This Week In Music Production - Welcome to the first one!
Jun-12-2025
Welcome to This Week in Music Production!
This is a weekly blog dedicated to sharing interesting insights into the production of music, sound design, and anything audio. This Week in Music Production (TWIMP) is tailored for anyone who has an active or passing interest in production and design of audio and the creation of music.
To kick off the first entry we are going to be looking into a new mixing technique that I have started incorporating into my tracks
Ring Modulation Side-chaining
Firstly, what is Ring Modulation?
Briefly, Ring Modulation is the multiplication of two input signals to create a single output, where one is your carrier signal and the other is your modulator signal. This is an alternate form of amplitude modulation (AM). In regular AM a direct current (DC) offset is applied during the signal transformation that prevents it from going below zero. Allowing the signal to dip below zero may introduce strange cancellation artifacts and sidebands (new frequencies) due to phase inversion.
About a month ago, Virtual Riot (who is a fan of SWISSARMYKNIFE ;) ) published a video detailing different methods of how he likes to implement side-chaining into his tracks. One particular method which was novel and of interest to me was ring modulation side-chaining. To paraphrase, the way he described it was “What if instead of ducking the volume of our track under the kick, we could subtract the value of the kick from the rest of the signal?”.
This immediately caught my interest and further into the video he demonstrated how it sounds. I have linked the video below for those who wish to check out his breakdown (it begins at the 11:48 mark):
Incredibly curious to see how it would work in my own mixes, I set to recreate his side-chain rack and began working with it in some tracks.
The results were immediately clear: This is fantastic.
My drums remained loud and punchy, yet it didn’t silence the rest of the mix nearly as aggressively as regular volume ducking. There was a complete lack of undesirable artifacts that you would normally get by overlaying your drums without any side-chain input whatsoever. It makes the track feel integrated and less like there is a problem trying to be solved by shoving everything else underneath it by the way of volume reduction.
But note that I say “undesirable” frequencies. This method of side-chain is not without drawbacks and does introduce distortion into your tracks. If you have watched the video above you will have noticed that Val goes into these details. This is where it comes down to personal preferences. If you’re primarily an electronic producer like me, this is likely a desirable sound that you want in your mix to make it hit just a little harder and give it a bit of crunch without completely destroying your mixdown. But is it perfect for every track? Absolutely not. If you’re a producer who leans towards a calmer production style you will probably get more mileage out of other production techniques suited to your target genre.
