Sonar 5 ... sidechain support?

I think the dave brown audio compressor offers sidechain support at a reasonable price.

I also think the original FX series of plugs from cake had a compressor with side chain support, not sure.

Could you not approximate the effects with some multiband compression?

Pretty much all I ever hear about people actually using sidechaining for is de-essing vocals and I am pretty sure there are some free tools for that purpose at kvr.

Of course, mic distance and angle will do a lot to rememdy excessssssssive ssssssssssybilance.

There are work-around-type things (including the old cakewalk fx compressor). db-audioware's quantum fx bundle ($250) allows 6 instances of side-chain per effect. But it does kind of suck that there's no native support for side-chain.

Pretty much all I ever hear about people actually using sidechaining for is de-essing vocals and I am pretty sure there are some free tools for that purpose at kvr.

There are a lot of creative uses for side-chain, and side-chained effects are pretty common in professional recording. As billkath pointed out, a common one in dance and hip-hop is to use the kick to duck the bass, so that the bass notes sound like the decay of the kick drum. You can also use a dry sound to duck the reverb send, which allows a clear, articulated sound with a full ambience that doesn't wash out. You can gate some white noise to the snare drum to increase the explosive sound of the snare hits. You can duck the prescence range of power guitars when the vocal comes in to keep the feeling of a "wall of guitar" but still allow the singer to come through. You can tighten up double-tracked parts by gating the "extra" tracks to the main track.

All of these things could be controlled in other ways, but then so could any gating, expansion, or compression effect. The advantage to having it as an effect is the ability to tweak it in real-time to get the feel right. Resorting to envelopes makes what could have been a 30-second adjustment turn into 20 minutes of drawing in envelopes or a painstaking fader-riding session. And even then, it doesn't have the same feel. Trying to get the bass and the kick drum to "lock in" together is the kind of thing that can really only be done by ear, I think.

Cheers.

So how could Cakewalk implement sidechaining? Since the envelopes in version 5 are so much more powerful, I wonder if version 6 could create envelope patterns from waveforms. If I understand sidechaining correctly, this would enable sidechaining on every parameter of every effect (and be a real innovation for Cakewalk).

So every effect that utilized the feature would have to be designed for it?

The vocoder is interesting, because it seems like one of the few sidechainging effects that couldn't be accomplished with envelopes. Anyway, I'm still intrigued by putting sidechaining on any parameter (why not a bump in guitar tremolo whenever the Rhodes plays?), which is why I'm requesting that Sonar have the ability to generate detailed envelopes based upon waveforms (e.g. translate all the peaks, silences and everything in between into an envelope), with the ability to invert the envelope. If I'm not missing the point, I think this could cover all the usual compression/de-essing/gating/ducking applications, and also allow some cool unforseen applications of sidechaining with any effect parameter (and not just in Sonitus).