Help me up with a routing scenario

Help, Support & Bugs
1

Hi everyone. Here’s the case: I have a drum track going to a bus. And lets say a pad going into the same bus. I’m using a compressor to crush both of these sounds together (in the bus). What I’d like to do is somehow render the crushed output of both the drums & the pad seperately.

Is this possible? I remember finding a solution to something like this before but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it this time. Some help would be appreciated.

Edit: After re-reading my post I realized it could be possible by inverting the phase of the drums, re-rendering and summing two copies so that drums cancel out but gotta try and see. Still eager to hear some ideas on this.

2

I know you have your solution but Im curious:

Why not create 2 separate bus with a compressors on each with the same settings? (since you didnt mention ducking…)

3

Well I haven’t tried that tbh but I believe it wouldn’t sound the same when the tracks are hitting the compressor individually as the input levels will be different. Especially the pad wouldn’t be pumping as much without the beat playing on top of it? I’m probably confused here but oh well… :slight_smile: I’ll try & see tomorrow!

4

Well I haven’t tried that tbh but I believe it wouldn’t sound the same when the tracks are hitting the compressor individually as the input levels will be different. Especially the pad wouldn’t be pumping as much without the beat playing on top of it? I’m probably confused here but oh well… :slight_smile: I’ll try & see tomorrow!

Oops, your right. It’s not a good solution.

Better idea to try:

I didn’t tried it myself but, maybe you could: Send both drum and Pads track on a third track where you apply the compressor. After the compressor, you add a signal follower that will control a gainer’s gain that is applied after the sends of both your drum and Pad tracks. And also but a gainer at the end of the third track with minus infinite (to mute this bus track off the mix (after the signal follower)).

I’m just not sure if the signal follower will allow you to feedback the drum and Pad’s gainer’s gain. I remember I encountered situations where I could not send back some signals to build weird setup…

5

Hey, the phase inversion trick ist some neat stuff! In an unrendered (live manipulation of further chains) situation this would probably mean having lots of and lots of tracks around till your cpu chokes. I was close to bending my mind into how many extra tracks you’d need for each additional seperatable channel in such a setup. Wicked. And well but, eh but…with assymetrical transients and such, won’t there be artifacts somewhere?

Other than that this is the typical sidechain situation. Renoise gives you signal follower - i.e. make a muted bus with drums&pads and a sig follower and let it control gainers or compressors on each instrument in their respective own tracks. Bad luck the signal follower is dopey to the point of being limited to tickrate. Worse luck of course renoise won’t allow sidechaining. Now you know why people whine all day for enabling routing of plugins with more than one stereo input.

6

Oops, your right. It’s not a good solution.

Better idea to try:

I didn’t tried it myself but, maybe you could: Send both drum and Pads track on a third track where you apply the compressor. After the compressor, you add a signal follower that will control a gainer’s gain that is applied after the sends of both your drum and Pad tracks. And also but a gainer at the end of the third track with minus infinite (to mute this bus track off the mix (after the signal follower)).

I’m just not sure if the signal follower will allow you to feedback the drum and Pad’s gainer’s gain. I remember I encountered situations where I could not send back some signals to build weird setup…

Don’t think you can route backwards. Would be cool to try that kind of stuff if you could though.

Hey, the phase inversion trick ist some neat stuff! In an unrendered (live manipulation of further chains) situation this would probably mean having lots of and lots of tracks around till your cpu chokes. I was close to bending my mind into how many extra tracks you’d need for each additional seperatable channel in such a setup. Wicked. And well but, eh but…with assymetrical transients and such, won’t there be artifacts somewhere?

Other than that this is the typical sidechain situation. Renoise gives you signal follower - i.e. make a muted bus with drums&pads and a sig follower and let it control gainers or compressors on each instrument in their respective own tracks. Bad luck the signal follower is dopey to the point of being limited to tickrate. Worse luck of course renoise won’t allow sidechaining. Now you know why people whine all day for enabling routing of plugins with more than one stereo input.

Yeah I agree there could be some artifacts. I actually never got around to trying it as it got a little bit too geeky (I was just trying to render my beats to audio and chop them :P) Eventually gave up.

And indeed I realized it’s not possible without sidechain afterwards. Renoise routing can sometimes be quite mind boggling.

Thanks for the replies anyways!

7

Hm, just thought about the stereo split sidechain trick on these forums, that was just brought up.

In your example, chains for pads & drums and extra sends might go like:

Pads Track:

Send to “Send Pads L” panned hard left

Send to “Send Pads R” panned hard right

Mix to Mono

Send to “Send Pads L” panned hard right

Send to “Send Pads R” panned hard left

Send to “Send Drums L” panned hard right

Send to “Send Drums R” panned hard left

Drums Track:

Send to “Send Drums L” panned hard left

Send to “Send Drums R” panned hard right

Mix to Mono

Send to “Send Pads L” panned hard right

Send to “Send Pads R” panned hard left

Send to “Send Drums L” panned hard right

Send to “Send Drums R” panned hard left

Send Pads L:

Compressor

Send to “Pads Final” Panned Hard Left

Send Pads R:

Compressor

Send to “Pads Final” Panned Hard Right

Send Drums L:

Compressor

Send to “Drums Final” Panned Hard Left

Send Drums R:

Compressor

Send to “Drums Final” Panned Hard Right

Pads Final:

Record this track to get pure Sidechained Pads

Drums Final:

Record this track to get pure Sidechained Drums

I hope I’ve got this right. I haven’t tested in detail, just that the compressor will react on combined mode. Phew what a hassle to get around lacking of proper sidechaining.

Edit: because I thought It’d be useful, I’ve tried it out a little with a drone type sound and a bassdrum, with extreme compressor settings. The result is not quite the same as when running everything straight through one comp, but similliar and the “Final” send tracks hold an effected result, i.e. the drone pumping by the bassdrum. I found two things problematic however. First was that all the mixed together mono sounds had different level than using straight compression. Maybe one extra send channel for mixing them together & monizing and then leveling out might be useful to counter that effect and adjust the level (gainer) to be similliar to a straight source. And it’d also keep some nasty sends of the source tracks, also it’s maybe useful to view that track as kind of “sidechain bus”. Next point was that the actually used (and to be effected) stereo channel effects the compressor pretty hard, and as all compressors have one channel with common info, but one with only one signal, it might be useful to keep the volume of that channel intentionally very low, and reamplify in the “Final” track to minimize the effection being different for every instrument. Too sad you can’t put send channel setups in doofers, I guess one could use a tool to auto-setup such stuff in case it’d be used more often, or there’d be multiple setups of that kind in tunes. cheers.

Edit 2 - haha, I’m such a fool. Of course it will effect the passed on channel much more, when the to be effected channel is there twice because it is also added in a mono sum in the other channel. Duh. adjusting routing with leaving it out in the “sidechain” stereo channel might help a little. But the formula by which the compressors work is guesswork after all, not public as I see - two possibilities, either maximum peak of left or right is taken into account, or added peak of both channels. No easy way to find out…