Hi All,
I know there are some old posts around this… But I am looking for a good high quality side-chain compression for ducking. (so ducking bass sounds out of the way of kick drums… or more ala French house)
I have tried putting SC3 on a buss as recommended on one of the other forum posts, but this seems to create a 3 channel panner and I still can’t work out how to send an aux send to the side chain input…
Does anyone have some suggestions? (BTW needs to be LADSPA or LV2)
cheers
Allan
Hey Allan,
I went to search on KVR Audio, selected requirements being ‘effect plugin’, ‘LV2’ / ‘LADSPA’, ‘free’.
Results for LV2:
Results for LADSPA:
just to mention the free ones, for little pricing you’ll get much much more options to stagger your decisionmaking 
Some of those may not be compressors but rather a gate or other sidechained effect and I haven’t checked them. I guess easiest way is to sort them by the ‘average user rating’ shown on each page if the plugin is rated yet. I believe a friend to have mentioned the ReaComp by Cockos positively.
I’d be glad to hear your opinion on those you try!
Kind regards,
Wanja
well and the selection will depend on your OS of course, some run on either Linux / OSX / Windows only
it is not clear why the LADSPA searched returned any of those results. I checked three of them and none of them are LADSPA-format plugins.
that’s correct paul, something went wrong with the LADSPA-search. Checked again and the only result now is Mixbus, rather expensive. Well stick to the LV2-selection above. I guess reviews of those would be great.
well and those three listed for LV2 don’t work as compressors. Maybe the Pilgrim has some feed for a sidechain, but not an obvious one. So, not much worth mentioning after all.
Mixbus is my tool of choice for this honestly. Otherwise I would use SC3 as you described, or possibly in an external host and route as an insert to it from Ardour.
Seabladethanks everybody… seablade… I think you might be right on the mixbus front… not that expensive really but I’ll wait for the 3.x version to come out… (cheaper than buying high quality outboard gear) … I have some entry level DBX’s, Behringer and an ART compressor… but not really what I’m looking for on a buss mix… I was hoping that I could sidechain with some of the linuxdsp stuff … but it doesn’t look like it’s possible (hint hint linuxdsp 
) …
The only other thing I can think of is running the calf sidechain compressor, with the sidechain in bandpass mode and run this in parallel, not sure if I’ll get the result I’m looking for.
I made sc3 work on a 3 input 2 output channel … doesn’t work on a buss though… if I can get sc1 to work on a mono (or actually this will be stereo I think) channel then I can do this channel by channel rather than a buss… the sc3 compressor seems pretty transparent … so this won’t provide colour. (something like the fc70 with a sidechain would be amazing) but at least I can get the ducking thing going okay and apply more tone on the bus to glue the whole thing together. … although I have a feeling that mixbus will probably be the best option here for workflow and possibly sound quality (no offence to Mr Harris)
so finally it looks like the calf sidechain compressor can be used for mono sidechain compression … sc3 does have a little bit of pumping and so does calf — but that’s what ducking compression is going to create… deliberately… still can’t do it over a bus and will have to deliberately create stereo channels for mono with a ducking compressor and 3 in 2 out channels for stereo with a ducking compressor… So mixbus is looking like a good option .
there should be mono to steroe and stereo to mono plugins, i use these for mono channels when putting stereo plugins on them,
sending an aux send is pretty easy, right click in the plug in area and click new send, a dialog should pop up, and you can find the input of the plugin side chain input.
ardour 3 is alot easier with routing than 2, the way it displays the routing reminds me of yamahas ls9 and m1 digital desk.
ardour 3 provides automatic mono->stereo conversion when needed. it does not do stereo -> mono.
ah i didnt know that, i have been working on a project file from ardour 2 that has smono stereo splitter in the tracks