The CQ finally gets a ducker! MiniDucq is here and you can test it today by following the link: Join the MiniDucq beta - TestFlight - Apple
This is an early beta version that has only been tested with the CQ20B with the latest FW version as of writing.
So hows this work? Whats it running on?
It is an iOS app so it runs on iPhone or iPad. It controls the mixer remotely.
Not very descriptive. Whats it doing?
Thanks for your interest. It’s a ducker, meaning it automatically rides the fader of a channel to lower that signal in favor of another channel. It could be lowering background music while someone is talking into a mic, like in my demo. Or the delay while the vocalist is singing.
Technically, the app connects to the CQ the same way MixPad does. But instead of the engineer manually ducking, a machine does it automatically by monitoring the trigger signal and moving faders.
I hope that is descriptive enough for you, otherwise please keep asking.
Understand what a ducker is.
So youre saying you monitor the metering traffic and use it to in near real time adjust the fader of the ducked channel?
Yes, that’s precisely it.
Just updated with a new beta version 6. It has:
What a cool idea! This can totally work as a DJ or podcast ducker.
I’m not sure it’ll work as a musical sidechain compressor though, because of latency and unpredictability.
Still, it seems to be a super useful idea. Good luck with the app!
Thanks so much for you feedback! I agree that it is not accurate enough for true musical sidechain compression. But as you say, to rather harshly ducking music for speech mics and similar. I have had pretty good results with using it as a ducking delay on my vocals.
Hello @Vedeja,
Great initiative, and congrats on getting this out into beta — CQ has needed something like this for a while.
Building on what @schpeakers said about latency/unpredictability for full musical sidechain: there’s a deeper distinction worth drawing out. What MiniDucq does — riding the whole channel fader down — is a great match for speech-over-music scenarios: podcasts, VO, announcements, maybe a ducked vocal delay like Vedeja mentioned. In those cases, ducking the entire signal is exactly right, because you genuinely want the whole channel out of the way.
But a lot of us running CQ desks for live music don’t need that. What’s missing isn’t a full-channel ducker, it’s a dynamic EQ — sidechain-triggered gain reduction on a specific frequency band, not the whole channel. Think of something like the dynamic-EQ mode in Steinberg’s Frequency 2, where each band can have its own sidechain trigger. Classic use cases: ducking the low end of a bass synth or pad under the kick, so the two don’t fight for the same 60-120Hz without killing the whole bass part; or pulling down 2-5kHz on a rhythm guitar/synth when the lead vocal hits, without dulling the whole instrument. That’s a fundamentally different tool than a full ducker, and CQ has nothing like it natively.
Given that MiniDucq already proves out remote fader automation driven by a trigger signal, over the same protocol MixPad uses, I’m curious whether the same approach could target a PEQ band’s gain parameter instead of the fader — assuming the mixer’s remote control protocol exposes that parameter with usable latency. Even a single-band version (one sidechain-triggered PEQ band per channel) would open up a lot of live-music mixing use cases that a full ducker simply can’t touch.
Not a knock on MiniDucq — it does its job well for what it’s for. Just flagging that “ducker for speech” and “dynamic EQ for music” are two different tools, and CQ users mixing live music are still waiting on the second one.
Best regards,
Thurisaz
Awesome feedback, thanks! I will experiment with EQ. I know I can control it and it will be fun to see how to optimize reaction time, so that triggering of something like a kick would become possible.
Would the latency be less if you run it on a decent computer on an ethernet connection instead of a mobile device through wifi?
Most likely, assuming network latency and MiniDucq processing power is in play. What I’m observing though, is low/moderate CPU usage from my app. And if there is a processing bottleneck on the CQ side, we are still to discover. I will look in to this, thanks for the suggestion!
I’m having a better idea about the overall integration of the MiniDucq and the potential DucqEQ (the dynamic EQ that I have suggested).
Woud be a nice idea if @Vedeja contact the Allen & Heath team through the e-mail (not here), in case he is not already in contact with them.
The best way to have them would be if they become a part of the internal CQ DSP. That way we would be able to store them in the Scenes and also to have control over those plugins directly through the touch screen on CQ-12 and CQ-18.
Best,
Thurisaz
I agree it would be better if Allen&Heath developed the ducker natively in the CQ, and I think they are aware of that it is a highly requested feature. I hope they see this and become inspired. Until then, I will keep exploring MiniDucq.
In the next version I’ll be adding the possibility to switch effect type between the ducker (current) and a new side chained, dynamic EQ. Moving forward I might add having multiple effect engines running simultaneously.
Right now going through Apple review and the special treatment due to the connection to custom hardware (ie the CQ).
Unfortunately, I’m not getting MiniDucq to pass Apple’s review. Due to the claim of controlling third party hardware and all that comes with that. So, this very promising experiment seems to end here.
Can’t you try to explore the web Midi API way ? Like my midi message convertor for Stage Traxx 3 using IOS App " WebMidiBrowser" ?
