Hey. I like ducking tracks for my mix and am thankful for the thought behind adding a ducking tool to the XY. However, sacrificing the only modulator slot per track to duck a single track is a provably bad design choice for the following reasons:
- Ducking is best used as a bus effect for performance reasons because it is commonly utilized on a category of multiple tracks at once.
- Making a cool sound only to find that to duck it for a powerful mix you would need to sacrifice the modulation that makes it cool really sucks from a creative process standpoint.
- Configuring a separate instance of ducking for every track I want to duck results in inconsistent ducking when in reality what one commonly wants is a tight, unified envelope on a group of tracks.
Plenty of other thoughts on this, but importantly my suggestion is to move ducking off to the mixer or add an identical ducking component to the mixer section so that we don’t have to sacrifice effects or modulators for it. This might be a hot take to some, but ducking is primarily a mixing workflow, even if some musical projects like to stretch its character into the compositional space (lookin’ at you, IDM and Riddim).
where can we hear some of your music? do you have any examples of the effect in your old songs?
what did you use for ducking before xy?
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My music features various forms of ducking over the years. The most recent examples (the first section in this project, and this) use a rather complicated example - impulse-triggering envelopes that’re separated per frequency band. The result is a cleaner, clickless ducking sound that is very tightly latency-compensated. Listen to the kicks and snares punching through the mix cleanly and aggressively.
What the XY is doing is a simple MIDI-triggered envelope controlling the amplitude of the channel, it’s a very widely-employed technique for ducking and it does 90% of the job. It’d be enough for all XY use-cases to just move this implementation out of the modulators section and make one single ducking bus, for example. Same way the XY’s compressor has melodic / drums buses. I have made a lot of stuff using this simpler technique, good examples will be some of my DAWless tracks made on my old Eurorack synth: this and this. In these examples, using a midi-triggered amplitude envlope on a bus, the kicks/snares punch through more obviously as you can hear the envelope affecting the rest of the mix. The more advanced tooling in the former examples is used to make it less obvious and more natural-sounding while still getting the same satisfying punchy result.
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I was surprised when they introduced ducking that this wasn’t part of the feature roll out. Some kind of internal subgroup routing with the ducking lfo would be huge.
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Thanks for the detailed answer and sound examples!
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Hard agree on this. I’m happy to forgo side chain in favour of having an LFO modulating synth or filter parameters. This makes up more of my sound than side chain does. Adding side chain to the LFO screen makes little sense to me. A big missed opportunity 
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I agree with you - sidechaining is fun and important but in a situation where i have to choose that or sound design, I will go with sound design, and the tool that forces me to make that choice is a tool that cannot produce a certain sound signature / workflow that is critical to my (and many others’) sound.
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You can probably achieve what you want using the tape track, by adjusting the instrument output level to tape, the volume of the tape track and the dry amount of the tape track, and placing steps on the tape track on every beat. I just tested this method and found it very versatile and great sounding, you can use it on as many tracks as you want, use a custom rhythm rather than an input track or the metronome, and even customize the envelope using parameter locks (which are a bit buggy for the dry amount parameter, you can only set it once and then it gets blocked, but it works and the “smooth automation” curve also works). Of course you have to sacrifice the tape track for this, but I personally don’t use it that often. I hope this helps!
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Thanks for the idea! But it sounds super clunky to do it that way, plus the tape is crucial for resampling 