Psy trance you just leave out the bass note on the kick drum - works loads better than trying to duck it.
Now that's a useful trick - thanks. I've been trying to shorten kicks using timestretching, which was moving in a similar direction anyway, but tends to do nasty things to the transients; will have to try that.
I've never managed to make a track sound as sweetly compressed as Prydz or as some of the Daft Punk stuff though ... usually give up trying before I finish one, all tips gratefully recieved
If you haven't read it, the "Cracking a Safe" article on this forum somewhere should be helpful.

Eric Prydz:
this can be done to some extent by ducking the bass using a side-chain compressor. to increase the effect but still retain some of the bass transients do what eric sometimes does:

1. bounce your bassline to a mono audiotrack.
2. slice your bassloop with one cut on the beat and one just where the energy of the bd disappears. do this for every 4 measures in the bar.
3. duplicate the basstrack.
4. put a high-pass eq on on of the tracks.
5. mute bass audio segments so that
a) the high-passed track plays when the bd hits but quickly fades out.
b) the normal bass track is silent when the bd hits but quickly fades in.


play with the timing of the fades and eq cutoff to find the thresholds that fit your bass and bd track.
So it's sidechaining, but whilst the sidechain is in operation a hipassed version of the sidechained track can be heard (although the hipassed track isn't itself being sidechained, if you get me). If you give the start of "Call on Me" a listen, there's no bass in the track except for the kick when the kick is present, but the high frequencies of everything else remain (unlike normal sidechaining where everything would disappear). Quite clever.