Hoya, first of all I just want to praise the new effect->to-different-track feature which finally can be used to “side-chain” stuff, excellent. That being said I’ve encountered a somewhat strange problem; say that I chain a compressor on a base I’ve just made with a kick and make the base duck for the kick, a lot of times I get a strange clicking sound right before the “duck”, I’ve tried to rearange settings but to no effect. After a while I began to realize that this may have to do with when the side-chained kick hits the compressor on the basetrack it (of course) won’t start at maximum but rather that it takes a millisecond before the compressor is maxed out( = base quiet). This, I thought, would make a millisecond of a click, on sounds put on the compressed track(more on sounds with more direct hit(this I’ve confirmed)), right before the compressor hits, if so I see no way out of this. Since you can not make the side-chained compressor start before the kick hits it, what can be done?; it’s awfully annoying, for me it crashes some otherwise pretty good mixes and it’s starting to grow into a pretty serious problem.
As Conner said, it always helps to see an example .XRNS of what you are working with. In the meantime, it seems like you might be using a signal follower device here? If that is the case, then I wonder if adjusting the look ahead value might help out. The signal follower needs time to react to quick changes in the signal, so the look ahead can help to take care of these sudden or unexpected jumps.
…and I’m no expert on mixing stuff yet so hopefully I’m just being dumb or something’s wrong with my setup , but I have tried everything I can think of.
//Robert
Mhm, hadn’t noticed this setting before, but it doesn’t seem to work still.
In this particular instance, the noise seems to be coming from the very fast attack on the Bus Compressor you have on Track 03, combined with automating the threshold parameter very rapidly. You’re already controlling the compressor with the signal follower anyway, so a fast attack on the compressor is not really that important here. If you raise the attack from 0.50ms up to around 25ms - 50ms, then it results in a much smoother sound.
(This may not apply to all situations, but in this case it works ok)
i also find turning up the look ahead works pretty well for this… signal follower can have a bit of a delay when automating the bus-comp. Its really small but its enough to make those clicks
Using the look-ahead feature will increase the overall latency/plugin-delay-compensation by the amount specified, but in my experience, the sweet spot is often really low, like somewhere between 0 and 2 ms. You can enter decimal values as well, so it will allow precise time values like 0.951ms (insanely precise?)
This, in combination with a short attack time on compressors etc. really should make clicks a thing of the past.
, but I have tried everything I can think of.