Unsuccessfully trying to side chain

[TaylorJMcBride]

Hey Guys,

I have a play that I am mixing in audition. There is ambient music playing in the background of the scene, which I am trying to create a ducking effect for so that when the charaters speak, the music will attenuate. Well, there's really just one main character, a sock puppet, talking to himself, if it would just duck the music when he speaks, I would be happy. There is also other random ghost voices that come from the corners of the room but I'm not that worried about ducking under them, they only have a few lines. BUT I CANT GET EITHER TO WORK.

I created an effect on the effects rack for the music track and moved the two white dots to a perfectly flat -25 limit at the top of the chart. Then I clicked the side chain button indicating there will be a mono input. Then I set the mono track of the speaking character to have a send track (volume up to +0) and aimed it at the processing effect on the music track.

I notice absolutely no difference. None at all. Also, I've now noticed that even if I try and go into the music track and manually create an envelope and I will draw out the ducking by hand, THE MUSIC WILL NOT GO DOWN. I feel like I'm going totally crazy here.

The effects rack has stopped showing input and output meters for amplitutde for this track as well so I can't visually confirm what I know, which is that the music is steady volume the whole time, not ducking at all.

Furthermore, there are many heavy reverb effects in this track so I have most of the tracks set to render. Audition crashed twice earlier. Is there perhaps a software issue? Am I going crazy?

Please help. I followed the instructions as best I can from Jason Levine's wonderful youtube videos and also followed another tutorial.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Sorry if this is obvious, but have you done this?

If the whole thing's turned off, then nothing will happen!

[TaylorJMcBride]

Yes sir I have. Thank you for thinking closely about my issue.

[TaylorJMcBride]

I had a bus track, which contained a small room reverb to add the effect of a room echo.

I routed all the voices as well as the room reverb echo bus track into a new bus track. I created the new bus track specifically to send a stronger signal to the dynamics processing ducking effect on the music. I sent Bus B as a send to the ducking effect. I also lowered the attack times and raised the release times in the dynamics processor. I also increased the send amount by around +5 dB. Further i lowered the curve on the dynamics processor so -35 instead of -25.

I now find that at the very least there is a ducking effect. Its not as much as I want but its there. Also if I now have the option of leaving Bus B unmuted which effectively doubles all sounds accept the music contributing to it being pushed to the back. I also added a custom parametric EQ to the music to take some bass and other frequencies out and give it more of a boom box analog radio tupe feel while softening it.

Im starting to think thst even though I have 8 gigs of RAM my system is struggling to perform a reverb on one ghost voice track, a full reverb on another ghost voice track and the ducking effect all in real time (even though ive activated pre rendering). Im going to try and mix down the ghost stems in the wave form editor to include the ghostly reverb to make it easier on the system.

Because when i mix the entire session down I get static. A whole new issue...

[TaylorJMcBride]

I was able to mix down the session by removing a lot of the effects that take processing and applying them to the stem inside the wave form so they did not have to be rendered.

But this side chainging ducking issue is very frustrating.

What I am seeing is that sometimes, it side chains and ducks the music just fine, but other times, no ducking at all, I can't locate what setting is off, but the strangest thing is when I watch the effects rack for the track effects it does not show anything in the input/output meters, so I am not able to confirm or deny what I know to be true at those times, the music is not ducking at all. But then it will be ok and I'll go into wave form and come back and suddenly it no longer works.

[TaylorJMcBride]

Also the music track keeps changing its name to (blank)

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

I haven't done this for ages, but if I recall correctly, the one thing that you do need in order to get ducking to work reliably is a consistent signal to drive the ducking with. Which means that if you have a signal with a wide dynamic range, all bets are off. If you are using a narrative to drive the ducking, this needs to be limited so that there are no massive peaks, and possibly also compressed below the threshold point to bring up the quieter bits. This way the results should be more consistent.

[TaylorJMcBride]

Hey Steve G,

Been a long time, but now that I'm much more experienced with using various adobe software, I'm starting to think that perhaps it was simply a matter of my computer was struggling to render the feature in real time playback or otherwise compute it. I've upgraded my memory RAM and also added a solid state drive to my unit. Thanks for helping.