KickBass Check
Manual · version 0.5
Insert on the bass track, set the side chain to the kick. It shows the notes of both and the interval between them, who owns each low band, the kick body against the beat, and it can duck the bass per band under the kick.
Setup
Insert it on the bass track. In the Side Chain menu at the top of the plugin window, pick the kick track. The header turns green when kick signal arrives. With every DUCK button off the audio passes through bit-identical; the plugin then only measures.
What it shows
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Spectrum | Kick (orange) and bass (blue) averaged over the last seconds, 20 Hz to 5 kHz, with the four low bands shaded. With ducking active, the bass after ducking is drawn as a white dashed curve. |
| Kick note | The pitch the kick settles to, from a glide tracker on each hit (the same detector as Kick Tune). The line below shows the glide and where it settles, or says that the drum has no settled pitch and reports the level-weighted value instead. |
| Bass low note | The lowest strong partial of the averaged bass spectrum, so a moving bass line reads as its most used low note. |
| Kick vs bass, kick vs key root | The interval, coloured: unison, fourth and fifth green; second, tritone and seventh red; the rest amber. Set the key root in the header. |
| Band table | 30 to 60, 60 to 120, 120 to 250, 250 to 500 Hz. Kick and bass level in each band, the difference, and the owner: kick or bass when one is 6 dB above the other, shared otherwise. With ducking active an After column shows the bass post-ducking. |
| Body and peaks | Kick body length (time above -20 dB of the hit peak, below 150 Hz) against the beat length at the song tempo, as a percentage; crest factors of kick and bass; kick loudness. The loudness panel measures the bass output. |
Ducking the bass under the kick
Each band row has a DUCK button, a depth (0 to 12 dB) and a live readout of the cut. With DUCK on, the bass is cut in that band by up to the depth while the kick has energy in the same band, and recovers afterwards. The key is the kick's own level in that band, normalised to its recent peak, so the cut reaches the depth on every hit regardless of level, and a kick with nothing above 120 Hz never ducks the upper bands.
Suggest fills the four rows from the measured overlap: off where the bass owns the band, 6 dB where shared, 9 dB where the kick owns it and the bass is still in it. Edit from there. The release menu in the header follows the measured kick body by default, so a tight kick frees the bass quickly and a long one holds it down; fixed values from 60 to 500 ms are available. BYPASS switches the ducking off; it is a parameter, saved with the preset and automatable.
Under the hood
The band split is four Linkwitz-Riley 8th-order crossovers (48 dB per octave) at 60, 120, 250 and 500 Hz, with the lower bands carried through the allpass of each later crossover so the bands sum back to the input exactly in magnitude. A one-octave band still holds only about 80 percent of a tone sitting at its edge, so a bass note at 90 Hz under a 9 dB cut on 60 to 120 drops about 7 dB, and a note mid-band gets the full depth. Above 500 Hz nothing is touched. Zero latency.
Analysis runs while the window is open; ducking and loudness run regardless.