1. Power

Turns off the effect, the audio will not be changed. But the plug-in will keep sending the input to the selected virtual bus.

2. Send

Each SideKick4 sends the incoming stereo audio to 1 of the 32 available virtual stereo buses. By default SideKick4 will automatically try to select a unique/unused bus. However by clicking the box next to "Send input to Bus" you may manually select a different bus. Thereby it is possible to create mixes by selecting the same virtual buses in multiple SideKick4 instances.

3. Receive

With the box above the text "Receive Bus" you may select any of the 32 virtual buses. Which will then be used as controlling input for the compressor. (Selecting “self” will use the instances own input). The led underneath the input box will turn from red to green if audio is being received from the selected bus.

4. Gain

To adjust the amplitude of the received audio from the virtual bus.

5. Threshold

This parameter defines from which dB level the compressor will start to react on the received audio from the virtual bus.

6. Ratio

Defines the amount of gain reduction. Or in other words the strength of the effect.

7. Attack

How fast the compressor will react to rise of the received audio signal from the virtual bus. (in millisecond)

8. Release

How fast the compressor will react to decay of the received audio signal from the virtual bus. (in millisecond)

9. Drive

A soft saturated drive to ''fatten up” the output.

10. Stereo-link

When turned off the compressor will treat the incoming stereo audio signals as 2 separate mono channels. Turned on, the effect will always use the same gain reduction for both the left & right channels.

11. Ducking/Keying

Inverts the gain reduction mod of the effect, making the compressor act as a expander in keying mode.

12. Listen

By turning on the listen mode the sidekick will output the selected receive bus audio instead of its own input. You can use this to check the audio that is being used as controlling input for the compressor.

13. Filter input & output

The filter allows you to select a range of frequencies on which the compressor will act and react.
By turning on the 'input' the audio from the selected receive bus will be filtered before being used as control signal in the compressor. Use the listen button to check the setting.

By turning on the 'output' the compressor will only apply the compression effect on the selected frequency range. Leaving the audio outside the selected frequency range untouched.

14. Low & high cut

With these two parameters you can select the range (from 0 to 20000 hertz) for the filtering for both the input and output filters. A selected range are the frequencies between the low cut setting and the high cut setting.

15. Bus delay

A display from which you can read out the initial delay of the selected receive bus in milliseconds. This delay is caused by the buffer in the VST host itself and the buffer size of the sound card hardware. You can reduce the delay by selecting a smaller buffer size in your VST host or or sound card settings.