homecrate dynEQ & Send (Sidechain)

Some mix problems can’t be fixed on one track alone. The bass sounds great until the kick hits and the low end turns to mud. The pad sounds lovely until the vocal comes in and suddenly you can’t hear the words. In both cases the fix isn’t “turn something down” — it’s “turn something down only at the moments the other thing is playing.”

That’s what homecrate dynEQ and homecrate Send do together. They’re a matched pair:

Send goes on the track that causes the problem — the trigger. It listens and broadcasts. It does not change your audio at all.
dynEQ goes on the track that has the problem — the target. It listens for that broadcast and moves its EQ bands in response.

This is the single thing people get wrong, so it’s worth saying plainly: the two plugins go on two different tracks. Putting both on the same track does nothing useful. The Send is not an effect you add to the track you want to fix — it’s a microphone you put on the track you want to react to.

Both plugins are homecrate’s own, so they’re already installed.

📘 This page is the short version — how to use the pair inside the DAW. Every parameter, its exact range and default, the signal path, the shared-sidechain rules and the full troubleshooting list live in the dedicated section: homecrate dynEQ documentation →

[SCREENSHOT: Two mixer channel strips side by side — kick track with hc_send loaded, bass track with hc_dynEQ loaded]

The Mental Model

Think of it as a radio.

	hc_send	hc_dynEQ
Goes on	The trigger track (kick, vocal, snare)	The target track (bass, pad, guitar)
Does it change the sound of its own track?	No. Audio passes through untouched.	Yes — it’s a real EQ and compressor
What it does	Broadcasts how loud its track is, moment to moment	Receives that, and uses it to move its own EQ bands
Useful on its own?	No — it needs a dynEQ listening	Yes — it works fine as a plain EQ + compressor

Nothing routes through anything. You are not sending audio anywhere, and there’s no bus to create. The Send publishes a level; the dynEQ reads it.

Names to look for in the browser. The faceplates are silkscreened DYN EQ and SEND, but the Plugin Browser lists them under Effects as homecrate: hc_dynEQ and homecrate: hc_send. Search for hc_, not for “dyn eq”.

The Classic Setup: Ducking Bass Under Kick

This is the recipe worth learning first, because once it clicks, every other use follows the same shape.

The problem: kick and bass both live around 60–120 Hz. Played together they fight, and the low end loses definition. The fix: let the bass step out of the way for the few milliseconds the kick is hitting, then come straight back.

Step 1 — Put Send on the KICK track

Open a plugin slot on your kick track and load homecrate: hc_send from the Effects tab.

That’s most of the work. The Send has one knob and doesn’t touch the audio, so you can drop it anywhere in the kick’s plugin chain. The display shows an INPUT meter and the line BROADCASTING TO EVERY HC_DYNEQ — if that meter moves when the kick plays, the transmitter half is done.

[SCREENSHOT: homecrate hc_send plugin — INPUT meter moving, single SEND knob]

Step 2 — Put dynEQ on the BASS track

Open a plugin slot on your bass track and load homecrate: hc_dynEQ.

Look at the FOLLOWER GLASS at the top of its face. The EXT readout is the level it’s receiving from the Send. Play the song: if EXT pulses in time with the kick, the two plugins have found each other, and everything from here is just taste.

[SCREENSHOT: homecrate hc_dynEQ plugin — follower glass showing EXT level and GR, EQ and DUCK rows below]

If EXT stays at zero, jump to When Nothing Ducks below.

Step 3 — Duck the band the kick lives in

The EQ panel has five gain knobs, and directly under them a row of five DUCK knobs in the same columns. Each duck knob controls how much the incoming Send signal moves that band.

Turn the first duck knob (the 100 Hz column) down — start around −6 dB. Negative pulls the band back when the trigger plays.

Play it back. You should hear the bass dip out of the way on each kick and return between hits. Push toward −10 or −12 dB if the kick still isn’t punching through; pull back toward −3 dB if you can hear the bass pumping.

The depth you dial is a maximum, not a fixed amount. The duck is proportional to how loud the trigger is right now, and you only reach the depth you set on a trigger that’s hitting full scale (EXT reading 1.00). A quiet trigger gives you a fraction of the depth you dialled, which is why a duck can feel weak for no obvious reason. That proportionality is what makes it sound like part of the arrangement rather than a gate — but watch EXT: if it isn’t reaching roughly 0.6 on the loudest hits, fix that first (next step) and every depth you dial afterwards will behave the way the number says.

Step 4 — Shape the movement with FOLLOWER

The FOLLOWER panel controls the timing of the duck, and it’s what separates a fix from an obvious effect.

ATTACK (1–200 ms) — how fast the bass gets out of the way. Short (5–15 ms) for a tight, invisible duck. Longer lets the very front of the kick through before the bass moves.
RELEASE (10–1000 ms) — how fast the bass comes back. This is the one to tune by ear. Too short and it pumps audibly; too long and the bass never fully returns between hits. 80–200 ms suits most tempos.

A good starting point is ATTACK 10 ms, RELEASE 120 ms, and then adjust RELEASE until the pumping stops being something you notice.

Step 5 — Set the broadcast level from the Send

The SEND knob on the kick track scales the broadcast, so it changes how hard every dynEQ listening reacts. It still doesn’t change the kick’s own sound.

It runs 0.00 to 2.00, and the part above 1.00 matters: it’s a boost path, not just a trim. If EXT never gets near 1.00 and the duck feels weak no matter how far you turn the depth knob, push SEND up toward 2.00 — that’s the intended fix for a quiet trigger, and it’s usually better than dialling in an implausibly deep duck. Pull it down in the opposite case: the duck is hitting harder than you want but the depths are where you like them.

One gotcha: the INPUT meter on the Send is measured before the knob, so a bouncing meter alongside EXT 0.00 on every dynEQ means the SEND knob is at zero.

Pushing Instead of Ducking

The duck knobs go up as well as down — the range is −24 dB to +12 dB.

A positive value makes a band bloom when the trigger plays instead of pulling back. This is much less common but genuinely useful:

Send on the snare, dynEQ on a room mic or reverb return, +4 dB on the 3.5 kHz band — the room lights up on each snare hit and settles between.
Send on the kick, dynEQ on a sub-bass part, +3 dB on 100 Hz — the sub reinforces the kick rather than competing with it.

Each of the five bands has its own duck knob, so you can pull one band back while pushing another on the same trigger.

The Bands

The EQ gains are a normal five-band tone control and work with or without any Send in the session.

Band	Frequency	Duck it when…
100	100 Hz	Kick and bass are fighting — the classic one
300	300 Hz	Two mid-heavy parts (guitar + keys) are cluttering each other
1K2	1.2 kHz	A part is crowding the body of a vocal
3K5	3.5 kHz	A part is masking vocal intelligibility — the most effective vocal-clarity duck
10K	10 kHz	Cymbals or air-band content is stacking up

Top row = static EQ (always applied). Bottom row = how much the trigger moves that band. They add together: you can cut 100 Hz by 2 dB permanently and duck it a further 6 dB when the kick hits.

The Compressor

dynEQ also has a full compressor, sitting in its own panel.

Control	Range	Notes
THRESH	−60 to 0 dB	Defaults to 0, which means no compression until you move it
RATIO	1:1 to 20:1
ATTACK	0.1–100 ms
RELEASE	10–1000 ms
MAKEUP	0–24 dB	Gain back after compression
KEY	INTERNAL / SIDECHAIN	What the compressor listens to
POSITION	PRE-EQ / POST-EQ	Where the compressor sits relative to the EQ. Defaults to POST-EQ.

⚠️ Switching KEY to SIDECHAIN on its own does nothing. At the default THRESH of 0 dB the compressor isn’t doing anything at all, so changing what it listens to changes nothing you can hear. Sidechain compression is always two moves: set KEY → SIDECHAIN, then pull THRESH down (try around −20 dB with RATIO 4:1). If GR reads 0.0 dB while EXT is clearly pulsing, this is almost certainly why.

KEY is the interesting one. On INTERNAL it behaves like any compressor — it responds to the track it’s on. Switch it to SIDECHAIN and it responds to the incoming Send instead, which gives you the other classic move: broadband ducking, where the whole target track drops on every trigger hit rather than just one band. That’s the pumping-pad sound.

On SIDECHAIN, THRESH is measured against the trigger’s level, not against the target track’s. A quiet trigger may never cross it — raise SEND or lower THRESH.

Band ducking and sidechain compression can run at once. Band ducking is the surgical option; sidechain compression is the obvious, musical one.

POSITION decides whether the compressor sees your EQ moves or not. POST-EQ (the default) compresses the already-shaped signal. PRE-EQ compresses the raw signal and then shapes it, which keeps big EQ boosts from driving the compressor harder.

Reading the Display

The follower glass has two readouts:

Readout	Meaning
EXT	The smoothed follower level — the loudest live Send in the session after FOLLOWER ATTACK/RELEASE has shaped it. This is your “is it connected?” indicator.
GR	Gain reduction in dB — how much the compressor is pulling down right now

Two things about EXT are worth knowing:

It’s the smoothed value, not the raw incoming level. It’s what actually drives the ducking, which is exactly what you want to see — but it means a long FOLLOWER RELEASE keeps the number falling slowly after the trigger has stopped. That’s not a lag in the meter; it’s the duck you’re hearing.
It’s a level, not dB. Full scale reads 1.00, and a quieter trigger reads proportionally lower — which is also the fraction of your duck depth you’re actually getting.

The caption underneath reads FED BY EVERY HC_SEND IN THE SESSION, which is a literal description of how routing works today — see the next section.

How Routing Works Today

This is worth understanding before you build a complicated session.

In the current version there is one shared sidechain path. Every Send in your project feeds every dynEQ, and each dynEQ responds to whichever Send is loudest at that moment.

What that means in practice:

One trigger, many targets works perfectly. A single Send on the kick can duck the bass, a pad and a guitar independently, each with its own bands and its own depths. This is the common case.
Two different triggers going to two different targets does not. If you put a Send on the kick and a Send on the vocal, both dynEQs will react to both — whichever is louder at that instant wins. It sounds like crosstalk and it looks like a bug; it isn’t.
A Send that stops — transport stopped, track removed, plugin unloaded — stops contributing almost immediately, so the ducks it was driving release cleanly rather than sticking.
Bypassing a Send stops the broadcast at once, so host-bypass is a clean way to release every duck listening to it without touching a knob. (Bypass doesn’t affect its audio either way — it’s a bit-exact passthrough in both states.)

Per-pair routing is reserved for a future update — you may notice unused BUS parameters in the plugin, which is what they’re for. Until then: use one Send per project and give each target its own dynEQ.

It Doesn’t Survive a Mixdown

This is the one limitation to plan around, and it follows directly from how the pair works.

Sidechaining is a cross-track, real-time effect: it only happens while the trigger and the target are both playing. Mixdown and stem export don’t capture it — the ducking simply isn’t there in the exported file.

Everything else renders normally. Your EQ gains, the compressor on INTERNAL key, and the IN/OUT gains are all baked in as you’d expect. Only the sidechain movement — the band ducking and any SIDECHAIN-keyed compression — goes missing.

The workaround is to print it first. Set the target track’s input to Plugin Output and record the ducked result to a new audio clip while the trigger plays, then export that. See Arming Tracks & Input Monitoring for the input setting, and Mixdown & Export, which carries the same warning.

Other Recipes

Make room for a vocal. Send on the lead vocal, dynEQ on the pad or rhythm guitar, duck 1K2 by −3 dB and 3K5 by −5 dB, ATTACK 20 ms, RELEASE 250 ms. The backing dips out of the vocal’s range while words are happening and fills back in between lines. This is far more transparent than automating the pad’s volume, and it tracks the performance automatically.

Tame a boomy guitar under a snare. Send on the snare, dynEQ on the rhythm guitar, duck 300 Hz by −4 dB, fast attack, short release.

Use dynEQ on its own. With no Send anywhere and every duck knob at zero, dynEQ is just a clean five-band EQ with a compressor. That’s a perfectly good reason to load it.

When Nothing Ducks

Work down this list in order — it’s almost always one of the first three.

Are the two plugins on different tracks? Send goes on the trigger, dynEQ goes on the target. Both on one track does nothing.
Is the Send actually on the trigger track? People habitually load it on the track they want fixed. It goes on the track that causes the problem.
Is any duck knob turned up? Duck depths default to 0, which is off. The EQ gains on the top row do nothing dynamic on their own — you need the row underneath.
Is the EXT readout moving? Play the song and watch dynEQ’s follower glass. Moving means the connection is fine and it’s a settings problem. Flat means the Send isn’t receiving audio — check the trigger track isn’t muted and its INPUT meter is moving.
Is the SEND knob at zero? It scales the broadcast; at zero it broadcasts nothing, while its INPUT meter keeps bouncing.
Does EXT peak well below 1.00? You only get the full duck depth on a loud trigger — a quiet one delivers a fraction of the depth you dialled. Raise SEND (it goes to 2.00) or deepen the duck knob.
Compressor not reducing? Setting KEY → SIDECHAIN alone does nothing — the compressor stays inactive until you pull THRESH down from its default of 0 dB.
Is the release far too long? With RELEASE at 1000 ms on a fast part, the band never recovers between hits, so it reads as “just quieter” rather than as ducking.
Are two Sends fighting? See How Routing Works Today — a second Send on a louder track will dominate.
Did it duck during playback but not in the exported file? That’s expected — see It Doesn’t Survive a Mixdown.

More general help lives in Troubleshooting.

Tips

Set the duck depth deliberately too far (−15 dB or so) so you can clearly hear it working, then back it off until it stops being noticeable. Finding the effect and then hiding it is much faster than creeping up from zero.
RELEASE is the knob that decides whether this sounds professional or obvious. Spend your time there, not on depth.
Duck narrow and deep rather than broad and shallow. One band pulled back 8 dB usually beats all five pulled back 3 dB — you keep the target’s character and only clear the space that’s actually contested.
Keep the Send in slot 1 on the trigger track. It doesn’t process anything, so its position doesn’t matter sonically, and always putting it in the same place makes sessions easier to read later.
For a vocal-clarity duck, trigger from the lead vocal rather than a bus — you want it responding to the words, not the whole arrangement.
Watch EXT before you touch a depth knob. If it isn’t reaching about 0.6 on the loudest hits, raise the trigger’s SEND first — every depth you dial after that behaves the way the number says.
Both plugins save their settings with the project, so a session reopens exactly as you left it.
Print the duck before you export. Cross-track sidechaining doesn’t survive a mixdown — record the ducked result via Plugin Output first.
Also see homecrate vocal for the vocal chain itself, and AUv3 Plugins Overview for how plugin slots are ordered.
Everything on this page in full detail — exact ranges, defaults, the signal path and the complete parameter reference — is in the homecrate dynEQ documentation.