Hello,
I have Cubase Essential 5 and tried to make a 3rd party sidechain compressor work from my Kick and Bass tracks with no success.
Do I need to upgrade to Cubase Studio 5 to do this? Thanks in advance for your response. 
Best Regards,
C5
As far as I recall it should work. Which compressor and how is it routed?
Not VST 3. VST 3 Sidechain inputs are supported in Studio and full version only. VST 2.x group method will also work in Essential.
oops, my bad. brain obviously not in gear. must be old age 
Hi thanks for your feedback,
Iāll have to upgrade to Artist 6 to take advantage of its compressor with its built in sidechaining capabilities, because in essential 5 it isnāt availableā¦ Neither are the Quadro group tracks.
The way I tried to connect was to create a group track, insert the SC compressor and then send the kick and bass to the group track, but, obviously, the kick not being routed other than the ānormalā way both signals are being compressed. So, there you go I personnaly donāt know any other way to do it, if there is please let me know! However, the upgrade from Essential 5 to Artist 6 is more affordable than upgrading to studio 5, and Iām kind of happy about that 
Cheers,
C5
You can do mono file sidechin compresssion with stereo groups. For stereo files youĀ“d need quadro groups thoughā¦
You also canĀ“t use sends in Cubase 5, because it doesnĀ“t support send panning, so youĀ“ll have to set the output of the two (mono) tracks to the group (one panned hard left, one panned hard right). Then do as the used compressor needs to do. There once was a PlugIn called āSidekick from twisted Lemonā, which had its own implementation of sidchaining, so it would let you do stereo sidechaining in Essential als. Version 4 costs 15 ā¬, version 3 was free. Mybe you can still find it on the web somewhereā¦