Hi, I’m working on a game with proximity voice chat. I’m setting up a multiband side chain ducking system so that the voice chat ducks my SFX bus across 3 freq bands, with more ducking emphasis on the mid band.
My issue is that I am having to feed a ton of dialogue gain into the side chain of the multiband dynamics processer just to get it to start compressing. I’ve had to set the dialogue side chain send to +10db and set the “pre-gain” of the multiband dynamics plugin to “+30db” just to see any sort of gain reduction. With all this extra gain I’m seeing max 8db of gain reduction, there are time where I’d like to get a little more out of it if I could.
My dialogue meters in game at about -22LUFS and I feel that should be plenty of signal to feed the sidechain of the multiband dynamics in order to get good gain reduction on my SFX bus.
My question… What am I missing? Why is the side chain needing so much gain in order to do any amount of ducking.
Screen Cap VIDEO
Hi,
Thanks for providing the video demonstrating the issue. I’ve found a couple of bugs with the multiband dynamics effect that I’ve passed to the development team - the ones that are giving you problems here are as follows:
- The amount of attenuation applied is less than it should be
- The visual display for attenuation (i.e. the red bar on the side of the band) isn’t visually accurate to the amount of attenuation applied
To start with, in your case I’d recommend increasing the ratio property for the band. If that’s not enough, you may need to apply additional gain to the sidechain signal before it enters the multiband dynamics effect. The easiest way to do this would be to increase the gain before the sidechain, and then decrease it by the same amount afterwards. Alternatively, you could send the sidechain signal event to a return where you increase the gain, and then mute the signal following the sidechain so the gain-increased sidechain signal isn’t audible.
Let me know whether these workarounds address the issue for you.
Thank you for the reply Leah! You are definitely right the metering doesn’t appear to be accurate to the amount of reduction I’m hearing. I’m also not liking the way they attack and release, the release seems to hold on for a long time even with low settings. Also what does the “Sidechain link” button do? When it’s on it seems to use a hybrid of the sidechain and standard input in the detector circuit for ducking - which is pretty odd behavior.
For now I think I’m going to just use the 3 band EQ with spectral sidechain inputs for each band. I seem to get better results with that.
Thank you much