AU3FX: Push

What it does

A stereo dynamics processor from the developer of AUM and AudioShare, with a noise gate, a combined compressor and expander, and a limiter and clipper stage. Threshold, ratio, attack, release and knee are set against a curve display, alongside makeup gain, a parallel dry mix and look ahead. The side chain takes an external input, so one track can duck another, and negative ratios push the same stage into expansion and pumping. Presets run from subtle to hard compression, plus gates, expanders, a maximizer, distortion and a reversed pump.

In the demo

Jade records one take that moves from quiet speech to a whisper to a shout and brings it all to a similar level, then adds the gate and shows it chewing on the breaths. She builds radio-style ducking from a second instance in AUM, drops a synth pad under a kick, and swaps it for the GarageBand compressor on a snare.

Worth knowing

Kymatica still sells older Inter-App Audio versions named without the 3, so the AU3FX spelling is the AUv3 one. It is built to run many instances cheaply rather than to model a particular hardware unit.