Question

Hi. It's more of a bug, in my eyes, but Presonus support told me to post it as a "feature request". Oh well.

When I have two tracks sidechained, for instance track 1 is feeding signal into a compressor on track 2, track 2 is no longer affected by the Console Shaper in the Mix FX slot on the Main Out master channel (Console Shaper or any other Mix FX plugin, like Softube Tape).

I understand it's because Studio One doesn't want to affect the same signal twice and it's seeing that track 1 is sending its already wet signal to another channel. But the thing is that the signal from track 1 is only used to trigger a compressor on track 2 - i still want track 2 to be treated with the Mix FX plugin.

Is it possible for you to make it so that clicking the "Sidechain" button on an insert plugin (e.g., the compressor on track 2) allows Mix FX on the parent buss channel to still affect the track with a plugin receiving sidechain signal?

Answer 1

What if track 2 is a bus and you use passthrough?

Answer 2

I just tested it. A work around is to put your sidechained compressor on a bus, with track two feeding that bus. For example if you want your kick to duck your bass, send your bass to a bass bus and put the compressor on the bass bus. Send the kick to that compressor's sidechain. Your master mixfx will still work on the bass track in this scenerio. But you're right, if the sidechained comp is on a track, that track will not be affected by the mix fx. They should fix this.

Answer 3

Thanks for checking, Ryan. I already know that. Unfortunately that only works sometimes. I often separately sidechain things that are feeding into the same bus, my routing can get a bit complex at times, so this isn't the most convenient workaround. Still a workaround either way. I really hope Presonus fixes this asap.

Answer 4

Up you go! Just wanted to post the same feature request myself ... and I am actually surprised it is not that requested. Not sure of people are not using the Mix FX that much, or side chaining that much, or simply have not noticed.

It's quite annoying, especially since one of the reason I got Studio One was for the Mix FX engine. But this (arguably) bug makes the Mix FX basically unusable for me, as I use a lot of side chaining, from regular volume ducking, to spectral ducking (track spacer like), vocoding or similar effect also use side chaining... Ryan's workaround is not really feasible when you need to create duplicates for tens of tracks, it becomes a huge mess.

I don't know, to me it should be pretty easy to detect if the side chained signal is used for detection only, or it actually passes trough and is heard. Or at the worst, a setting for the side chain could be added (similar you how you can say if it should be pre or post fader), where you can specify that manually, which would then tell to the Mix FX plugin if it should affect the target channel or not (I would assume most of the time you would want it to be affected, i never had, nor can I now think of a situation in which I would not want to).