Crossfader-esque Gain Control via Gain 3 (or anything really)

[justifiednoise]

As a producer and mixing engineer I've been looking for a way to improve a specific part of my workflow. I'll jump right in ...

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what I was initially looking for was something that could, within Pro Tools, be able to:

by sending TrackA's audio out bus.TrackA, and
by sending TrackB's audio out bus.TrackB

receive BOTH busses within one plugin and 'crossfade' between the two of them like a DJ's crossfader

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However, after looking into this for some time now, and emailing a plugin developer or two, I learned that Pro Tools Vanilla is only capable of offering mono side-chain inputs which pretty much kills that train of thought. Apparently there is a way to get this done with quad-aux busses in HD, but as I'm not an HD user this isn't very exciting news.

My next thought was trying to find something that allowed for paired, but inverted, gain or volume control of tracks -- which Gain 3 has. However ...

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a more elaborate example to illustrate what I'm trying to do would be:

track A contains a well recorded dry vocal
track B I've distorted, compressed, and eq'd the vocal in a totally different way, but I've level matched it to track A

I like the balance in volume level that track A has overall in my song and I'd simply like to mix in a bit of the 'character' I've created on track B without changing the overall volume. Currently the only way I can do this with any sort of ease, depth, or control is by creating different pairs of trim plugins to simulate the blend.

-6db on track A and track B in order to get a 50:50 blend
-3db on track A and -12db on track B to get a 75:25 blend
etc

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Gain 3 almost solved my problem, but the whole 'proportional' volume change thing is a bit different then simple 'relative' change.

Is it possible to control gain in the way that I'm describing using any of the blue cat plugins?

Also -- I understand that the singular real world example I provided could potentially be achieved within Patchwork, but there are other more awkward mix scenarios where Patchwork is not a viable solution for me and that's why my question is focused specifically on controlling gain proportionally.

Thanks so much for your time and thoughts in advance,
-Stephan

[Blue Cat Audio]

Hi Stephan,

mono side chian in Pro Tools is indeed a huge limitation for what you want to do. We do not have plug-ins that will let you do this, and adding such features to the Gain Suite plug-ins is not planned.

However, why wouldn't you just use a bus to blend both tracks and adjust the vocal volume from there?