FabFilter

Hi!

It's 2020 and setting up sidechain compression is still cumbersome in most DAWs. In FL Studio you have to use a VST3 plugin, route sidechain tracks and set outputs and inputs correctly, before you even get started.

The collision detection between instances of Pro-Q 3 works really well - without any complicated DAW routing - and it got me thinking that this kind of inter-plugin communication would also be of benefit to Fabfilters compression plugins, particularly with external sidechain scenarios. I think a Send / Receive type of system would be really easy for most people to understand.

For example if you want to do the classic "bass ducking against the kick drum" sidechain, you would insert the compressor (Pro-C / MB) on the bass channel, and you'd set the sidechain to External "Receive". Then you'd insert a special new "Send" plugin on the kick drum channel. This Send plugin would be nothing more than a signal router (sender).

These could be number coded so Send 1 sends the signal to Receive 1, etc.

TO extend this further, in Pro-MB for advanced users you could have and individual "Receive" input for EACH band, and this is where the fun could really begin!

Then we can forget about all this spaghetti channel routing.

Fabfilter could lead the way with this and show the competition how it's done.

At least in Studio One you can already do this, each available sidechain (including separate ones for each band of Pro-MB) appears in your list of outputs you can select and sends you can set up for each track, so I guess it's not the plugins that lack this functionality but some DAWs.

Cheers,

Correction: not to separate bands of Pro-MB, even if there are several bands with Ext. sidechain selected, there's only one Pro-MB sidechain available.

That's what I mean...