GPW Duck Shaper.Shape the pump.
Sidechain ducking without the routing. Sixteen curves, one screen: scroll and watch them find their place.
Pumps, cuts and swells
Eight pumps, four cuts and four swells, from Classic and Hard Cut to Chop and Wave. Click one and it plays.
Drag it shorter or longer
Drag any curve on the screen to stretch the duck from 25 to 400 %. The bass makes room for the kick exactly as much as you want.
Kick and bass, in phase
PHASE ALIGN lines the bass up with the kick: DELAY, PHASE, polarity, AUTO ALIGN, SMART PHASE and WAVE DUCK, and a meter shows how much louder the kick + bass get. SHIFT and BEND reshape the duck right on the screen.
Draw your own pump
Six shaper modules, up to three bands each, curves you draw and a library of 35 shapes.
Shape the pump
Buy US$ 29.00Watch it in action.
Two and a half minutes: the 16 curves, Phase Align on a real kick, the Shaper modules, and the drop with and without Duck Shaper. Every sound you hear is the plugin's own output.
Kick and bass, in phase.
When the kick and the bass play at the same time, their low ends can cancel each other and the drop loses its weight. The DUCK tab now lines them up before it ducks.
One click, lined up
AUTO ALIGN (formerly PHASE LOCK) listens to about two seconds of the kick against the ducked bass and sets the DELAY and the polarity that line them up.
Re-aligned at every duck
SMART PHASE (formerly ADAPTIVE) turns the bass to match the kick on every hit. It looks 200 ms ahead, and your DAW compensates for that delay on its own.
Fine-tune it by hand
DELAY holds the bass back by up to 20 ms and PHASE rotates it from 0 to 360°, with no delay added. Ø flips the polarity.
A lamp that agrees
The MATCH lamp lights in the colour of how well the kick and the bass agree right now, and stays dark when one of them is silent.
The kick cuts in
Instead of aligning, WAVE DUCK (formerly RINGMOD) lets the kick cut into the bass, with an AMOUNT from 0 to 100 %, for a harder, more aggressive pump.
Hear it, then see it
A meter on the curve screen reads the kick and the bass together, in RMS or LUFS, and GAIN shows how many dB louder the pair gets from the alignment.
Reshape the duck
Touch keys under the curve: SHIFT moves the duck earlier or later, BEND makes it lighter or deeper, while the curve stays the one you picked.
A low end that hits
MONO folds everything below 20 to 150 Hz to mono at the very end, so the sub stays centred and solid on any system.
The DUCK tabSixteen curves. One MIX.
DUCK is the fast lane: pick a curve, set its length, choose what fires it and turn MIX. The screen shows the curve over the kick and the bass, so you see the duck the moment you hear it.
- DUCK16 curves
Curve
Sixteen built-in shapes: eight pumps, four cuts and four swells. Click one and it plays right away.
- DUCK0 – 100 %
Mix
How deep the duck goes. 0 % leaves the sound alone, 100 % follows the curve all the way down.
- DUCK25 – 400 %
Duck length
Drag the curve on the screen: left makes the duck shorter, right makes it longer. Double-click puts it back.
- TIME1/16 – 1/1
Length
How long one curve lasts: a sixteenth, an eighth, a quarter, a half or a whole bar.
- TIMESync · MIDI · Audio
Trigger & offset
SYNC follows the host tempo and OFFSET moves the duck up to 100 ms earlier or later. MIDI restarts the curve on every note; AUDIO fires it from the kick on the sidechain, with a threshold.
- BAND20 Hz – 5.2 kHz
Band, slope & solo
With BAND on, only the part below FREQ is ducked, at 6, 12 or 24 dB per octave. SOLO plays just that ducked low band.
- BAND20 – 150 Hz
Mono maker
Everything below its frequency goes to mono at the end of the chain.
- ALIGN0 – 20 ms · 0 – 360°
Phase align
DELAY, PHASE and Ø line the bass up with the kick; AUTO ALIGN finds them for you, SMART PHASE keeps them right on every hit, WAVE DUCK cuts the kick into the bass, and the meter shows the gain.
The SHAPER tab. Draw your own pump.
A rack of six shaper modules. Each one can split into three bands, and every band rides its own curve per target, from a palette of ten you draw on.
The pump
Ducks, gates and swells from any curve you draw, with a trim after it. Each of up to three bands runs its own curve and mix.
Twelve filter types
Low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, notch and peak, 6 to 24 dB. Curves drive the cutoff and the resonance, with drive and a stereo offset.
Movement
Auto-pan from a curve, with four pan laws, width and a Haas spread that swirls the image.
Tape tricks
A curve scrubs through a buffer: half-time, tape stops and frozen steps, from 2.5 ms up to four bars.
Air that pumps
White, pink, brown, hiss, crackle or tonal noise, with curves for its level and pitch.
Bits and rate
Curves for bit depth and sample rate, with push, dither, jitter, a pre-filter and a treble control.
Follows the loudness
The input or the sidechain pushes any curve up or down, with amount, attack, release and sensitivity per module.
Tools for curves
Random, 2X, flip, shift, reset, a grid from 4 to 64 steps, smoothing, undo and redo, and a library of 35 shapes in four groups.
Up close
The new skin: glass knobs, backlit screens and lit keys, rendered like real hardware.
A new skin
The same family as GPW Heat: a bead-blasted plate, glass knobs, backlit screens and keys that light up, all rendered in 3D.
Tempo, MIDI or audio
Lock to the host tempo, retrigger from MIDI notes, or let a kick on the sidechain input fire the duck.
29 to start from
Factory presets for pumps, gates, filters, motion, time, lo-fi, noise and envelopes, plus your own saved from the header.
Updates in one click
The plugin tells you when a new version is out and updates itself. Resize from 50 to 150 %; right-click any control for automation.
GPW Duck Shaper FAQ
Straight answers about what the plugin does and how to use it.
What is GPW Duck Shaper?
GPW Duck Shaper is a sidechain and volume shaper plugin (VST3, Windows) made by Ghost Producer World. It ducks your sound along a curve instead of a compressor, so the pump is the same on every beat. DUCK is the fast lane: 16 curves, MIX, band, mono maker and phase align. SHAPER chains Volume, Filter, Pan, Time, Noise and Crush modules with curves you draw.
How is it different from sidechain compression?
A compressor reacts to the level of the kick, so the duck changes with the mix and needs a sidechain routing. Duck Shaper plays a curve: the depth and the shape are exactly what you see on the screen, locked to the tempo, with no routing needed. If you want it to follow a real kick, switch the trigger to AUDIO and feed the kick to the sidechain input.
What does PHASE ALIGN do?
When the kick and the bass play together, their low ends can cancel each other. PHASE ALIGN lines the bass up with the kick before the duck: DELAY holds the bass back by up to 20 ms, PHASE rotates it from 0 to 360°, Ø flips its polarity, and the MATCH lamp shows how well the two agree. AUTO ALIGN listens to about two seconds of kick and bass and sets the delay and polarity for you. SMART PHASE re-aligns at every duck. WAVE DUCK instead lets the kick cut into the bass. The meter on the screen shows how many dB louder the kick + bass get.
What can trigger the duck?
SYNC runs the curve on the host tempo, with an OFFSET of ±100 ms to move it earlier or later. MIDI restarts it on every note you send to the plugin. AUDIO fires it from hits on the sidechain input (or on the track itself when nothing is routed), with a threshold. SHAPER adds HZ, a free-running rate from 0.01 to 40 Hz, swing for the synced curves and a MIDI switch that picks the curve from the note you play.
What does the SHAPER tab add?
A chain of six shaper modules: Volume, Filter, Pan, Time, Noise and Crush. Each module can split into three bands, and every band runs its own curve per target, picked from a palette of ten that you draw on, with a library of 35 shapes in four groups, a grid, smoothing, random, flips and shifts, undo and redo, lengths from 1/32 to 16 bars, an envelope follower and a scope.
Does GPW Duck Shaper add latency?
No, with one exception: SMART PHASE looks 200 ms ahead to re-align the bass at every duck, and the plugin reports that delay to your DAW, which compensates for it automatically. Everything else runs with zero latency.
Which plugin format does it use, and how do updates work?
VST3 for Windows, stereo in and out plus a stereo sidechain input, in any DAW that hosts VST3 plugins. It comes with 29 factory presets and saves your own. The plugin checks for new versions and updates in one click from its header; the window resizes from its corner, 50 to 150 %, and right-clicking a control opens your DAW's automation menu.
How much does GPW Duck Shaper cost?
US$ 29.00 for a license for one person, on as many of your computers as you like, and every update is free. The download itself is free: without a license the plugin runs in demo mode, with a short dropout of the sound every 45 seconds. Buy a license on this page, paste the key in the plugin and the dropouts are gone.
GPW Duck Shaper is out.
Download it free and try it in demo mode. A license for US$ 29.00 removes the dropouts, and every update is free.