FabFilter

Hopefully someone can help me, I have been trying to wrap my head about how to do this, and I feel that I am missing something straightforward.

I have a source channel that I am routing out to different effects buses, but I only want those buses to become active when the original track reaches a certain dB. Additionally, I only want these effects to occur on the release of the incoming audio so that the effects only occur on the release of the original track's sustained notes: not during the sustain.

How would I go about achieving this?

The problem I am running into is that the length of the sustained signal is variable and typically longer than the attack settings in the plugins.

Hi,

You should be able to do it if you put a side-chained gate on the effect bus *before* the effect itself.
This way only the high-enough signal will pass to the effect.

If you want your gate to respond to the release only, I suggest you duplicate the source track, and manually cut the peaks.
You can use peak detector tools for that job.

After doing that you can send this track pre-fader to the side-chain effects (and take the volume all the way down, ofcourse).

Sometimes manual intervention is the easiest way to achieve your goal.

Good luck