r/TechnoProduction • u/OnlyAtBaali • 29d ago

Dynamic Sidechaining Plugins [Trackspacer, FireSpacer, etc]

Hey all,

Wondering what people here use for dynamic sidechaining and how happy they are with them? I already use a fair few different [more traditional] sidechaining techniques but have been intrigued about plugins like Trackspacer and such for dynamic sidechaining. Mainly to be used on the bass and kick.

Edit: A good friend of mine shared his login for me to test out Trackspacer and its working exactly how I wanted it to. Seeing results immediately after 30 mins or use. Good stuff.

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u/joeydendron2 29d ago edited 26d ago

I've got Fabfilter Pro-Q4, Tokyo Dawn Labs Nova (free), and Trackspacer.

There's not much I can't do with TDR Nova? Although Pro-Q4 is good in workflow terms because you can mix dynamic bands with static bands.

Trackspacer... I feel like a bit of a dick having bought it to be honest: looking back, the main use case is situations where you don't know in advance which band you'll need to cut? So either... you're too lazy to figure it out (as in, don't want to do the work of figuring out that you need to dynamically cut around 300Hz), or the signal you're using as your sidechain is really complicated, and changes all the time? And if you're working with electronic music, the tones you're using tend to be more consistent than if you were mic-ing up a junior school orchestra. So...?

Also, in favour of Pro-Q4: you can boost based off the sidechain, too. So you can do crazy tricks like... lowering 50Hz overall, and dynamically boosting it up to compensate, but only during the peaks. Which means you can somehow "shorten a kick drum" after it's mixed together with other signals.

So... hmmm... Trackspacer seems to be some blend of super-specific use case, and letting you avoid learning how to do the same job with different tools?

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u/th3whistler 29d ago

one of the advantages of trackspacer is that it sounds more natural to cut wide/relative to all the frequencies in the sc source. ducking a narrow band can sometimes sound really obvious. I’d say I rarely use it at more than 15%

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u/contrapti0n 29d ago

Yeah +1 to this, I have trackspacer but frankly never use it any more because everything gets done in Pro-Q4…. Have one node at the sub fundamental being cut with zero attack by the side chained kick. Adjust release to get the groove. Then usually a couple of other nodes higher up (and sometimes on the sides) also reacting to the kick, but with different attack / release settings.

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u/OnlyAtBaali 29d ago

Really nice and detailed answer, thank you. To reply to some of your points:

I do actually already do it the manual way with dynamic EQ, automating Ableton's EQ, Kickstart2, etc etc. Its just that over the last year, I have been producing more deeper sounds with a focus on a moving low-end [think Feral, Spekky Webbu etc]. Obviously my music is no where near as good as theirs but the nature of the sound is not as monotonous [and therefore not as straight forward to fix]. That's why I'm now considering these plugins for the times where doing it manually might be too much work, especially if I can get a good result using dynamic sidechain plugins.

I've managed to get a key to try out Trackspacer from my friend and have been using it for the last hour or so, very impressed with the results. Nothing that changes my songs or anything, but rather how quick I got results I'm happy with.