The 32Classic installs as AAX, VST, VST3, and AU, in mono, stereo, and every multichannel layout up to sixteen channels. That list matters more than it looks. A sixteen-channel instance covers a full immersive bed, and the key you feed it has to make sense across every leg.
Wiring an external key is the same three moves in any host. Bus the source, pick that bus in the plug-in header, then engage the sidechain. Every tutorial you will find covers those steps for the kick drum ducking a bass.
None of them mention the catch. Routing an external key into the strip can quietly cost you the SSL 360° Plug-in Mixer, and with it your UC1 control surface.
So the common advice to grab whichever format sidechains most conveniently does not survive contact with this plug-in. Pick wrong, and the strip still works fine as a plug-in. It just stops appearing in the mixer.
In Live, that costs you nothing, because VST3 is the format you want for sidechaining anyway. In Logic, you are on the AU, and the key source comes from the Side Chain menu in the plug-in window header.
This is worth knowing even with no hardware on the desk. SSL states plainly that the plug-ins and Plug-in Mixer work without a UC1 attached. So the format choice affects every user of the 360° software, not only controller owners.
The bill comes from the same support notes. In Pro Tools, you can run multi-mono, but only the left leg is displayed in the Plug-in Mixer. In Logic, multi-mono is not supported by the Plug-in Mixer at all.
That leaves a real decision rather than a default. Independent detectors on a stereo overhead pair are useful. Losing hands-on control of half the strip, or all of it, is a steep price for that on a track you will revisit twenty times.
Pro Tools has one more trap that generic guides skip entirely. Avid's own developer documentation states that plug-in aux outputs never appear in another plug-in's sidechain pop-up menu. You cannot key one processor straight off another processor's output. Send the source to a bus and select the bus.
The offline version narrows further still. Avid notes that in AudioSuite the only eligible key source is an existing audio track. A bus you built for the real-time chain will not show up there.
The gate's sidechain filter is a band-pass. It boosts one center frequency and cuts everything above and below, and a LISN button plays you the filtered result on its own. The compressor's emphasis filter is a high-shelf on its detector. It sits around 10 dB at its lowest frequency of 100 Hz, and climbs to roughly 40 dB at 12 kHz.
One key bus, two very different readings of it.
Put a kick into the strip on a bass guitar, and the difference gets obvious. With emphasis low, the compressor responds to the whole kick, so the bass ducks under the full drum. Tune the gate's band-pass up onto the beater click instead, and the gate opens on the attack alone while ignoring the body.
That gives you a bass that gets out of the way of the low thump while a gated layer tracks the transient. Two behaviors from one send, with no second instance and no second bus.
External keys on both detectors, along with dedicated sidechain monitoring, landed with the August update to the channel strip. The monitoring is the part to lean on while you set this up.
Listen to the key rather than the output when you are hunting a threshold. On a snare gate keyed from a room mic, the output tells you the gate is chattering. The key signal tells you why, which is usually a hi-hat sitting inside your band-pass window. Move the center frequency until the hat drops out of the detector, then set the threshold once and leave it.
Wiring an external key is the same three moves in any host. Bus the source, pick that bus in the plug-in header, then engage the sidechain. Every tutorial you will find covers those steps for the kick drum ducking a bass.
None of them mention the catch. Routing an external key into the strip can quietly cost you the SSL 360° Plug-in Mixer, and with it your UC1 control surface.
The Plug-in Mixer only sees one format per DAW
SSL is blunt about this in its own support notes. In Cubase, Studio One, Live, and REAPER, AU and VST plug-ins are not supported by the Plug-in Mixer. VST3 is the only format that gets you in. In Logic, it is the Audio Units version that the mixer recognizes.So the common advice to grab whichever format sidechains most conveniently does not survive contact with this plug-in. Pick wrong, and the strip still works fine as a plug-in. It just stops appearing in the mixer.
In Live, that costs you nothing, because VST3 is the format you want for sidechaining anyway. In Logic, you are on the AU, and the key source comes from the Side Chain menu in the plug-in window header.
This is worth knowing even with no hardware on the desk. SSL states plainly that the plug-ins and Plug-in Mixer work without a UC1 attached. So the format choice affects every user of the 360° software, not only controller owners.
Multi-mono gives each leg its own key input
On a stereo source, you sometimes want the left and right sides gated independently. A multi-mono instance does exactly that, with a separate detector per leg.The bill comes from the same support notes. In Pro Tools, you can run multi-mono, but only the left leg is displayed in the Plug-in Mixer. In Logic, multi-mono is not supported by the Plug-in Mixer at all.
That leaves a real decision rather than a default. Independent detectors on a stereo overhead pair are useful. Losing hands-on control of half the strip, or all of it, is a steep price for that on a track you will revisit twenty times.
Pro Tools has one more trap that generic guides skip entirely. Avid's own developer documentation states that plug-in aux outputs never appear in another plug-in's sidechain pop-up menu. You cannot key one processor straight off another processor's output. Send the source to a bus and select the bus.
The offline version narrows further still. Avid notes that in AudioSuite the only eligible key source is an existing audio track. A bus you built for the real-time chain will not show up there.
The gate and the compressor hear the same key differently
Both detectors take the external input, and each keeps the filter it already had. That is the part worth building a technique around.The gate's sidechain filter is a band-pass. It boosts one center frequency and cuts everything above and below, and a LISN button plays you the filtered result on its own. The compressor's emphasis filter is a high-shelf on its detector. It sits around 10 dB at its lowest frequency of 100 Hz, and climbs to roughly 40 dB at 12 kHz.
One key bus, two very different readings of it.
Put a kick into the strip on a bass guitar, and the difference gets obvious. With emphasis low, the compressor responds to the whole kick, so the bass ducks under the full drum. Tune the gate's band-pass up onto the beater click instead, and the gate opens on the attack alone while ignoring the body.
That gives you a bass that gets out of the way of the low thump while a gated layer tracks the transient. Two behaviors from one send, with no second instance and no second bus.
External keys on both detectors, along with dedicated sidechain monitoring, landed with the August update to the channel strip. The monitoring is the part to lean on while you set this up.
Listen to the key rather than the output when you are hunting a threshold. On a snare gate keyed from a room mic, the output tells you the gate is chattering. The key signal tells you why, which is usually a hi-hat sitting inside your band-pass window. Move the center frequency until the hat drops out of the detector, then set the threshold once and leave it.
