Hello, I am a newbie to this new plug in and signal routing. I need some help in the basic use of applying this to a vocal bus. I have 4 vocal tracks being routed to a single stereo bus in ProTools. I am applying the Resolve plug in to the vocal bus to have it compare/improve it vs. the rest of the mix. When I look at the key in the upper left corner to select the side chain all I see are mono bus numbers in the drop down menu. Why wouldn’t I see the other stereo bus where the rest of of the mix is?
Firstly, you most likely want to put the Resolve plugin on the other bus, since the plugin will only reduce the level (unless you really want your vocal to be reduced so it’s harder to hear against the rest of the mix…).
Second, you might have chosen Pro Tools’s dual/multi-mono mode, rather than stereo mode, for the plugin. On a stereo bus you should have two choices when you start browsing plugins, either for “multichannel”/“stereo” or “multi-mono”. You want the first one - that’ll create one plugin with all the channels being processed, and so the sidechain will be allowed to also be multichannel.
If you pick the second one, you get one plugin per channel, all with linked settings (by default), but processing each channel independently. In this case, each plugin only has a single channel, so the sidechain has to be a single channel.
Thanks Steve! I will try that tomorrow to see if that changes anything. I’ll post my results.
I agree with Steve. It definitely would be more ideal to add one instance of Resolve per vocal track as that is how you would get the optimum results. You can always use Track Freeze, or Freeze up to Insert if you want to reclaim your CPU for other things.
Hey Steve (and Simon), I am in ProTools now and added Curves Resolve (stereo version) to the instrument track bus as you suggested. When going to the key in the upper left to add the side chain bus, it still only shows bus numbers in mono (1-32) in the pull down menu. What am I missing?
Probably time to send it over to tech support - it’s possible that the plugin is registered in Pro Tools in a way that isn’t quite right, but you’ll need them to look into it (I don’t have PT in front of me now to check, but I know the plugin handles stereo sidechains just fine in my usual DAW).
I raised a ticket with Waves and they just told me that they don’t support a stereo bus in ProTools. Seems very odd to me. I am going to follow up on how then to manage this.
Is it perhaps that the only busses currently available in your session are all mono?? Do you maybe need to create a stereo buss.
I’m actually a Logic user, so I’m unclear how this kind of thing works in ProTools.
Probably not. Pro Tools defines busses separately from tracks (and then you can patch them in/out of track), so you tend to have a bunch of them all there by default. It takes a lot of clicking to remove them all and create mono-only ones, and then you wouldn’t be able to have any stereo channel outputs at all.
Usually it’s the plugin requesting only mono inputs. So the workaround is to either use one channel from the stereo bus (if the signal is “mono enough”) or add another track to downmix it into a mono bus.
For Resolve, you probably want the same reduction on both channels anyway, so no harm done, but you could also split the stereo channel into two monos, assign each mono of the sidechain to each one, and then recombine it at the bus (and if you’re being really clever, use the MS Matrix to apply it on mid-side rather than left-right 
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I asked Waves support whether I could use the plug in twice in the stereo bus and then select the right and left bus numbers. Here’s their reply:
“When assigning external sidechain source (key in) for any plugin in Pro Tools, the selected bus has to be a mono bus. This is not a limitation of Waves plugins, rather a requirement in any plugin that accepts sidechain input in the DAW.
As a workaround you can go to Setup > I/O… > Bus, select the stereo bus you chose, then click “New Sub-Path”. Doing so will create mono sub-busses associated with the stereo bus, and then you’ll be able to select it as a key input source.
In case any issues occur during such procedure, please contact Avid tech support directly, since these functions of the DAW are out of our scope.”
Looks like I need to create a mono bus but that just seems odd to me. To answer Simon’s question, ProTools only creates stereo bus tracks.
The usual defaults create mono subpaths for each stereo bus (e.g. “Bus 1-2” also has “Bus 1” and “Bus 2” available to get the L-R individually). Following the steps they gave you will add these back if you’ve got an I/O setup without them.
I knew mono and stereo buses had to be created independently in ProTools and there was no simple way to change the format between stereo and mono. It’s all these other details I weren’t aware of as a Logic user.
But I have to admit, this would seem to be one of those times I’m glad I use Logic. As it’s very simple to create buses and change them to mono, stereo, multi-channel and back again.
But it’s very dated implementation of midi controlled effects is truely cumbersome and sucks. I generally try to avoid it altogether and opt to draw in automation instead. Still a little tedious, but more straightforward.
Anyway, I digress. I’m glad tech support was able to point you towards a more optimal solution with Sub Paths.
AVID told me that I can apply the Curves Resolve plug in twice to the stereo bus and then select the left mono bus and right mono bus separately from each.
That sounds to me like you’re riding two mono instances, which might end up being a little more expensive on the CPU than running one stereo instance.