Trouble with busses and side chaining to new plugin...

[guitardood]

Hello All,
I've just purchased a new plugin from Waves called "Vocal Rider". This plug is essentially an automated fader on a track that rides itself at whatever threshold you set in relation to a side-chained input. It's basically for auto-riding a vocal to keep it just a hair above the rest of the mix, but I'm sure you can see as I did that there are other potential uses for this.

My problem is: When I route the audio that will feed the side chain to busses, it seems that DP is losing its mind and every action then becomes a 5-minute beach ball event.

My configuration example is a project with 4 sub busses Drums/Bass, Rhythm Guitars/Keys, Lead Guitar, Lead Vocal. I've put the Rider plug on the Lead Vocal bus and on the Lead Guitar bus. Next I routed the Drums,RhythmGt to SCBus1 and assigned the side chain for the Lead Guitar Rider to SCBus1. Next I routed sends from the Drums,RhythmGt,Lead guitar to SCBus2 and finally set the Lead Vocal Rider's side chain to SCBus2. With this configuration, for some reason, DP is hanging for up to 5 minutes at every single change (i.e. add a plugin, change an input or output, arm a track for record) and sometimes resulting in the MOTU Audio System shutting itself down. The thing that is interesting is that I've tried deleting the Rider plugs from the mix, yet the sluggishness/flakiness remains as long as those routings remain. As soon as I clear the above mentioned routings, DP is back to normal.

I realize the plugin is kind of a lazy man's tool, but the mix I did with it, despite all the hanging/crashing, sounded better than anything I've done by hand, and I would kind of like to keep it in my arsenal.

I guess my question is: Has anyone experienced anything similar and/or found a fix/workaround. I've got a support request into Waves and am planning on contacting MOTU on Monday, but thought it couldn't hurt to ask here.

Thanks for any/all help, comments.

[guitardood]

An update and temporary workaround.

I've come up with a bit of a workaround for this, albeit with a little latency. The UAD-2 Apollo has 2 stereo virtual Ins/Outs that work similar effects sends and returns. In my example above I just replace the internal side chain busses 1 & 2 with Virtual sends/returns 1 & 2 and am able to get by for now. Opened a tech note with MOTU regarding this as well.

[guitardood]

Guess I'm all alone on this post, LOL! But I thought I'd keep posting updates in case anyone else has similar trouble in the future.

According to support at Waves, side chain is not supported under Digital Performer for ANY of Waves plugins. I've voiced my concern back to support and made a official feature request, FWIW.

Still waiting to hear from MOTU, but I have a feeling because of the above that it is pretty much out of their hands and not necessarily their problem.

In the mean time, the usage of the UAD-2's virtual Ins/Outs seem to be working out for this particular plugin, latency and in turn slight inaccuracy notwithstanding.

[billf]

I don't have this specific Waves plugin, but Waves support for DP is always a question mark. Do you happen to have one of the officially supported DAW's? It would be an interesting test to try.

[guitardood]

I don't have this specific Waves plugin, but Waves support for DP is always a question mark. Do you happen to have one of the officially supported DAW's? It would be an interesting test to try.

That's a good idea to try it, just for the heck of it. I do have PT11. I'll give it a go and post my findings later.

[guitardood]

Just another update...

As I happen to own both Logic X and Pro Tools 11, I tried this particular plugin, Vocal Rider, in both of them and it worked as documented and expected.

I retested again in DP after trashing preferences and still the same problem. Set the sidechain on the plugin to bus specifically set up for this, DP loses it's mind and beach balls at every turn. Reset the sidechain input to 'None' and DP is back to normal.

Unfortunately, the reply from Waves regarding DP support for sidechaining was not very encouraging. A quote: "you need to understand though that many times we cannot support certain features because of technical limitations, we would gladly support side-chain in DP, it's non of our interest to limit the plug-ins capabilities in certain DAWs, sometimes however there is not much choice".

Even though I'm a programmer, I'm not specifically an audio plugin developer and can't either agree or disagree with that statement, but I think if DP has the capability available, there should be a way for plug-in developers to utilize that functionality.

Kind of disheartening since DP has supported sidechaining since at least 2006, according to this article in SOS.

I explained all of this to MOTU. Hopefully some good will come out of my experience.

As for the plug itself, without sidechaining, it is still a pretty cool plug that can ride a track and level the volume based on a few threshold settings and sound much better on vocals and things like guitar or keyboard solos as opposed to compressing the hell out of them and it will write the automation data to the track which you can then customize. Just another tool in the arsenal.

So, sorry for my messy long post, but hopefully it will help someone.

[Shooshie]

Kind of disheartening since DP has supported sidechaining since at least 2006, according to this article in SOS.

DP has been sidechaining in the Dynamics Plugin since at least January, 2001, the first time I noticed that it did.

Waves used to support sidechaining in their plugins by way of stereo channels. A stereo channel plugin became a mono-plugin with sidechain. You specified which channel was the signal and which the sidechain through a little drop-down menu. I think some of them still work like that, but I haven't looked lately.

However, since it's come to Waves telling you what is and isn't supported in DP, I had to get involved and try some myself. I chose to try H-Comp, because I know it has a side-chain channel menu, the way side chaining is supposed to work, the way it works in DP's Dynamics plugin. It worked. No problems at all, just honest-to-goodness side-chain ducking and limiting and such. Works like a charm. That's the AU version of H-Comp, btw.

Next, I tried it with the Vocal Rider, which is the plugin you're talking about. It worked fine as long as I used a track that didn't create a feedback loop. So, in a mix with vocal, guitar, and percussion, I could use the guitar or percussion tracks as side-chain tracks, but not the submaster bus, which contained the vocals.

I don't know how other DAWs handle feedback loops like that, but DP has never allowed them in any kind of routing. Your options are to sidechain all the other tracks, but not attempt recursive sidechaining with the same vocals you're riding in the Vocal Rider plugin.

So... I don't know what Waves means by "they do not support sidechaining in DP," but it appears to work here, as long as you don't want a feedback loop. Bear in mind that I carry a bit of a grudge when it comes to Waves tech support and their "non-support of DP." The offices at Waves harbor people who in turn carry a grudge against DP. Years ago I went through a bit of a tiff with them because of the stupidity of the Waves techs on the phones in that office. They deprived me of the use of the MultiMaximizer plugin for nearly a year, with my calling about once a month and always getting derision and put-downs for using DP, while telling me it was all DP's fault that the plugin would not install on my system. (never mind that it was installation I was talking about, not DP. The plugin also "would not install" for Logic, Final Cut Pro, or anything else.) Only when I managed to catch a programmer on the phone, who assigned another programmer the task of rewriting their obviously failed installer routine, did I finally get to use my plugin, which ran fine in DP, btw. Their tech support had prevented me from using it, because they were too lazy to research the problem, and would rather just say "it won't work in Digital Performer. You should switch to a real DAW like Logic." They literally laughed at me, etc., etc., but I've told this story so many times in this forum that I'm sure it's getting stale.

Still, it's kind of suspicious when I hear them say "that isn't supported in DP." I just proved them wrong. It works just fine here.

Shooshie

[Shooshie]

PS: do you really need recursive side-chaining? Why do you feed the vocal back into itself? It already rides that vocal, and you can set the sensitivity of the ride. Side-chaining the vocal to itself doesn't really accomplish much unless it's some kind of hyper-ride or hyper-compression you want, which is easy enough to do other ways.

I'm not up on all the side-chaining tricks that engineers use, so maybe I just don't understand how important it is to do feedback loops like this, but my understanding of side-chaining is that you use a signal you want to duck or ride, and feed it into the attenuating circuit. It's like having the threshold jumping at the attacks and releases of the other instruments, which can bring the attenuated signal (vocal, especially ) up or down to compensate. That's the only way I've used it, anyway.

[bayswater]

So... I don't know what Waves means by "they do not support sidechaining in DP," but it appears to work here, as long as you don't want a feedback loop.

I've had this conversation with them more than once. What they mean is, the testing with DP didn't pass, or that they might not even have tested it with DP at all. In specific cases, it might work, or it might not. If it doesn't, they aren't going to make any attempt to help you. I've been using Waves plugins pretty regularly with DSP-Q, although Waves will tell you they don't support it at all.

We have been warned. I guess Waves is still confident enough that we are more likely to choose a DAW that works with Waves, than we are to choose a plugin that works with our DAW.

[Shooshie]

We have been warned....

Yeah, we've been warned not to call Waves Tech Support, unless you want to deal with buttheads who take a certain pride in dissing one of the oldest and best DAWs on the planet.

[guitardood]

PS: do you really need recursive side-chaining? Why do you feed the vocal back into itself? It already rides that vocal, and you can set the sensitivity of the ride. Side-chaining the vocal to itself doesn't really accomplish much unless it's some kind of hyper-ride or hyper-compression you want, which is easy enough to do other ways.

I'm not up on all the side-chaining tricks that engineers use, so maybe I just don't understand how important it is to do feedback loops like this, but my understanding of side-chaining is that you use a signal you want to duck or ride, and feed it into the attenuating circuit. It's like having the threshold jumping at the attacks and releases of the other instruments, which can bring the attenuated signal (vocal, especially ) up or down to compensate. That's the only way I've used it, anyway.

Hey Shooshie,
I think you may be misunderstanding my routing. I'm definitely not doing any feedback loops, especially since DP doesn't really like that. BTW, if I haven't mentioned, I'm using Waves 9.3.

Essentially I have the drums and bass going to one submix and rhythm guitars/keys/pads going to a second submix and finally a lead guitar track, a lead synth track, a lead vocal track and a back vocal submix. Each of those have their main outputs set to my master bus. So I essentially have 6 outs to the master bus as follows:



The idea here having the Lead Guitar and Lead Synth (which appear at different points in the track) ride the combination of Drums/Bass & Guitars/Keys. Then have the Lead Vocal & Background Vocal ride the Combination of the previous 4 sub mixes. With this config, DP starts giving beach balls at every operation, even just arming a track for record.

I've tried a simplified version of this with only the vocal rider on the Lead Vocal alone and still have the same trouble. As soon as I reset the sidechain on the ALL of the vocal rider plugs, DP is back to normal. Interestingly, if I set a single one of the above source busses, Drums/Bass as an example, to the sidechain. The sluggishness does not occur. Perhaps what I'm experiencing has something to do with bus nesting levels.

FWIW, I also tried H-Comp with the above routing, and get the same beach ball response which gets exponentially worse as I add H-Comp with a sidechain on tracks that are not feeding the sidechain busses.

I've only been using DP for a few years now, coming from Sonar on Windows and when I made the move away from Windows to Mac, I tried to do my homework and test all the DAWs available and picked DP as it seemed the most comprehensive not only feature-wise, but feature-wise history. When Waves told me they didn't support sidechain on DP (it does say this on their compatibility page, but nowhere in the manual or sales literature), I was surprised and did some follow up reading on DP and its sidechain capability and posted the SOS article I found, just as an example.

Also, just for kicks, here are the my bundle configs. I'm pretty sure there are no loops or overlaps. Note: I've increased my number of busses in "Configure Studio Settings" from the default of 32 to 72.

[guitardood]

We have been warned....

Yeah, we've been warned not to call Waves Tech Support, unless you want to deal with buttheads who take a certain pride in dissing one of the oldest and best DAWs on the planet.

Could not agree more on this one.

[Shooshie]

Sorry, I thought I read that you side chained with a bus that was receiving the channel the plugin was on. I probably misread that. Well, that leaves us, then, with the problem that sidechaining the vocal rider is working fine here, but not there. THAT means it could be a few different things. Maybe a corrupted file... I don't know. Maybe worth loading it into a new file, then importing your V-Racks. But I wouldn't really know where to start without being there, so you decide.

Shooshie

[guitardood]

Sorry, I thought I read that you side chained with a bus that was receiving the channel the plugin was on. I probably misread that. Well, that leaves us, then, with the problem that sidechaining the vocal rider is working fine here, but not there. THAT means it could be a few different things. Maybe a corrupted file... I don't know. Maybe worth loading it into a new file, then importing your V-Racks. But I wouldn't really know where to start without being there, so you decide.

Shooshie

I believe it may have something to do with a combination of bus->bus->bus recursion and the number of busses I have defined. But, rather than spend a whole lot of time trying to work through a possible bug, especially without any help from Waves, the workaround I'm using seems to work well enough for now. Essentially replacing internal DP busses (SCBus1 & SCBus2 from examples above) with the UAD-2's Virtual ins/outs. Has a bit of latency going through the interface, but so far, for my purposes, it's close enough.

Thanks for commenting, though. Always helps to have another perspective.

[Maxxy]

I have sometimes found that in complex bussing projects DP can get a bit caught out if there is more than one instance of the same bus in the Bundles window.

Say you have a Bundles template with 62 stereo busses nicely laid out ... and you then want to create an aux send channel for a particular track from a blank send in the mixer window... If you scroll to the bottom of the pop up (skipping over all the sends available there) and add that aux channel by selecting 'New Aux Via New Stereo Bundle' e.g. you choose Bus 11-12, Bundles will then create another 11-12 bus .... in other words you now have 2 duplicate busses in Bundles using 11-12

If you then find some bussing weirdness going on this may be the cause ... 11-12 might be an Aux channel input and also, simultaneously, inadvertently being used as a plug-in sidechain input....not good

I have sometimes found it useful to wipe all duplicate instances of busses from the Bundles window... and then go through the project carefully looking for italicised sends in the mixer and Aux channel inputs in the TO window. Sends now going to a deleted bus... going to nowhere... and Aux channels with lost inputs.... can all be reassigned to the same and only bus with that name in Bundles

Another point ... and I'm not 100% about this ...is that choosing a source input in a plug-in with side chain input *usually* shows already assigned inputs in bold ...but not always... e.g. MOTU Dynamics plug does not show any side chain inputs in bold.... so you just need to be a bit careful not to choose a source that is already used somewhere else

Perhaps something to check?