Is there such a thing as a multiband sidechain compressor?
Kind of like having a sidechaining compressor control an EQ.
I’ve seen that it exists on google, but do anyone know if it works with the routing abilities in Renoise and the current VST’s available on the market?
What I want to do is duck lower frequences of the bass sound (and other bass-intensive sounds) to the kick if they occur on the same time to avoid hitting the ceiling. But I want to keep the bass sounds mid and higher frequences.
I’ve done this with envelopes and EQ a few times, but it’s kind of tedious.
There are a couple of options to make your wishes come true.
For those who like to use VSTs, there is the free multiband compressor C3Comp, which Sonicade had suggested to me somewhen. Don’t be scared about the Japanese website, the plugin will just work very fine in pure English. And I’m really impressed by its quality! (e.g. compared to JAMin on linux). However it’s not a sidechain in any way but it’ll do the job: Duck user-defined frequency-ranges. And it’s really easy to use.
The other option is to build your own multiband compressor in Renoise using only internal DSPs. To do that you’ll need Send Channels, Filters and certainly compressors.
So, MartinIR, you want to have your bass compressed seperately from other frequencies, right?
Let’s just have this example for bass:
Easy way: Say you have only two tracks in your song that have bass. One is a BD, the other a bassline. You can route them both to a send track, put a native compressor on that send track and then I’d suggest to put a lowpass filter behind it to hide any ramping artifacts.
Freaky geeky way: You compose your song and when you’re done, you route all your tracks to a send track, which will not be the master track. Let’s label it “mix”. Now you put three send devices (for 3 bands) on that “mix” track, have the first two send devices set to “keep source”, the last one to “mute source” and let each one route the sound to a new send track. So now, additionally to the “mix” track, you’ll have three more send tracks which you can call “bass”, “mids”, and “highs”. You see where we’re going to.
On the “bass” track you put a lowPass filter, a compressor and another lowPass-filter in a row.
On the “mids” track you put a bandPass filter, a compressor and a lowPass-filter (cutting only the highs) in a row.
On the “highs” track you put a highPass filter and a compressor in a row.
Now the selfmade multiband compressor is created. And if you think this is just too cranked to be done, let me show you a song that’s been made with 5 bands like that
I think Voxengo’s GlissEQ might be able to kinda do this. It has a “peak” mode that monitors the peaks of the freq bands and only applies the EQ curve on the attacks. I use it to make my percussion sounds sharper. It does a really nice job
Similar to the hacky way you can automate the threshold of the compressor using pattern effect 10xx (if the compressor is in position 1 on the FX chain), you can automate the frequency of something like the HP in GlissEQ.
Works for me as a workaround right now. If you stick the thing you want to “sidechain” next the the thing you want to “trigger”, you can match the positions easily on the pattern editor.
and really not bad!