Bloody hell this is an excellent idea! Massive props.
Here’s a very simple demo I made to test it out for myself:
http://datassette.net/temp/sidechaining.xrns
how bout a sidechaining compressor … and a key input gater as well
GUYS? HUH? Huh
so i don’t have to keep shuffling back and forth between pro tools for this effects …
help a brotha out!!! RENOISE 
This is damn sweet, got it on my playlist atm 
Too complicated, and doesn’t sound good. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. But love you for trying 
You probably are doing something wrong. Post your xrns and when I have the time I can take a look if you want.
I actually don’t think it’s too complicated once you get your head around what all the send tracks are doing. It took a while to set it up myself the first time, but I can now set it up fairly quickly and I was amazed just how good it sounds.
holy horse! 
great tune and perfect example for how good the native sidechain can sound with a proper sound design involved.
too bad the sendchannel frenzy kills multithreading efficiency - but nevertheless… if this ain’t predestined as a demosong i don’t know.
it’s musically original, lush sounding (!) and perfectly showcases a feature which was said to be undoable natively.
it’s also a good shocker for noobs as it rather looks like rocket-science than anything else 
thanks for sharing, vivace!
kudos also to eeter for fiddling about that mind-twisting stuff!
Holy shite sir…!! 
Massive thanks for the props!!
… Can’t say I’d mind if this track was added as a demo-song, but considering the ‘workaround’ is relatively complex and somewhat ‘unofficial’, not to mention (hopefully) obsolete in the (near?) future…
came up with a way to use the Gate dsp a while ago to do a similar thing. thought i’d share it (if you don’t know how to do this already):
okay I’ve just discovered Sidechain Compression and it’s unfuckinbelievable how it can turn a rather flat mix into something really badass. (yes I’m a complete noob I know )
Now I’ll have to try to understand how you guys did it with native DSP only - or cross many fingers to find it in renoise’s next version … 
EDIT : now I understand how the trick works, but I can’t reproduce the sound I have with an external DSP. I guess it comes from the subtle tweaks of the compressor …
I do double duty on Ableton and Renoise these days, and even in Ableton with sidechaining natively available, i still actually prefer the oneshot LFO+gainer/filter approach in Renoise because of the control it gives you. For most purposes, manually ducking the signal is the more flexible, stable and preferable solution.
Cool technique, but i would never bother with it for the sake of a single channel’s worth of sidechaining when a manually tweaked duck will do the same thing and for all intents and purposes, better.
can you elaborate on “oneshot FLO + gainer/filter” ? Is it a LFO triggered by the kick altering the filter/gainer on the other track ?
Almost; it’s an LFO, linked to a Gainer. So instead of ducking, you simply alter the volume of whatever you want to be sounding ‘ducked’. It will make it sound, if you make this happen on the kick, as if it was sidechained. You need to watch the curve of your LFO, though… But it’s true, it allows more freedom over the ducking-process, but it’s just that… fake, not the real deal.
so you can use this LFO to control parameters other than the gain, such as a HP filter cutoff, or an eq band, right ? and with the hydra, you can control many things at the same time …
Yes, ofcourse! 
Except, you know, wtf is the “real deal”, and what is it actually worth? Sidechain compression, when used for ducking a bass under a kick or whatever, is a question of tweaking threshold, ratio and decay. What exactly is the difference between this and using a triggered LFO cycle.
I think this whole sidechain debate is out of control. There’s this idea of real sidechaining as a kind of holy grail, when the effect it produces is, at this point, easily recreated in other ways. I’ll go as far as to say real sidechaining is inferior to manual ducking.
It’s just a matter of wanting to experiment with sidechaining. Not with setting up LFO-devices. For what other reason would I set up a track with the technique? If you think that using an LFO to controll a gain parameter to simulate ducking hadn’t crossed my mind, you’re insulting my intelligence.
I dunno at which point this became about you. Sidechain posts like this one are a dime a dozen, and all i’m saying is a lot of people apparently want sidechain compression for some mythical magical thing it does that they heard of, and not what it actually is and does.
Making electronic music shares many elements with programming, and in this case, like developers with a preoccupation for OOP design patterns, people are losing sight of what they are trying to achieve and have become hung up on the technicalities of it.
Well, you can’t expect ‘a lot of people’, which you are talking about, to respond, can you? 
Why get so personal anyway?