But surely you don't need this Ringmod technique for that? I think you can get the same result with traditional sidechain, or just muting the bass when the kick hits, because that's what basically the other guy was doing! There was just a gaping hole at that point, no joke. Now don't get me wrong, I am all for experimenting and this might give different sound with the distortion etc. The video I watched was from somebody called 'Polarity Music'

 

It won't be quite as dense and stealthy if you just use volume shaper or something like that.
Volume automation will have to be done by hand and either will sound just like volume shaper, or will have to be exhaustingly precise.
The cleanest sidechain ducking you can get is RM sidechain followed by a very fast (but not sample-precise fast) wideband compressor to duck the distortion.

 

You sure don't need it, but you cannot get the same results using conventional approaches to volume automation. Whether or not you need ducking this precise is a personal choice, but conventional approaches are guaranteed to lose some small amount of loudness--and the dubstep kids need every weapon they can get in the loudness wars!

 

Thanks, I guess I now understand it better and the potential benefits, in terms of being sample accurate (I think those words were thrown around also earlier in the thread). Like let's say you have a kick sample, there would potentially be maybe few samples empty in the beginning so maybe difficult to make with automation to start the duck exactly with sample precision at the moment when kick starts. Then same with tail (end of the kick), to make volume automation sample accurate when the tail (and thus the duck) ends manually would be probably tricky. Maybe not impossible if somebody really tried but very tedious. Now does it make any real world difference, I trust you guys when you say it does at least for certain types of music!

 

Last edited: Aug 23, 2025 at 9:28 AM

A good amount of these kinds of "tricks" which get pushed by the same users are also created with the main motivation of something to stick on a YT channel like clickbait and hope people will refer to it as "their trick". Often similar to how plugin developers can invent new physics to find a problem that no-one else ever noticed; and conveniently which they now have a plugin to sell you for the low introductory sales price of $29.95. (normally $250).