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Old 10-04-2018, 09:55 AM   #31
ashcat_lt
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 7,272
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Something I think a lot of people overlook is that you can use other plugins to condition the signal on the way to the sidechain. The classic example is to highpass it to make a compressor into a de-esser, but there's a lot more you can do.

In this case, putting a limiter on the sidechain before it reaches your compressor basically means the compressor will only ever get to a certain amount of gain reduction no matter how loud the original control signal was. The range then is the difference between compressor threshold and the limit you set on the control signal.

I get the idea that the OP is looking more for something like a triggered envelope where when the voice is happening, the music is turned down by a specific amount that is not actually dependent on the level of the voice itself. Like anytime there's a voice, the music should drop 9db or whatever. I'd almost call this "dimming" rather than "ducking", but I don't care to argue semantics.

To do that via sidechaining I think I'd first add a gate to the control signal and then a hard limiter or even clipper with a limit just above wherever the gate is set so that it's pretty much either off or as loud as it will ever get. Adjust gain of that signal against the threshold of the compressor until you get what you want.

I think it probably wants some lookahead/precomp, so that the attack fade happens just before the voice starts, though that might mean that the release fade starts before the voice is done. One could use JS Time Adjustment with a negative delay mixed 50/50 with the dry sidechain. Now we've got three plugs just conditioning the sidechain signal to make the one compressor do what we want, and for some reason there's suddenly tape on the bridge of our glasses and a pocket protector has spontaneously manifested in our shirt pocket.

It wouldn't take much to build a JS plug that could do this kind of on/off dimming thing without all that fuss, but I haven't had time to mess with it.
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