I want a pad to be ducked by a four-on-the-floor kick, using sidechain compression. How do I do that in Renoise?
Here’s an example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi8WmfzdS3Y
Look at the sidechain compression example in the tutorials that come with renoise. 
there is a tutorial song in Renoise’s “Songs” subfolder which explains how to do it.
the demosong is called “Tutorial - Ducking (Sidechaining).xrns”.
basically, you have to use the Signal Follower in order to route the signal of the bassdrum to another track as the input of the gainer
Oh. Is there a way to have it duck the pad whenver the kick is triggered, instead of involving the filter?
The easy way would be to connect the signal follower to a tracks volume.
have the signal follower in the kick track control a gainer volume in the pad track.
Oh, thanks
You wont get a compressor breathing style of sound with this method, yuck, i wish there was a way to really do side chain.
jonas you crack me up 
but i did ask myself the same question wether or not i could use other compressor plugins in renoise for the sidechain route… can it be done anybody ?
Yeah and you are missing out many of the parameters of the Compressor there! Although, in it’s most basic, it is the same process it is in fact much hard to set up and adjust for the same effect.
For Attack the Signal Follower does have a much forgotten Look Ahead parameter.
To fake Release you can use a reverb on the original signal before the signal follower (obviously, if you want the actual audio somewhere else, you will want to send it to a Send first.)
A Noise Gate can be used to activate the Gainer away from maximum or not.
All fairly hard to set well and up how to create the Knee effect I do not know (I think it is probably related to using a compressor and having the Signal Follower tied to Ratio.) Still the vast majority of the time you will not really even have to go to these extremes and simple ducking will suffice, but trying to claim it is a full replacement to being able to route audio freely and the effects offered by plugins is naive at the best.
Although Hexifx93 does say “You wont get a compressor breathing style of sound with this method” and as far as I can tell that is false, unless he wishes to provide examples of what he thinks isn’t possible. Possibly a bit more hard work than using a ready made device though!
Yeah totally agree with kazakore.
I don’t.
“For Attack the Signal Follower does have a much forgotten Look Ahead parameter.” doesn’t make any sense, because a Look Ahead shortens the time to react (respectively forces earlier reaction), while raising a compressor’s attack increases the time to react and does the exact opposite.
“To fake Release you can use a reverb on the original signal before the signal follower (obviously, if you want the actual audio somewhere else, you will want to send it to a Send first.)” has to be a joke. A compressor’s release doesn’t have anything to do with the release tail of the sound. The release parameter on a compressor tells the compressor, when (/how fast) to release the compression. To release the sent trigger value the Signal Follower has its own release. Both variations wont work, because they both depend on an already ended signal. Otherwise the sent trigger value will still be up. You can’t fake a compressor release this way, if the amplitude of the sound doesn’t accidently fit your needs.
This is a How-To-Do for messing up your sound, but not for faked sidechain compression.
Beside that, at this point again the hint: the Signal Follower is not thread safe and because of that messes the timings up. It’s in multi-CPU environments not suitable for faking accurate sidechain compression.
One doesn’t explicitely need sidechain compression in a preprogrammed song-environment, therefore there are enough ways to accomplish what a side-chain compressor does automatically when assembling patterns in Renoise.
When doing stuff live, then side-chain compression has more value if it has to control dynamic response output. But i suspect audio routing is a necessary evil in Renoise to be capable of creating a native side-chain device. The signal Follower does have a lot of other useful purposes besides sidechain.
Exactly. In the end the Signal Follower is also okay for sidechaining, if it hasn’t to be accurate to the millisecond. But as the aspiration of Kazakores posting was a best possible simulation of a real sidechain-compressor, I thought the timing issues should be pointed out.
I personally would still always suggest to use OneShot-LFOs for sidechain effects. Has a lot of benefits. You’re able to model the detailed behavior yourself then, the behavior stays the same, even when the trigger sound (e.g. Kick) changes, it’s easier to level out, etc.
I am not sure why some say that side-chain compression is not possible in Renoise. Can you not connect signal follower to pretty much any parameter you’d want to, including compressors’?
If the compressor had an “input track selection” this issue would be completely solved… unless i’m missing something?
Is side chaining a compressor possible now in 3.1?