I am hoping someone can help me out a little. As the title suggests, I am looking for a clever way to duck my reverb on leads, plucks and vocals etc. Meaning, when a sound is playing from the synth, I want to compress the reverb signal (on a send). And vice versa, no compression when silent. I tried with signal-follower, but the way I did it lead to really choppy and erratic behavior and did not sound very good. I have 3rd party compressors with ext. sidechain-input, can I use that those in some way? Let me know if you have any clever tips or tricks
I do use the signal follower for this. Mostly because it is the only device with actual lookahead. But I learnt it is often better to utilise artificial inputs instead of letting it analyse the actual audio, especially for bass.
One trick to make it behave in controlled ways, is to use dc samples in the instrument you want to duck things to. You know, a 1-sample loop with maximum value set via sample drawing, turning off the key/pitch in the keyzones, velocity to your liking. Put the keyzone spanning each key of the instrument that you want the sidechain to react to. Then you define the shape of the ducking via a volume envelope for this sample. The sample should be routed to an extra instrument fx chain, and from there to some sort of dummy track. In the dummy track you use the signal follower to process the envelope, and a gainer right after which will mute the dc sample, you don’t want it mess up your audio.
It is a bit of a hassle to set up right the settings for the signal follower, because sensitivity will make peaks be different with attack/release changed. What I do is vaguely adjust the sensitivity so I get proper ranges, tune the attack/release to my taste and then adjust sensitivity up from a low position, with a +1 dc sample feeding into the device, so it will just touch the top of the bar to the right of the device.
Maybe you will wish to compress/limit the signal if you use polyphonic action. Also if you wish to mix the sidechain signals from multiple instruments - all no problem. Just make sure you always somehow mute the dc signals before they hit your master or sound card outputs, there’s no value in listening to them, and I think they might even be dangerous for some speakers.
I would then of course use the signal follower to control a hydra, and from there some kind of effects making things react, i.e. a gainer or compression or gate threshold on the 100% wet reverb send, or the track that some instruments would send their ambience sounds if they are encapsulated.
You can also modulate the “analytical” dc signals with a gainer or other modulation means, for example if you wish a sidechain to react to a filter modulation, or similar tasks. And you can of course set up multiple different sidechains per note/instrument.
Wow man - that was elaborate! Really appreciate it, thank you! I will have to play around with it a bit and see if I can get this to work the way I want to. To be honest, its a bit of a creativity killer for me… I need to work fast, which is why I love Renoise in the first place. I have been doing most mixing in other DAWs up until now - but there are only a few things missing for me to use Renoise 100% “start to end” - and I would really like to do exactly that. Lets see what the future holds.
But again, thanks a lot for awesome answer, will have to test these things out and see if I can use it.
Another idea is using a Keytracker linked to an LFO instead. You can put the LFO into one shot mode and use the envelope of it to trigger your reverb. The Keytracker than fires that LFO for each note it catches. Worth a try maybe.
Another idea is using a Keytracker linked to an LFO instead. You can put the LFO into one shot mode and use the envelope of it to trigger your reverb. The Keytracker than fires that LFO for each note it catches. Worth a try maybe.
Click the renoise logo in the low right corner of the renoise screen, and choose from “Demos & Tutorials” the song “Tutorial - Ducking (Sidechaining)”. There you can see such a setup. The trick is to let the vel tracker or key tracker always trigger the reset at value zero.
I recommended my way of using ducking signals out of enveloped dc samples because this way you can mix multiple signals to a single sidechain, and mainly because you can use the signal follower lookahead, making attacks much tigther on than using non-lookahead solutions.
Click the renoise logo in the low right corner of the renoise screen, and choose from “Demos & Tutorials” the song “Tutorial - Ducking (Sidechaining)”. There you can see such a setup. The trick is to let the vel tracker or key tracker always trigger the reset at value zero.
I’m actually using a Signal Follower in that example so it’s not quite what i wrote above. Maybe you meant a different example file?
Sorry, my bad…I remembered it wrong, its been some time since I looked at the examples. It was in the file “dblue - tension” where you will see a key tracker on the kick track controlling a lfo that will duck the bass to it.
Thanks a bunch both of you - really! Problem with me is that I am not so good at the “tech stuff”. I read these forums a lot and usually get lost when being explained how to do a simple thing. But I get that. I have showed Renoise to so many people and explained to them how easy it is - and they get lost once values are in hex
In this case - I will just NOT duck the reverb… and save it for the mix in some other (lesser awesome) DAW. I can still do everything I want
But guys, thanks! These forums are amazing because of you - I think I have asked silly questions like this 20-30 times over the years and was always answered within hours.
Bonus question: Is there a way to make a shortcut to the STOP button? I mean… the button that will stop DSPs running?
Just use a signal follower on the reverb wet slider or with a gainer on the reverb return channel, it does the basic job and is easy to set up.
With the other question do you mean to mute everything or just to stop CPU usage?
Yeah, that is what I tried… but it was very choppy and “temperemental”. OopsIFly had some ideas how to fix this - but it was so complex I think I just save it for the mix later
You can also modulate the “analytical” dc signals with a gainer or other modulation means, for example if you wish a sidechain to react to a filter modulation, or similar tasks. And you can of course set up multiple different sidechains per note/instrument.
This is an extremely useful idea actually. I’ve always disliked how modulations are associated with the track. This is a nice solution which is way more powerful than either of the native modulation schemes! Check out the example I attached to see what I mean. You can basically create “modulation patterns” with just note data. Open the sample editor and make DC sequences, envelopes and LFOs and then you can sequence them, mix them, apply fx, etc… Very cool!
