Selective Bandwidth Ducking.. How do you do this?

Hello guys. I’m sure a few of you know how to perform this technique with no problem… as for me I’m still confused with the steps and the process of it.

I’ll lay the instructions here and if anyone of you are able to show me how to do this on cubase, step by step I’ll appreciate it.

So here’s the typical problem. A bunch of noisy guitars driving along and you want to inject an acoustic guitar or vocal lead in there once in a while. But you can’t get the track hot enough or eq’d enough to overcome the noisy guitars. Ducking the guitars with either automation or a sidechained compressor might be too noticable, so this trick allows you to just duck the specific frequency range that is masking your lead track. Here’s how to do it:

  1. This is a mix technique and we’ll be assigning plugs to auxes, so make sure PDC is set to “All” in your preferences.

  2. Assign your noisy guitar tracks to a bus. We’ll use bus 10 as in my example.

  3. Assign your lead track to your main outputs. Create a Send on this track to bus 11 and set its level to unity, (ctrl-click the send)… This will also create an aux in your mixer. Delete this aux.

  4. Create 2 new aux channels. Assign both their inputs to Bus 10, and both their outputs to your main outs.

  5. Don’t put any plugs on the first aux. On the second aux, (from top to bottom) place a Linear Phase EQ, a Noise Gate, then a Gain plug.

  6. Set the EQ up with a Lopass and a Hipass only, with steep 48dB/oct slopes. Leave the Q at .71.

  7. Set the Noise Gate as follows.
    Threshold & Reduction: -100dB
    Attack, Hold & Release: 0mS
    Hysteresis: -20dB
    Lookahead: 20.000mS
    Sidechain: Bus 11

  8. Open the Gain plug and enable Phase Invert(s). Close the Gain plug.

I can’t seem to figure this out on Cubase…