Cool YouTube Video... using Dynamic EQ and Sidechain to make "space" for vocal

[James Steele]

Okay... here's an interesting video. This guy is using Cubase and an EQ plug that comes with it that allows for using multiple sidechain inputs on the same instance of the plug-in, but it can be duplicated using multiple EQ plugs in series apparently.

First here's the video:


It's good stuff and I guess there are tools like TrackSpacer that can do this kind of thing.

It got me thinking. I don't really deal with material like that with a Rhodes, etc. but more hard rock/metal. I've heard of heavy rock/metal mixes where some will duck the rhythm guitars with a compressor keying off the lead vocal. Whenever the lead vocal is present, it "turns down" the guitars by a certain amount and brings them back up. But this concept is more subtle and perhaps better in some cases.

So did a little experiment and put an instance of Kirchhoff EQ (got it on sale with a voucher) on my stereo rhythm guitar bus, and then set it up a dynamic EQ at about 1.6k with a pretty broad Q of 1.4k and then set it to respond to the Lead Vocal track so that every time the lead vocal was present, the frequencies competing with the lead vocal were attenuated. The results were pretty good. Kind of an "Aha!" moment for me. I've never been an expert mixer... I'd leave that to someone better than me... so trying something like this is new. I noticed that the EQ plugin only sees buses as sidechain inputs, so I had to make a mono bus first, then assign a send on my lead vocal track (pre fader) to that bus, and THEN choose that bus for sidechain input.

Oh well... muddling though it, but pretty cool. I'm sure a lot of this is old hat for the more experienced mixers out there.

[James Steele]

Tried to see if I could do this with the MOTU Dynamic EQ but I could not find anywhere to set a sidechain input on it?

[FMiguelez]

Very cool mixing workflow. I hear EDM guys make extensive use of it.
Melda has a very nice plugin that tells you which tracks are fighting each other and at which freqs.

Tried to see if I could do this with the MOTU Dynamic EQ but I could not find anywhere to set a sidechain input on it?

Except for the MW Gate, no MOTU plugin has sidechain inputs at all...

[mini rant]
That is exactly what I've meant every time I complained about DP plugins... they are just too early-2000, too old, and they don't really sound very good either (the MW limiter is horrible). I mean, what do we expect when the MW EQ doesn't even have a global i/o gain knob?

A complete plugin overhaul is so past due!
They'd all become instantly 10 times more useful and useable if MOTU added sidechain inputs and SC filters, as well as M/S facilities to all relevant plugs. That would be a good start.
[/mini rant]

[James Steele]

Agreed. There's a lot of things that could be improved. Plus the MOTU plug-in GUIs need to be re-sizable already. When I was using the MOTU Dynamic EQ, the FFT display was just very small, even on my 43" Samsung 4K TV that is my main monitor. With the higher resolution modern displays, resizable GUI is just become a standard feature nowadays.

I've have a few other DAWs installed on my Mac Studio now: Pro Tools, Cubase Pro 12, and Logic Pro. As I mess around with each of them (I don't do any serious work on them as I just can't get around quickly in them), I *do* find pretty cool features in all of them that I wish DP had.

For instance Cubase has something called Control Room. I was just experimenting with it now. I imagine I could recreate much of this function in DP by using auxes and setting up some routing. One of the cool things it's just for "monitoring" and doesn't affect what's on your main stereo master fader, so I can for example put my ARC 3 plugin on an insert on the "Control Room" section and have my room correction without it affecting levels on my main stereo buss, nor needing to remember to bypass it when I decide to bounce.

The other thing is that Cubase just seems to run like a bat out of hell. The GUI feels ridiculously responsive and fast. I find it very intriguing and between it and Logic, I feel more drawn to Cubase. Of course in reality, the learning curve on another DAW is just crazy and who has the time for that? Pro Tools is finally starting to go M1 Native, so I'm probably smarter to learn that if I'm going to learn a secondary DAW.

But yes... MOTU kind of needs to step it up. They've made good progress in DP11... but they're still lagging behind in some areas.

[HCMarkus]

https://www.wavesfactory.com/audio-plugins/trackspacer/

AS Native.

[James Steele]

https://www.wavesfactory.com/audio-plugins/trackspacer/

AS Native.

Yeah... that was mentioned and I'm going to go check that out and download the demo. I just was also interested in this method, too, as I was reading in the comments on the videos that there's times where one method may work better than the other.

[HCMarkus]

https://www.wavesfactory.com/audio-plugins/trackspacer/

AS Native.

Yeah... that was mentioned and I'm going to go check that out and download the demo. I just was also interested in this method, too, as I was reading in the comments on the videos that there's times where one method may work better than the other.

Missed your reference. Lots of ways to skin that cat.

[James Steele]

https://www.wavesfactory.com/audio-plugins/trackspacer/

Just played around with the demo a little... and A/B'd between the dyanmic EQ in Kirchhoff EQ and Trackspacer. They both sound good. It's interesting... I can see times when one might be preferable over the other because as I was dialing them both in I got them pretty much sounding the same... any preference would just be a matter of taste. I'm kinda wanting this plug now just to have another option. The ability to use the low-cut and hi-cut to zero in on a narrower band is very helpful!

Either method is sounding good. Subjectively, for this particular situation, I find I prefer the what I have dialed in with Kirchhoff EQ. But again... it's such a small difference. Again, I'm using the lead vocal to key the EQ on a stereo aux of a doubletracked rhythm guitar part. Guitars panned left and right and very distorted crunchy Marshall type sound.

[James Steele]

Missed your reference.

Actually you didn't... sorry. I didn't mention it in this post. I'm exhausted and so not completing my thoughts very well in writing. What I should have said was that Trackspacer was mentioned in the comments on that YouTube video. Brain function not so great right now!

[sayatnova]

Great info here, thank you James for posting it. This also works well with compressors/multiband. Although Kirchoff does have ratios, as well...

[Michael Canavan]

Except for the MW Gate, no MOTU plugin has sidechain inputs at all...

The MOTU Dynamics plug in does have sidechain as well, the fact the dynamics EQ does not is big miss for sure. Trackspacer does exactly what the Cubase plug in does in the video though.

[FMiguelez]

Except for the MW Gate, no MOTU plugin has sidechain inputs at all...

The MOTU Dynamics plug in does have sidechain as well, the fact the dynamics EQ does not is big miss for sure. Trackspacer does exactly what the Cubase plug in does in the video though.

Ha! You're right. I forgot that one. So it is just those 2 DP plugins that have SC, yes?

That Dynamics plugin works well, but IMO it would benefit from a true duck mode added as a tab in there

[sayatnova]

Okay... here's an interesting video. This guy is using Cubase and an EQ plug that comes with it that allows for using multiple sidechain inputs on the same instance of the plug-in, but it can be duplicated using multiple EQ plugs in series apparently.

First here's the video:


It's good stuff and I guess there are tools like TrackSpacer that can do this kind of thing.

It got me thinking. I don't really deal with material like that with a Rhodes, etc. but more hard rock/metal. I've heard of heavy rock/metal mixes where some will duck the rhythm guitars with a compressor keying off the lead vocal. Whenever the lead vocal is present, it "turns down" the guitars by a certain amount and brings them back up. But this concept is more subtle and perhaps better in some cases.

So did a little experiment and put an instance of Kirchhoff EQ (got it on sale with a voucher) on my stereo rhythm guitar bus, and then set it up a dynamic EQ at about 1.6k with a pretty broad Q of 1.4k and then set it to respond to the Lead Vocal track so that every time the lead vocal was present, the frequencies competing with the lead vocal were attenuated. The results were pretty good. Kind of an "Aha!" moment for me. I've never been an expert mixer... I'd leave that to someone better than me... so trying something like this is new. I noticed that the EQ plugin only sees buses as sidechain inputs, so I had to make a mono bus first, then assign a send on my lead vocal track (pre fader) to that bus, and THEN choose that bus for sidechain input.

Oh well... muddling though it, but pretty cool. I'm sure a lot of this is old hat for the more experienced mixers out there.

Hey James, I am trying to replicate this using the Kirchoff EQ (1.6 from PA) in DP 11.21. I am having trouble getting it to work:

The Kirchoff EQ does not seem to see stereo busses, as you mentioned. So, I made a mono buss send from a track (track 1)and set that to prefader. I put the Kirchoff EQ on a second track and set the side chain to Buss 1. On this second track I set a bell filtre to be dynamic with a range of -6 just to see the effect work...

When I play the first track I see no signal coming in to the detector section of the band I set up on the second track... How did you get this to work?

Thanks for any help!

[James Steele]

Hey James, I am trying to replicate this using the Kirchoff EQ (1.6 from PA) in DP 11.21. I am having trouble getting it to work:

The Kirchoff EQ does not seem to see stereo busses, as you mentioned. So, I made a mono buss send from a track (track 1)and set that to prefader. I put the Kirchoff EQ on a second track and set the side chain to Buss 1. On this second track I set a bell filtre to be dynamic with a range of -6 just to see the effect work...

When I play the first track I see no signal coming in to the detector section of the band I set up on the second track... How did you get this to work?

I don't know Kirchoff EQ that well, so I had to muddle around to find it. Main thing is to click the little dot for the EQ band on the graph and when the box with the controls appears, click the little "D" for Dynamic. If I recall, not all the EQ types have this. I'm not sure, but don't think the hi shelf or low shelf do, but I could be wrong.

kirchhoff.jpg (92.04 KiB) Viewed 2853 times

I'm totally a beginner at messing with this and really need to read about this EQ because I only used stereo mode and I think you can use mid side so that only the center part of a stereo track gets attenuated and it leaves the sides alone? I will need to read the manual and find some tutorial online before I even begin to understand that.

[James Steele]

Trackspacer does exactly what the Cubase plug in does in the video though.

I would agree.. mostly. The only difference I can see is:

• The plug-in in Cubase can accept more than one sidechain input at a time. In one instance he set up a dynamic EQ that keyed off the vocal track and another that keyed off the bass guitar track. So to do that with Track Spacer you'd need to use two instances of it?

• In the EQ it seems as if you have more precise control over exactly the type of EQ curve and what frequencies will be affected. Track spacer is great for sure and the low cut and hi cut filters it adds does give you much of that needed control.