SideKick 2 (VST Plugin)

The Sidekick 2 plugin pleasantly surprised me with the combination of functionality, quality, and design it offers. From the very first use, it’s clear that it was built to make creative work easier without sacrificing professional results.

- Functionality: The tool flawlessly fulfills its purpose of sidechain and dynamic control. It’s versatile and adapts well to both simple projects and more complex productions.
- Effect quality: The processing is clean and transparent, delivering a natural and musical pumping effect without unwanted artifacts. The response is precise and adds character without losing definition.
- Interface: The graphical interface is clear, intuitive, and modern. It allows parameters to be adjusted quickly and without distractions, which speeds up the workflow.
- Overall experience: As a whole, Sidekick 2 feels like a solid and reliable plugin. It not only meets expectations but does so with a level of quality that inspires confidence in any production environment.

In short, I really liked it because it strikes the perfect balance between power and simplicity. It’s a tool that integrates seamlessly into any session and delivers professional results without complications.

Nice free alternative to Kickstart 2. It's just simple and have some good presets builtin. Previously I heavily depended on MTremolo, a free multi-functional plugin that can also be used as sidechain, but given that MTremolo is a bit of difficulty to configure, it is still convenient to have SideKick 2 in place when the only thing you need is a simple sidechain.
However, there are still 2 things that dissatisfied me:
1. No MIDI/Audio triggering: sometimes the kick is not 4/4 and I want to keep the sidechain effect fit the varied rhythm. Sadly, SideKick has no support on auto triggering via MIDI or auxiliary audio channel. Kickstart 2 has this feature built-in, and MTremolo also does this with some tricky config.
2. Require manual "wake up" when opening the project: I'm a REAPER user and the plugin just stays at the default preset when a project is opened. The settings does not load until I open the plugin window manually. It's a quite annoying bug and I wish it could be fixed.

Impressive for a free plugin and really easy to use. I'll be using it in a lot of projects going forward where sidechaining is needed.

I always use it on my Windows PC, but I'm having problems to install in my MacBook Pro, MacOS High Sierra.