Compressors with gain reduction control output

I looked it up and Reason lets you do it, but obviously this will only work on CV control ins. I want to to do fun stuff, like bitcrush things according to how compressed they are. Customizable "clipping" essentially. Or tons of other cool shit (EQing based on compression, reverb based on compression - so many things you could do). Is there another way to do this? I assume DAWs don't really let plugins have control outs to map to parameters anyway (or do they? that would be sweet) so this probably isn't very possible anyway. Is there some way to do this?

edit:

I mean, I guess you could do it with three (two aux, one audio) tracks and just use an expander on the effects track that is sidechained to the main one, mute the output of the main track and bus it to another track that is also sidechained with a compressor, but this would be a pain in the ass.

Do you need this to be part of a compressor, or do just need something that'll detect the amplitude and send out a signal when it exceeds a certain threshold?

FYI, CV control in reason is not limited to the parameters that have cv ins on their backs. You can find most parameters (with the exception of some on the nnxt and the px7) in the combinator. You just use the combinator programmer window to map a cv in to a parameter of a device in the combinator.

Oh that's cool. But you can still only use it in Reason. I guess it just really needs to be something that detects an out and sends a signal (actually one might not want to compress it within the same effect), but it would need to be more than just an "off/on" signal, which would essentially be a compressor that doesn't lower the gain of loud signal, but just outputs the voltage instead. Also, it might be nice to be able to have it as part of my compressor, but I can live without.

Renoise has good support for modulating effects via the envelope detection.

it sounds like you're really just talking about modulating reverbs and such with an envelope follower, which doesn't really have to have anything to do with a compressor.

i would maybe use an envelope follower to modulate how much bitcrushing you get BEFORE having a compressor. that way if you have, say a really dynamic drum performance that you would typically compress because there is too much range, some hits are just too loud compared to others etc, well the loudest hits would get more crushing than others. THEN you put the compressor in to reign in the dynamics. so you end up with controlled dynamics but some drums are crushed more than others because of their original level. to me that would be possibly be worth trying. using a compressed audio signal to control something, not so much.

i think what i just described is basically what you were wanting. the louder signals would trigger more of the effect first, then they would also get compressed more. so i think this is how you would have to do it. modulate the fx first with envelope follower, then compress.

Yeah, that makes sense. Still, it would be neat to get a sort of tandem effect+compressor thing, so that effects increase with the compression. It could keep a small dynamic range but still increase the "feeling" of loudness at louder parts using distortion or something. In Renoise can you set it so that modulation from an envelope follower only affects things at a certain "voltage" or higher? You could do this pre-compression, like MiserE was saying, and then just have it set to only kick in at whatever your compressors threshold is. Then again, I don't have Renoise, so I guess real question is are there any practical, cheap ways to do this in either Logic or Pro Tools (I have access to Reason but I'm hesitant to limit myself to its plugins only).

well, i think you would get the effect where the originally loud signals could get more distortion just with the envelope follower modulating distortion level, before a compressor. but if you really want it to only kick in over the comp's thresh level, for something like having distortion/saturation kick in above the thresh, you wouldn't really need a thresh for the env follower, so much as a transfer curve. if you used some kind of exponential or other curve (that curved the mapping of the input level to the envelope follower's action), you could get a result with some tweaking where basically you would have no distortion up to a point and then you'd start getting lots of it beyond that. i know you can do this kind of stuff in FLstudio, but i don't know if you can in other specific programs. as much as FLstudio gets knocked on by some, it actually has great modulation capabilities. anyway it'd take some tweaking to get the breaking point of the curve to match up with the comp's thresh.

Yeah, I think maybe my best bet within one of the available DAWs is to just try use like four tracks and sidechain the "distorted" version with an expander and regular version with a compressor and match the settings, then mix them together and compress that track. But I'll have to do some research on how to get envelope followers in Logic or Pro Tools.