Multistage Sidechain manual

1 · Installing

On macOS the download is a disk image. Open it and run Install.command, which puts all three formats in place for you. An Uninstall.command sits beside it, so keep the disk image if you may want to remove the plugin later.

On Windows the download is a zip of plugin bundles. Copy each one to the folder your host scans:

Rescan plugins in your DAW. You only need whichever format your host reads — they are all installed, so pick the one it handles best. Logic and GarageBand will only see the Audio Unit. On first load you will be asked for the serial that arrived with your purchase; after that it validates locally and never asks again.

2 · Your first patch

Sixty seconds to a working pump:

1. 01 Put Multistage Sidechain on the bass channel — the thing you want ducked — not on the kick.
2. 02 Leave the trigger on Sync. Nothing to route; it follows the host transport.
3. 03 Stage 1: division 1/4, depth to taste, first curve. That is the main pump.
4. 04 Select stage 2, turn it on, set 1/8 and a shallow depth. The offbeats now breathe underneath the main pump.
5. 05 Route the kick to the sidechain input and press Phase Lock to settle the phase relationship.

That is the whole workflow. Everything below is detail on each of those controls.

3 · The interface

Five cards stacked top to bottom. The trigger bar carries the note divisions, the trigger mode, the company mark and the two meters. Below it the envelope editor, which is the largest area because it is the thing you actually work in.

Then one control strip, read left to right: Phase Lock and its alignment score, Delay and Phase with the polarity flip between them, the Mix slider with the four stage buttons under it, then Multiband and Mono Maker.

Under that, the ten shape presets, and last the overview — the kick and the processed bass drawn together. It is last on purpose: it shows the result of everything above it. Click the title over it, or the display itself, to hide or show the kick trace.

The window opens at 1240 × 890, resizable.

4 · The four stages

Four independent ducking stages run in series. Each has its own on/off, depth, note division and curve. Their gains multiply, so stage 1 sets the overall movement and later stages carve into it.

Select a stage with the numbered tabs. The large knob sets that stage's depth: drag the ring to set the amount, click the centre hub to enable or disable the stage. A disabled stage is a straight bypass — it contributes unity gain and costs nothing.

Note divisions are 1/1, 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8. Because the gains multiply, a stage at 50% depth cannot undo what a previous stage removed — it can only remove more. Build from the widest division down.

5 · Curves

Ten shapes, shown as a 2 × 5 grid of thumbnails. Eight of them duck and recover; two run the other way — full level, then a cut to silence — for shortening sounds.

Editing, in the envelope display:

• Drag the curve horizontally to move the transition earlier or later in the cycle.
• Drag the green centre dot vertically to bend the concavity, from a hard snap to a slow swell.

The start and end anchors never move. However far you drag, the curve still begins at its held start level and still arrives at its end level by the end of the cycle. The horizontal drag is clamped to the range that actually moves that particular shape, so you never hit dead travel where the value keeps changing but nothing happens.

6 · Trigger modes

Sync — free-running against the host transport. Zero latency, nothing to route. This is the default and the mode most sessions want.

MIDI — retriggered by note-ons, sample-accurate. Use it when the pattern is not a straight division: swing, triplets, a beat left out.

Audio — transient detection on the sidechain input. The detector band-passes the sidechain between 400 Hz and 4 kHz to isolate the kick's punch from the sub and the hats, then fires on the rising edge of a novelty measure. It re-primes between hits, so fast rolls retrigger as reliably as a steady four to the floor. Sensitivity sets the threshold: raise it if hats are triggering the duck, lower it if quiet kicks are being missed.

Lookahead. In Audio mode only, the main signal is delayed by roughly 8 ms so the duck's attack spans that time and full ducking lands exactly on the hit. The latency is reported to the host and compensated automatically. Sync and MIDI report zero.

7 · Multiband

Multiband applies to stage 1 only. Stages 2–4 always process the full range. That keeps the common case — duck the sub, leave the body — one switch away instead of a routing exercise.

Crossover sets the split between 20 and 250 Hz. Slope is 6, 12 or 24 dB/oct. Solo auditions the low band on its own so you can hear exactly what stage 1 is removing — turn it off before you print.

8 · Mono maker

Folds the final output to mono below the frequency you set, from 0 to 150 Hz. Zero switches it off. It runs after every stage, so it always operates on the finished signal, and it leaves everything above the crossover exactly as wide as it was.

9 · Phase alignment

In the control strip: Phase Lock with the alignment score under it, then Delay and Phase with the polarity flip between them.

Phase Lock analyses the kick against the processed bass — after all four stages — and folds what it finds into the current delay and polarity. This is deliberate. Once the envelope has removed the bass from underneath the kick, the only place the two signals really meet is the handoff, where the kick decays as the sub swells back in. Aligning against the raw bass would optimise an overlap that no longer exists in the finished signal.

It applies a correction, not an absolute: the analysis already contains your current alignment, so pressing it again refines rather than starting over. After applying, it needs about a third of a second of fresh audio before it can run again — that is also what stops it re-applying a correction it has already made.

It will decline to do anything, leaving the alignment untouched, if either side is silent, if there is not enough fresh audio, or if the envelope left no real overlap to align. That is a correct answer, not a failure.

Manual controls:

• Delay — 0 to 20 ms with sub-sample precision, not rounded to whole samples.
• Phase — 0 to 360° of broadband rotation that leaves the magnitude spectrum untouched. Bypassed at zero.
• Polarity (⊘) — flips the main signal.
• Align score — live kick-versus-bass correlation as a percentage, red out of phase, green locked. It updates while you turn Delay or Phase, so you can finish by hand.

On a near-periodic sub there is often more than one acoustically identical answer. Phase Lock always picks the smallest move, so it will not quietly push your sub sixteen milliseconds late to reach the same result.

10 · Metering

Kick and Bass peak meters, in discrete segments, with peak hold. Kick is the incoming sidechain signal; Bass is the processed output after every stage. Click a meter to reset the hold.

Behind the editable curve are high-resolution scopes of both signals, phase-locked to the trigger cycle so they hold still instead of scrolling. The analysis panel at the bottom overlays the kick silhouette against the processed bass: that is where you read how much bass survives and whether it still collides with the kick.

11 · Licence & activation

Your serial arrives by email immediately after purchase. Enter it once and the plugin stores a signed licence file on that machine, which it verifies locally at every start — offline, with no account and no background connection.

One purchase covers up to three machines that you own. Changing computers or reinstalling Windows? Email support@hakunaaudio.com and I will reset your activations.

12 · Troubleshooting

The plugin does not appear in my DAW

Check the bundle is in the exact folder listed in section 1 and rescan. Some hosts cache a blocklist of plugins that previously failed to load; clear it and rescan again.

Nothing is ducking

In Sync mode the transport has to be running. In MIDI mode the plugin needs to receive note-ons. In Audio mode the kick has to be routed to the sidechain input, not the main input — and check that at least one stage is enabled with its depth above zero.

Phase Lock does nothing and the score does not move

That is the analysis declining rather than guessing. Play a few bars where both the kick and the bass are sounding, then press it again. If the envelope removes the bass completely under the kick there may be no overlap left to align — reduce the depth of stage 1 slightly and retry.

The plugin window has frozen

Close and reopen the plugin window; it recovers. Audio is not affected while this happens — the freeze is in the window's own redraw loop, and your session keeps playing. This is a known issue and is being worked on. If you hit it, please send a report with your host and Windows version; it helps narrow it down.