mix, this can easily drown out the vocals, making the show’s talent hard to hear and frustrating listeners.
After producing over 10,000 podcast episodes, one tool that has stood the test of time in all of our mixes, is sidechaining. With a simple compressor and bussing setup, you can create a balanced mix, allow the music to serve its purpose, but preserve presence and focus on the vocals. Once done, save your template for use on all of your episodes.
This guide (and included video) is going to use Logic Pro X and the Waves C1 Compressor; but any pro DAW should have bussing enabled, and any plugin with a sidechain route can perform the same function.
Decoding Sidechaining: A Compressor That Works Selectively
Imagine a compressor placed on the music track that only activates when triggered by another track (in this case, vocals)—this is sidechaining. The setup ensures that the music never drowns out the vocals but instead allows them to effortlessly cut through.
Step One: Place a compressor on your music track
First, the Waves C1 Compressor is placed in the signal chain on our music track. With the amount of shows we produce, the music tracks are preset and templatized for each podcast, so any new episode we work on has the exact music, at the exact volume, already set and ready to go.
You’ll want to adjust your compression settings as you normally would, ensuring that the music is not being compressed too hard, for example, or that your makeup gain is not artificially raising the music volume too loudly. This will all be relative to the music you chose, and its loudness—and may be further adjusted if you have any automation on your track to fade in or control the volume of the music.
Lastly, be sure your music track is a stereo track. This should differ from the individual vocal tracks, which are mono, and the difference here helps to create spatial variation between the vocals and music.
Step Two: Route another audio track into your compressor with a bus
Next you need to set up a bus on as many vocal tracks as you have in your project. In most cases, this is probably 2 tracks—a host and a guest—but depending on your show you may have as few as 1 track or as many as 6 tracks to work with. The important part here is that all vocal tracks are sending to the same bus. In most cases, we simply use Bus 1 for routing.
After you create the bus, you may need to set the level of volume that’s being sent through the Bus. Some DAWs may default to setting this to 0.0db, which is ideal; but with others it might start at -∞ which means no volume would be going to the compressor at all. Also, with Logic Pro, after creating a Bus, the DAW automatically creates an Aux track with the Bus as the input, which you need to either mute or delete entirely as to not hear duplicates of each of the vocal tracks.
Step Three: Adjust your compressor settings for the perfect mix
Finally, you want to fine-tune the settings to achieve the perfect mix. Once your compressor is dialed in to the settings you prefer, you’ll want to adjust the threshold of the compressor up and/or down to find the sweet spot. As mentioned above, this varies based on the type of music, loudness, volume of the bus, and number of vocal tracks being used to sidechain.
Once complete, you should be able to fully hear both the music and the vocals: the stereo space of the music track leaves room for the mono vocals to create presence in the center of the audio field; and the compressor triggering based on the vocal activity helps push the music down in volume and out of the way for clearly intelligible podcast vocals.
In Conclusion
Sidechaining should quickly become a staple of your editing and mixing techniques for your podcast (or your clients’). Once you have found the perfect settings for your compressor and busses, you can continue to simplify your workflow by ensuring that your raw vocal tracks are consistently recorded at the same volume, with the same mic, in the same space. This consistency makes future mixes much faster when you know that these native pre-production steps have already been taken care of. And don’t forget to save your music track’s signal chain as a template!
