If I understand it right you have individual weapon events that are referenced inside a “main” weapon event? FMOD assigns referenced events to the parent’s bank by default as seen here: https://fmod.com/resources/documentation-studio?version=2.0&page=getting-events-into-your-game.html#including-referenced-events-in-banks
You would have a few ways to handle this:
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Create new weapon events and reference them in the main weapon event. Assign the main weapon event to a new bank. Player’s without the DLC will load the old bank, with DLC you can load the new bank with the main event instead.
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Do the same as above but instead of assigning the main weapon event to a new bank, assign it to the already existing bank. You will just overwrite the old bank with the weapon DLC bank. The advantage of doing this is your game size will be a bit smaller.
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The more complex option that will maybe save some asset space is to disable the
Inlude referenced events in banksoption, assign the already existing individual referenced weapon events to a separate “non-dlc” bank, push an update to your game including this bank (probably not possible). For the DLC create new weapon events and this time assign them to a new “dlc” bank, also edit your main weapon event, include the referenced events and assign it to a new or existing bank. In this case you are only adding the new weapon sounds to the dlc bank, instead of including all referenced events in the new bank again.
I think all methods would work without needing to create empty placeholder events as you suggested. Maybe someone in the community or the FMOD team can give you more hands-on insight in this, I’m only interpreting the documentation I’m not 100% sure I’m right. Haven’t got the chance to test this yet.