Not heard of this technique before - not sure how it's done in danpo's plugin. The idea is to complement or replace sidechain ducking by forcing phase cancellation with a source by ring modding. There are a couple videos on manual setups, but someone's now made a plugin implementing part of the idea. The plugin can be found here: https://justdanpo.ru/data/projects/misc/rmsc.zip

Here's a video demonstrating danpo's plugin, which appears to combine RM and regular sidechain ducking:

The idea may have orginated from Borrasca's video (English) from two years ago:

Which may have inspired this (Russian) video, which then inspired danpo to write his plugin:

I don't speak Russian, so here's an AI summary of the above video:

- Ring modulation allows extracting part of the bass' amplitude based on the kick drum signal, removing conflicting frequencies.
- The bass signal is multiplied by the ring modulated kick drum to "cut out" conflicting parts.
- This produces a sidechain signal of shorter duration, matching the kick drum length.
- When the original bass and sidechain signal are summed, their amplitudes cancel out when the kick drum is active.
- This prevents both clipping and dips from the combined bass/kick drum mix.
- The approach effectively resolves amplitude conflicts between the bass and kick drum.

I've only tried the plugin on a single source, but it seemed to worked quite well on that material. Might be a useful tool for the toolbox.

 

At a quick glance or without testing it out, you have to admit this looks like some "omg new sidechain technique!" -style clickbait. And of course, the accompanying plugin. The "shorter duration than the kick" comment is about something people do all the time. Instead of linking the compressor's external sidechain to the kick, a duplicate of the kick track is created to link it to and then that channel muted. The duplicate channel kick waveform can be shortened or shaped, while still having the matching transient to trip the compressor. Or they do it the faster way, and just put a midi channel with whatever note duration they want. The plugin includes a Mac VST3, but not an AU plugin. Using it inside a wrapper like Patchwork might not produce the same results; but trying it the manual way will.

 

interesting post,
reminded me of this thing (for Live)
https://artsux.gumroad.com/l/uFLbW?layout=profile

 

Very useful plugin. Thank you!

 

Couple more options for ring-mod sidechaining available these days:

- RMSC: https://justdanpo.ru/data/projects/misc/
- Kilohearts Compactor: https://kilohearts.com/products/compactor
- Emphaseas x Pretender Massimizer: https://emphaseas.gumroad.com/l/massimizer

 

Another one that's quite good is FLVTTER by Zef Parisoto

 

What is the benefit to "normal" sjidechaining of this technique? As I understand it, basically the volume of the baseline is muted when the kick plays ie. canceled out, not just ducked. Does it sound better like this? Seems bit extreme

 

As an evergreen rule in audio says, you get more headroom in change of more distortion. The good thing about this is that the overtones generated are greatly masked by the signal already present (due to the nature of these overtones and how they are generated) so if you don't overdo it the result could be much cleaner and transparent that what you might think at first

 

Thanks for the explanation. Does it sound the same as normal sidechaining in a way, like the pumping effect in EDM etc? Or it sounds different? I like to have the pumping effect for side chain sound

 

You're welcome mate. The sound is different, and the relationship between RMSC and SC compression is similar to that one between distortion (aka saturation, soft clipping, waveshaping) and compression, in the sense that you having different artifacts: (more) harmonics for the former, ADSR changes (and pumping effect is one example of these) for the latter.

Disclaimer: this analogy isn't 100% complete (it would be taking as an example distortion plugs with ext SC like the clipper in FLVTTER, instead of RMSC), but it gives you the idea

 

P.S. nothing prevents to use both techniques in series (one for headroom, one for pumping sound signature), just be careful with it

 

it is called "using modulation signals" and is present is every programming enviroment as well as in eurorack modules.

that it is so rare to find in the DAW and plug-in world is one of the reasons why DAWs suck so much.