Hi,

Does anyone know of an EQ plugin that can take a sidechain input?  Being able to have the EQ on a bass guitar being fed from a sidechain from the kick drum would be useful.

I'm *not* talking about applying EQ to the sidechain of a compressor.

It would be great if the Sonitus multiband could do this - perhaps in Sonar Xn (where n is a number greater than 2).

Many thanks,

Mike T

Blue cats plugins can do it I think, but...

  Add your track, add two busses, add a send to each buss from your track.  

Drop a sidechain comp on the buss you want to duck the freq and set it to whatever source you want, like a kick.

Adjust the eq on both busses so one handles the part of the frequencies you want to do duck, set the other buss to take the frequencies that the ducking one doesn't handle.

Your kick ducks the buss with the low frequencies,  the other buss lets the higher frequencies though unaffected. 

Set the main track (Bass) to post send, and turn it all the way down.

Expand as needed.

EDIT: It this is confusing let me know and I'll try to elaborate, ESL here 

Hi Kenneth,

Thanks very much for your post.  I can see how the bus solution you suggest would work and will try it out.

I've downloaded Blue Cat's free plugins and the EQ tools there don't expose themselves as sidechain options.  I have heard that you need to disable 64 bit processing to get many sidechain enabled plugins to work with Sonar.  Can anyone confirm whether that is true and, if so, how to disable 64 bit processing.

Also, I've emailed Blue Cat about their commercial EQ products to see if they support sidechaining.

Bye for now,

Mike T.

Blue cats plugins works via midi cc's as far as I know, so for example a frequency analyzing plugin can be set to watch a frequency on one track, then you can add one of the eq plugins on a buss and set that to receive from the frequency analyzing plugin and have one of the bands of the eq react to that, I think only the pay versions have that functionality.

The response I've had from Blue Cat is below and it is, as you say, using midi.  It all seems a bit complicated for what ought to be a simple sidechain plugin.  I think there's an opening for some clever person to write a product here.

Blue Cat's response:

Hi Mike,
 
Our plug-ins can indeed do that, using MIDI or parameter data as a side chain signal. Here is a tutorial that shows an example of dynamic equalization using our dynamics processor with an EQ:
 
http://www.bluecataudio.com/Tutorials/Tutorial_Dynamics_EQ/
 
Depending on the king of dynamics processing you want to do on the EQ, you can also use Blue Cat's Digital Peak Meter Pro as a side chain source.
 
Feel free to gve a try to the demos and get back to us if you have any question.
 
Regards,
 
The Blue Cat Audio Team
www.bluecataudio.com

Kenneth, You are a smart guy.

Sidechaining is a compressor feature and simply has no meaning in the context of conventional filters. 

You could use a multiband compressor, assuming it supports sidechaining - which the bundled Sonitus multiband does not. Waves' multiband is the only one I know of that does, but I'm sure there are others. 
 
Alternatively, you could use any wideband compressor that offers sidechain filtering. I use FabFilter's Pro-C compressor for this, but it's not the only compressor that does it.

Another possibility would be to clone the bass track, add an appropriate filter to it and then duck it from the kick. You could do this using only the Sonitus compressor.

Hmmm....I'm not sure if I understand the premise here. An EQ is (generally) not a dynamic effect...that is, it does not change what it's doing in response to a variable (like level on a compressor) so a side-chain doesn't make much sense for it.

What Kenneth is describing is a super-cool classic method for emulating a multiband compressor by using busses. While it's certainly been done before, there are really only a few situations where I'd want to do it that way:

1. if I wanted a different compressor on each frequency range, like a '76 on the mids and a TLA-100 on the lows

2. If I had a situation were each frequency band on a multiband needed a discreet side-chain input.

3. if I didn't have an actual multiband compressor.

In any case, without a variable driving a parameter on an EQ I'm not sure I understand what a side chain would do....the concept of a dynamic EQ is kinda interesting (pulling down a frequency in response to that frequencies level), but that really is pretty much what a multiband comp does. 

Dean


EDIT: Heh....Bit beat me to it...

I haven't seen any multibands that did sidechaining but cool to know they exist, but this 2 buss method is very flexible as you can stick other stuff on the busses, like mentioned different comps, as many frequency splits as you want, duck frequencies, etc..

It's a good technique to have in your toolkit.

Thanks to you all for your responses.

I've asked a few other manufacturers since yesterday and they all say no they don't do this.

Sidechaining has traditionally been a compression feature, I agree, but surely that's because where it's come from in the analogue domain?

I often use automation to amend the EQ of, say, a guitar part while the vocalist is singing.  If I'm using automation to do this, wouldn't it be a nice feature if I could easily and simply plug the vocal part through the sidechain of a hypothetical sidechain enabled EQ?  I don't necessarily want to change the compression settings on the guitar.

Anyway, I will give Bitflipper and Kenneth's suggestions a try and see how I get on :-)  A multiband compressor with sidechaining sounds like what I need.

Many thanks,

Mike T.