How to do sidechaining in Buzz
This tutorial will teach you how to set up sidechain compression in Buzz using the BG Sidechain Dynamics machine. It took me forever to figure out how to do this the first time, so I wrote it up to save you the time. You’re welcome.
EDIT: Kibibu tipped me that Fuzzpilz Oppressor 3 also does sidechaining, and it’s a bit easier to set up. Here’s this same tutorial using Oppressor instead of BG.
Here’s our initial setup. We have two tracks, a kick drum and a bass line. We want to duck the bass’s volume in time with the kick drum. (Click on any diagram to enlarge it.)
Let’s set up the sidechain.
1. Add a BG sidechain machine and run your bass through it.
2. Open BG SCD. Set the Mode to AUDIOCOMP and the Channel to 1.
3. Add a new BG sidechain machine, called BG SCD2. Run your kick through it.
4. Open up BG SCD2. Set Mode to LEVEL and Channel to 1.
5. Important non-obvious step: BG SCD2 is gated by default. You need to turn off the gate to allow audio through. To do this, turn Gate Thresh all the way down to -50 dB. These are the quirks that make us love Buzz, right?
6. Start playing your pattern so you can hear what happens next.
7. Open up the bass compressor, BG SCD, again. Adjust the Comp parameters (Thresh, Ratio, Attack, Release, and Gain) to get the sound you want. Compression settings deserve a tutorial or six by themselves, but here is a quickie formula: turn Ratio all the way up; slowly lower Thresh until you can clearly hear the bass track’s volume ducking; slowly turn Ratio back down until the volume changes sound smooth.
That’s it. You now have sidechaining. You can set up more sidechaining pairs in the same Buzz song by using a different Channel setting.