Is there a way to use a kick track as the sidechain source but not have it also compressed?
Doesn’t seem to be a way… this would be a nice feature.
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No i don’t think so.
You can filter the source with a LPF or a HPF in order to activate the compression only when certain frequency content is hitting the threshold but the compressor remains on the master track so it compresses the whole master track.
you have to carefully set up the attack and release to preserve the impact of the kick
I believe the consensus is that you need to modulate with an LFO to approximate sidechain.
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i’m hoping that this still could be possible in a firmware update… it just seems so obvious…
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The octatrack compressor also cannot sidechain and that has been around for 10 years. I don’t expect the digitakt compressor to get sidechaining either, despite how much I want it.
I thought the DT has sidechaining but the op wants the sidechain source to not also be compressed
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Yeah, being able to specify a track as the analysis to the compressor, but not being able to leave that track out of the compression makes that feature really not that incredibly useful. Though I think it can be done with overbridge and a DAW.
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If you can live with the kick coming from something else then you could use inputs as sidechain source, route the kick from any other potential device to it, and just mute the inputs i think 
It’ll eat up your inputs so you can’t compress anything else though
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it’s still useful for shaping the response curve of the compressor, for mixbus compression this is invaluable
just not as useful for sidechaining elements to the kick seperate from the mix itself
it’s probably enough of a pain to program a seperate auxiliary bus within really any of the boxes to create a true sidechain compressor to not be worth doing
probably why the syntakt has the analog FX bus as it’s fairly easy to just design a dedicated hardware split to use as an aux bus (of sorts), whereas a digital bus brings latency and is more hassle to design
at least in theory anyways lol
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thats a big sacrifice for me, because i want to route other gear and duck that as well.
I do think that most of the DT users would love to juist have the kick/ch1 routed back in the mix, or left out of the compression, just for that one use case for the compressor. A end of chain compressor could easy be done outside the box, but the ducking fx is much harder without separate audio outs.
Yeah i suspected that might be the case.
I’m at work and don’t have my takt in front of me, will the compressor react to say channel 1 if that channel is turned down in master out settings? You could have a kick running on separate device and not going through side chain, and have a duplicate kick going in digitakt but turned all the way down to just trigger the side chain compression…
This is more of a hackaround type of response though
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oh for sure, I definitely want this functionality and was considering buying a digitakt thinking it could do true sidechaining
I still want it and am fine doing LFO or p-lock attack time workarounds (don’t really like sidechaining anything but bass and pads so it’s not a huge deal)
just is probably a hefty upgrade to give us sadly