I recently had a mix that I thought could have made use of side chaining the kick to the bass. In theory this should be simple and it seems to be a piece of cake,but I seem to be having a little trouble with the particulars.

 Simply feed the output of the instrument into the input of the VST that has side chaining capability so that it reacts to the audio from the channel right? I seem to be having trouble in figuring out the particulars of this when it comes to doing it in Sonar X1 PC expanded. Routing isn't intuitive to me on this.

 Can you maybe share some examples of how you use this technique most effectively and  how you approach the routing into and out of the channels involved? I know this should be simple but I'm missing it.

 Thanks- Tim

Hey Tim,
actually not the OUTPUT of the first instrument, but a SEND from that instrument to the sidechain input of the FX.

here's what helped me figure it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g60LK6u35c

Hi Tim, try this....

Put sonitus compressor in fx bin of bass guitar.
On bass drum track, right click and > insert send and select sonitus compressor side chain input (bass guitar or whatever you named this track )
That is the routing you need if im not mistaken
Then after adjusting settings you should see that the compressor only ducks the bass guitar when the kick plays. In addition ou may want to compress the bass guitar as a whole as it will not be compressed when the kick isnt triggering it.
Hope that makes sense and im not talking rubbish :)

Bibs

Thanks for the tips guys.  I needed this help too!

Rimshot

 Thanks Beagle and  Wizard 71! I planned to reply before now but things have been crazy round' here.

 This is the kind of specific info I needed to figure this out. I plan to give this a shot tonight in the studio. Thanks!

I set this up last night and the drum track did seem to be ducking the bass or mildly compressing it. I tried several compressors with similar results and adjustments.

 The thing that I noticed  was the effect seemed to be happening while looking at the graphs and graphic representations, but what I actually heard didn't seem especially different. Maybe it was my chosen combination or bass and drum tracks? Not sure. But even after adjusting several different aspects of the compressors I could not seem to get anything that jumped out at me where I said," wow, this is really better".

 I also noticed that my SPAN plug-in is side chainable and attempted to route to it. The routing seemed to work but when I clicked on the plug I didn't see the signal coming into SPAN.

 In the Sonitus compressor the audio button can be changed to side chain, but when I engaged it nothing happened. I guess I'm still not entirely familiar with it.

 Are the results of side chaining usually this discrete? As in I can hardly tell there is a difference.