Mallard.
Draw the duck.
Draw any envelope shape directly on the canvas. Sync it to your BPM or fire it from your kick, give the sub its own curve, and let the kick’s own level shape the gain. Mallard turns your sidechain from a reflex into a design decision.
Sidechain compression you design yourself.
Mallard replaces the compressor-and-kick-sidechain workflow with a direct approach: draw the exact gain reduction curve you want on a canvas, sync it to your project BPM and let it loop — or fire it from every kick, with the low end on its own curve.
Traditional sidechain compression reacts to an audio signal — Mallard executes a predetermined shape. You decide what the ducking looks like before the music plays, with unlimited points and full control over every curve.
This makes Mallard ideal for anything where the duck shape matters as much as the timing — stutters, rhythmic gates, pumping synths in time with complex polyrhythms, or any case where a compressor's attack and release curves aren't expressive enough.
Two bands, one kick, no late ducks.
Mallard 1.3 adds a second curve for the low end, a live sidechain follower (RM), a transient trigger with its own band-pass filter, and 10 ms of lookahead so every duck is already down when the kick arrives. Projects from earlier versions open exactly as they sounded: the new features start switched off there.
Draw one curve for the whole signal and a second for everything under the SUB crossover (40 Hz – 1 kHz). Duck the sub hard and long while the top of the bass barely moves. With lookahead on, the split is linear-phase, so nothing above the crossover is smeared or shifted.
The sidechain’s own level shapes the gain. Below ducks by it live: at Smooth 0 it follows the kick’s waveform for a gritty, ring-mod movement; smoothed, it becomes a centred envelope with no lag. Above lets your curve duck only as deep as the kick is loud. Drive, Smooth, Stereo Link and a per-hit Window shape it.
Fires on the attack of each hit instead of a level threshold, so a quiet kick and a loud one trigger alike and a swelling pad never does. A sidechain band-pass isolates the kick out of a full drum bus — set it by dragging on a live spectrum of the sidechain, or audition it with Listen.
With lookahead on (10 ms, reported to your DAW), Mallard sees each hit before you hear it and fades to the curve’s start value over a Pre-fade you set, with an optional Hold — no click at the hit, no late duck. In Loop and Sync the pre-fade works with no latency at all.
Hear the shaped signal, only what the duck removes (a transient gate), or that same removed part with its polarity flipped for parallel ducking on a send. Mix now blends VOL, SUB and RM together.
Kick-and-bass ducks, a sub-only duck, synced pumps and a trance gate, RM grit and RM follow, a transient gate, a parallel duck and a MIDI duck — each a starting point you can save over as your own.
A canvas for gain. Paint with volume.
The envelope canvas is the entire plugin. Click to place points, drag to reshape the curve between them. Every point and curve segment updates the gain reduction output in real time as you draw.
Place points anywhere on the canvas. Drag the curve segment between two points to control the interpolation — linear, concave, or convex. Unlimited points means you can construct any gain reduction shape, from a simple one-dip duck to multi-stage rhythmic patterns.
The envelope's total duration can be locked to a musical division of the host BPM. As you change tempo in your DAW or use tempo automation, Mallard follows. The shape stays proportionally identical regardless of speed.
The envelope repeats continuously on the sync division you choose. On 1 bar: the shape loops every bar. On 1/4: it repeats every beat. The loop point is seamless — the last point and the first point are always connected.
Drag the corner of the plugin window to resize it from 500×280 to 1200×700 pixels. The canvas scales with the window — more screen space means more precise point placement and a clearer view of your envelope shape.
Every curve, exactly where you want it.
There's no cap on how many points you can place. A simple duck needs two or three. A complex multi-stage stutter might use twenty. The canvas handles any number of points without performance impact.
Between any two adjacent points, drag the midpoint of the segment up or down to bend the interpolation from linear into a curve. Concave curves feel natural for release; convex curves create abrupt attack-style shapes.
Double-click empty canvas to add a point; double-click a point to remove it. The curve reconnects automatically between the surrounding points. Reshaping is fast enough that you can iterate freely — and Copy puts the VOL shape onto the SUB curve (or back) in one click.
Seven divisions. One tempo.
Seven musical divisions cover everything from 16th-note gating to four-bar breathing shapes. Pick the division that matches your pattern's musical context — Mallard calculates the exact duration in milliseconds from the host tempo.
Disable sync and set a precise duration manually — from 50 ms for ultra-fast gating effects up to 10 seconds for long, evolving volume shapes. Free mode ignores the host tempo entirely.
If your project uses tempo automation, Mallard follows it. A shape that takes exactly one bar at 120 BPM will still take exactly one bar at 140 BPM — the loop stretches and compresses with the tempo map.
Room to draw. Sized to your screen.
Mallard opens at 1000 × 660 and scales the whole interface to 90, 80, 70 or 60 % from the size pill in the header. Every control keeps its layout and the canvas stays precise at every size.
The curve editor on top, Shape / Trigger / RM pages underneath, mode on the left and output on the right — all in one view.
Five sizes from the header pill. Mallard remembers your choice and opens at the largest size that fits your display.
Points are stored as normalised coordinates, so scaling never moves a point or changes a shape, and a click lands under the cursor at every size.
Everything that shapes the shape.
Beyond the canvas, Mallard’s controls sit on three pages — Shape, Trigger and RM — with the mode switches and the output always in view.
Lock the curve to the host’s beat grid, or set its length freely. Shot plays it once per trigger; Retrig lets a new hit restart it mid-way.
How far each curve pulls its band down. SUB Freq sets the crossover under which the SUB curve works; Smooth (0 – 50 ms) rounds both curves’ edges.
Level fires when the sidechain crosses a threshold (−60 to 0 dB). Transient fires on the attack of each hit at any level, with a Sensitivity control. Source picks the sidechain, the track’s own input, or MIDI notes.
A band-pass on what the trigger hears. Drag it on the live Spectrum view (which also shows the SUB crossover over your input) or audition it with Listen, so you can tune it to the kick and leave the hats out.
Sees each hit early and fades to the curve’s start before it lands (Pre-fade 0 – 10 ms, then an optional Hold). Off = zero latency.
The sidechain’s level shaping the gain live. Drive ±18 dB, Smooth from audio-rate to a centred envelope, Stereo Link, and a Window (15 – 700 ms) that limits it to just after each trigger.
The shaped signal, only what it removes, or that part polarity-flipped for parallel use. Mix blends the dry signal back in under all of it; the GR meter shows the gain being applied.
Draw once. Loop forever.