Generate gain envelope from other track

Hi,
Sorry I’m quite a noob here and I’m not sure of the terminology, which is why my research didn’t lead me far enough.
Is there an effect to make a track’s gain vary depending on the amplitude of another track?
For example if you want to make the volume of a music decrease when a person is talking, but without adding and moving points manually, is there a tool to achieve that?

The keyword here is sidechain compression and ducking/gating.

You add a compressor plugin to the track of which you want to reduce the volume and then make it respond to the signal-level of the other track.

You can use the “a-compressor” plugin (comes with ardour). Set a large ratio, a low threshold, and enable sidechaining. Then open its pin-connection settings (the “pinout” button in the plugin’s toolbar) and select a source-track.

A quick demo video that shows an example of this is (here using two MIDI tracks, and LSP sidechain-gate) is

The concept is the same for audio and the sidechain can also be a live-input.

1 Like

Thank you, that’s what I was looking for!