Music Production
House Sidechain Compression: Settings That Actually Pump
Oct
House sidechain compression is the reason a groove breathes. When the kick lands, everything else ducks for a split second, then swells back before the next beat. Done well, you feel it in your chest more than you hear it. Done badly, the whole track sounds like it is gasping for air, or worse, the kick and bass fight so hard that the low end turns to mud on a club system.
I want to walk through how I actually set it up in my sessions: what to duck, how hard, and the numbers I start from at house tempos. No magic presets, just a method you can repeat on every track.
Why House Leans on Sidechain So Hard
House is built on a kick drum on every quarter note and a bassline that lives in the same frequency range, roughly 40 to 120 Hz. Two loud sounds sharing that space will mask each other. Sidechain compression solves the clash in time instead of in frequency: the bass gets out of the way for the 50 to 150 milliseconds the kick needs, then comes back.
There is also a musical side. The pumping effect became part of the genre’s sound. Daft Punk’s “One More Time” and Eric Prydz’s “Call On Me” made that heavy, obvious pump famous in the early 2000s, and French house in general leaned on it as a feature, not a fix. Modern deep and tech house usually keeps it subtler, but it is still there on almost every pad, chord and bass you hear on a Traxsource chart.
If your bass and kick are still arguing after this, the problem may be the bassline itself; our breakdown of what makes a house bassline work covers note length and placement, which matter as much as any compressor.
🎛️ Three Ways to Set Up House Sidechain Compression
There is more than one way to get house sidechain compression to duck. Each has a use, and I regularly mix all three in a single project.
1. Classic compressor with an external key
Put a compressor on the bass (or a bus of bass, chords and pads) and feed the kick into its sidechain input. In Ableton Live, open the stock Compressor, expand the Sidechain section, switch it on and pick the kick track under “Audio From.” The Ableton Live manual explains each control, including the sidechain EQ, which is useful when your kick has a long clicky top you don’t want triggering the compressor. Logic, FL Studio, Bitwig and Cubase all have equivalent routing.
The advantage: it reacts to the real kick, so if the drummer in your head plays a fill or you drop the kick in a breakdown, the ducking follows automatically.
2. Ghost kick trigger
Same setup, but the sidechain source is a muted “ghost” kick: a separate track with a simple, short kick pattern sent only to the compressor’s key input, never to the master. This is my default for house. You can keep the pump running through breakdowns where the audible kick is gone, and you can trigger the duck on beats where there is no kick at all, for example a light dip on the offbeat to help a hi-hat-driven groove swing.
3. Volume shaping (LFO or envelope)
Tools like Xfer LFOTool, Cableguys VolumeShaper (also inside ShaperBox) and Nicky Romero’s Kickstart don’t listen to any signal at all. They draw a volume curve synced to tempo and apply it to whatever you put them on. Many DAWs can do this natively too, for example with an LFO device modulating a utility’s gain.
Shaping is perfectly consistent and precise, which is great for pads and reverb returns. The downside is that it doesn’t know when the kick changes, so you automate it on and off around breakdowns. Some of these shapers are free or cheap; our list of free VST plugins for house basslines pairs well with this approach.
Starting Settings at House Tempos
These are starting points for compressor-based house sidechain compression, not rules. Adjust by ear, with the kick and bass soloed together first, then in the full mix.
- Ratio: 4:1 for gentle glue, 8:1 or higher for an obvious pump. On sub-bass I often go close to limiting so the kick gets a clean window.
- Attack: as fast as the plugin allows, 0 to 1 ms for bass. On chords and pads, 5 to 10 ms keeps a bit of the transient so they don’t sound chopped.
- Threshold: pull it down until you see 4 to 8 dB of gain reduction on each kick for a subtle groove, 10 dB or more for a French-house style pump.
- Release: this is where the groove lives. Time it so the sound comes back up just before the next kick.
- Hold or lookahead: if available, a few milliseconds of lookahead stops the very first click of the kick getting through on the bass.
Doing the release math
One beat lasts 60,000 divided by the BPM in milliseconds. At 124 BPM that is about 484 ms per quarter note; at 120 BPM it is 500 ms; at 128 BPM about 469 ms. For a smooth, “breathing” house sidechain compression, I start the release at roughly a third to half of the beat, so 160 to 240 ms at 124 BPM, then nudge it while listening to the hi-hats. If the bass is still ducked when the next kick hits, the release is too long and the pump starts to blur. If it snaps back too early you get a clicky, nervous bounce.
Tempo changes the feel more than people expect, which is one reason to commit to a tempo early; see our guide to the best BPM range for house music if you are still deciding.
What to Duck, and What to Leave Alone
The beginner move is to throw one compressor on the whole mix bus minus the kick. It works, but it flattens everything into one big pump. I prefer separate amounts per group:
- Sub and bass: the most reduction and the fastest attack. This is the functional side of house sidechain compression, the part that makes the low end translate on big systems.
- Chords, stabs and pads: medium amount, slightly slower attack. This is the musical part, the feel.
- Reverb and delay returns: sidechaining the returns rather than the dry sounds keeps the attack of your stabs intact while the tails pump, which is one of the cleanest tricks in deep house.
- Vocals: usually little or none. A vocal that pumps sounds amateur fast, unless you are going for a filtered disco-loop effect on purpose.
- Hats, percussion, claps: leave them alone. They carry the groove that the pump is supposed to sit against.
Common Mistakes I Hear in Demos
After listening to a lot of house promos, the same house sidechain compression problems come up again and again.
Pumping everything equally. When pads, bass, vocal and FX all dip by the same amount, the track sounds like it is being turned up and down by a nervous engineer. Vary the depth by group.
Ducking the bass with a kick that has a long tail. If your kick rings for 300 ms and the compressor is keyed from it, the release behaves unpredictably. A ghost kick with a short, consistent hit fixes this.
Forgetting the intro. DJs will mix your first 32 bars over another track. If your intro is kick-only and nothing pumps until bar 33, that’s fine; if your pads are pumping against a kick that isn’t there yet, it sounds broken in a mix. Our article on house track intro length goes deeper into building DJ-friendly intros.
Judging it on headphones only. Check the low end on monitors or, better, a car or a club system. Sidechain that sounds perfect at low volume can leave a hole at high volume, or not be nearly enough.
House Sidechain Compression FAQ
Should I sidechain the bass or use EQ to separate it from the kick?
Use both, but for different jobs. EQ carves a static space, for example a gentle dip in the bass where the kick’s fundamental sits. House sidechain compression handles the moment-to-moment overlap. Most finished house records use a combination.
How much gain reduction is too much?
There is no fixed number. If the pump is the first thing you notice and it isn’t intentional, it’s too much. For contemporary deep or tech house, 3 to 6 dB on chords and more on sub-bass is a common, safe range.
Is a volume shaper as good as a real compressor?
For the sound itself, often yes, and it’s more predictable. A compressor keyed from a kick or ghost kick follows arrangement changes on its own, while a shaper needs automation. Many producers use a shaper on pads and returns and a keyed compressor on the bass.
