Can't speak for Electrical, but as a rule it's good practice to bring everything up to the patchbay, including sidechain inputs.I've got an old Aphex box with no "external SC" switch, where the act of plugging a connector into the jack socket switches the device to look at the external sidechain input. Kind of annoying as I hadn't really thought about it before I wired it in, and now I need to go back and add normals at the patchbay so that I can leave the cables plugged in the back of the box.

Does Electrical bring out all the sidechain features of its outboard gear to the patchbays ... for example a limiter sidechain.How about a limiter that has multiple "patch" points for the sidechain that emphasize different frequency bands (like the BSS 402)? Do you bring all these out to the patchbay? Any help would be great.

Do you put the Side Chain jacks right next to the unit's I/O?I've got all my patchbays as Outputs on the top row, and Inputs on the bottom row. It doesn't make sense to layout the outboard stuff this way, intuitively, but it also doesn't make sense to break with the overall scheme just for the outboard gear. So, what to do?

ptay wrote:Does Electrical bring out all the sidechain features of its outboard gear to the patchbays ... for example a limiter sidechain.How about a limiter that has multiple "patch" points for the sidechain that emphasize different frequency bands (like the BSS 402)? Do you bring all these out to the patchbay? Any help would be great.Yes we do. We even have the VCA control voltage I/O brought to the PB when available. The Valley People Dynamites have that option. It is super handy for making a tremolo/ring modulator out of it (coupled to an oscillator). You can also make into a crude vocoder that way, feeding audio to the CV input. All the side chain, and CV connections are normalled appropriately, so you don't need to parallel patch to make a compressor work normally.Our BSS 402 is just wired simply with the main audio ins and outs. We can use the LA-22 as a sharp notch filter eq because the detector output is brought to the patchbay. Super handy.

ptay wrote:Do you put the Side Chain jacks right next to the unit's I/O?I've got all my patchbays as Outputs on the top row, and Inputs on the bottom row. It doesn't make sense to layout the outboard stuff this way, intuitively, but it also doesn't make sense to break with the overall scheme just for the outboard gear. So, what to do?If there are two channels, both with separate sidechain/detector/key I/O available, we have the inputs over the outputs (Chan 1, Chan 2, Chan 1 SC, Chan 2 SC). The sidechains are half normalled. For gear that just has a sidechain/detector/key input (no output) we either have input over output, with the SC next to, and on the same row as the input, normalled to the input. We have the normal programing available on the patchbay's punchblock, which make it easy to make any normal connection, anywhere on the patchbay.If it is a stereo compressor with a SC input (no output) per channel, we have on one row:Chan 1 Input - Output - SC In, then Chan 2 right below it. The SC would be half normalled laterally to the appropriate input. I wrote this stuff fast, let me know if I'm being confusing.

ptay wrote:Sounds like a way to blow stuff up ... I mean I have some limiters here where the CV is 0 to -200DC ... and it's DC coupled which makes me worry even more.Yeah, I suspect that bringing this stuff up to the patch bay allowed someone to discover ducking, dynamic EQ and multi-band compression.This is what I'm going for ... I just would like to figure out how to lay out the jacks so they're logical. The "flow" mentality from top to bottom is making the most sense right now.Do you normal the 'preffered' sidechain insert points?Saw this after my last post. We didn't wire anything that wasn't available on the back of the unit. It sounds like the CV you're talking about is for a tube compressor, and I totally wouldn't bring that to the patchbay. The Dynamite's CV inputs are semi buffered, and accept normal audio levels. The scale is 20dB per 1 volt. Positive DC voltage gives you gain reduction, negative DC gives you gain. So you feed it a sinewave of 2vpp (-1v to +1v) you get a 40db level swing centered at unity. It is really easy to max out.I've never used the BSS as a multiband comp, am curious now.

ptay wrote:Do you put the Side Chain jacks right next to the unit's I/O?I've got all my patchbays as Outputs on the top row, and Inputs on the bottom row. It doesn't make sense to layout the outboard stuff this way, intuitively, but it also doesn't make sense to break with the overall scheme just for the outboard gear. So, what to do?I treat the SC inputs as any other input, and place it on the appropriate row. If you're pushed for space and you've got a few different devices with sidechain inputs you could bunch them together across top and bottom rows, but it might look a little confusing.It's common for a lot of studios to break the "outputs on top, inputs on the bottom" rule for outboard. In this case the "signal flows down the patchbay" rule often wins out.

greg wrote:We even have the VCA control voltage I/O brought to the PB when available. The Valley People Dynamites have that option. It is super handy for making a tremolo/ring modulator out of it (coupled to an oscillator). You can also make into a crude vocoder that way, feeding audio to the CV input. Woah, that's a cool idea.

ptay wrote:My patchbays all have programmable normalling so this isn't an issue, onceI get my head screwed on straight about the obvious stuff.This might not be useful depending on how you lay it out, and on how the external SC input is dealt with inside the unit. If you have an "external sidechain" button on the front panel then I probably wouldn't bother with normalling, but given my earlier example using switching jacks I have it set up like this: In1 In2 SC1 SC2Op1 Op2With a normal between In1 and SC1, and another between In2 and SC2.Given a programmable patchbay, you would have to change the wiring coming into the bay by multing it on the DB25 (or whatever). Greg can do this on his punch panel, and my normal would be done on the back of my hardwired bantam bay.

Thinking about this again, if you've got a programmable bay you could set it up as:In1 In2SC1 SC2 Op1 Op2With the inputs half-normalled to the SC ins. This would save any additional soldering, but is slightly counter-intuitive in that you're splitting inputs across two rows, and that the outputs aren't directly beneath the inputs.