Help with sidechain / midi send and return

[Stood]

Hello, I am fairly new to producing, so I'm not too familiar with signal routing and buses etc. I am trying to use the plugin "STFU" by ZEEK to make a sidechain compression kind of effect. However, when I sidechain a track to my kick drum, nothing happens. I've also tried making midi that follows the kick drum exactly to send it to the plugin, but I'm not exactly sure how to do that. (I've turned plugin sandboxing off). Any help, or any youtube tutorials I can use would be appreciated.

Edit: found a solution which was to make an aux send for each track then make an aux return to the kick drum midi with the plugin on it and set the tracks to the default midi output so they wouldn't play anything. This is probably a terrible workaround but it works.

[Watchful]

In order to rule out a problem with the plug in, can you get other plugins to sidechain correctly? For example, if you were to put a compressor on a different track, and sidechain it to your kick, do you see the compressor reacting to the kick drum?

I'm not sure how often you side chain; if you're able to do it with even Waveform's stock compressor, then the problem might be with the plugin, not with Waveform or your set up.

For example, here's a simple test:

1. Put the stock Waveform compressor in your bass track *BEFORE* the volume fader.
2. Click on the "side chain" box at the top of the compressor and select the kick drum track.
3. Turn on "side chain" to full on the lower right of the compressor window.
4. Press play, and you should see the compressor working in time with the kick.

If this works, you're sidechaining correctly. Replace the stock compressor with your compressor and see if its sidechain options work. I'm not familiar with STFU, so don't even know if it supports sidechaining, so forgive me for not being more exact.