Ballpoint Spectral Sidechain: Frequency-Band Dynamics Processor by Fischer Music Club

Standard sidechain compression pushes down the entire track whenever the trigger fires, which can make the processing easy to hear and hard to see. Ballpoint takes a different approach. It is built on sixteen frequency orbs, and you choose which bands respond to the sidechain by clicking or dragging across them.

The plugin can use an internal trigger or an external track as its source. Fischer Music Club states that each band moves in real time, so you can watch the spectral reduction happen as the source plays.

The main interaction is the set of sixteen orbs. Selecting a region of the spectrum tells the plugin where to duck, and the display shows that movement while the audio plays. This makes it practical to target only the frequencies where a kick and a bass overlap, for example, while leaving the upper spectrum alone.

For mixing, the appeal is precision: you can make a specific clash clear without flattening the mix dynamics that a full-band compressor would affect.