CodWaves Just Launched QUANCE, a Resonance Suppressor With a Real Bass Use Case
CodWaves put out a new plugin this week called QUANCE, and it is not aimed at bass producers at all. It is a resonance suppressor, the kind of tool that is usually sold on vocal and mix-bus examples. But the way it is built points straight at a problem every low end producer already has and usually solves badly: a bass note that rings at one specific pitch and nowhere else, and a static EQ cut that either misses it or dulls every other note trying to catch it.
QUANCE launched October 28, 2026, at $79.99, with an introductory price of $49.99 running through November 30. It ships as VST3, AU, and AAX, on Windows 10 and up and macOS 10.15 and up, Intel and Apple silicon. There is a 7-day full-featured trial, which matters here since this is a genuinely new plugin with no track record yet, not an update to something your DAW already trusts.
What it actually does
QUANCE is built around a Learn function. Play the section where the problem shows up, press Learn, and it drops focus points on the strongest peaks and narrows its detection around them instead of guessing at a fixed band. Up to eight focus points and four detection ranges can run at once, each with its own Tone Protect and Transient Protect settings so the reduction eases up around harmonics and attack transients instead of flattening everything underneath. Six modes (Default, Vocal, Instrument, Drums, Mix, Hard) tune how aggressively it reacts, and there is sidechain unmasking, so one track can carve space out of another automatically instead of you riding an EQ by hand.
None of that is marketed at bass. The developer's own copy leans on vocal de-harshing and drum bus taming. But the mechanics map almost exactly onto the oldest bass problem in the book.
Where a static cut falls apart
A bass note at E1 and a bass note at G1 do not resonate the same room, cabinet emulation, or saturation stage the same way. Push a sustained low part through a resonant filter, an amp sim, or just a room with a mode sitting near 55 Hz, and one note in the phrase will ring longer and louder than the rest of the part, even though every note was played at the same velocity. The usual fix is a narrow EQ notch tuned to that one frequency. It works for that one note. It does nothing for the next note in the bar that resonates at a different pitch, and if the bass line moves at all, the notch starts working against notes it was never meant to touch.
That is the gap QUANCE''s adaptive bands are built for. Because the detection follows what is actually ringing in the signal rather than sitting parked on one frequency, it can catch a resonance that drifts with pitch instead of one that stays still. Run Learn across a full bar where the bass line moves through several notes, and QUANCE places focus points on whichever frequencies are actually misbehaving in that pass, not just the one you happened to notice first.
The sidechain angle
The sidechain unmasking feature is the part worth sitting with longest. Kick and bass fighting for the same 60 to 100 Hz window is close to universal, and most producers solve it with a sidechained EQ that ducks a fixed band on the bass whenever the kick lands, whether the bass actually needed ducking there or not. Sidechain unmasking in QUANCE only reduces where the two signals are genuinely colliding in that moment, which is a more targeted version of the same idea. It will not replace a proper bus-level workflow (see Alien KickLab's take on the same fight for a dedicated tool built around exactly that conflict), but as a second pass once the balance is mostly right, it is a reasonable way to clean up the moments a static sidechain EQ overcorrects or undercorrects.
How to actually try it
Start in Instrument mode on the bass bus, not Mix mode, since Mix mode is tuned for a full stereo master and will be far too conservative on a single low end source. Run Learn over the section with the worst ringing, not the cleanest take. Pull the reduction amount down from whatever the Learn pass defaults to, since automatic resonance tools tend to overshoot on a first pass, and check the result with Delta monitoring so you are hearing only what got removed rather than judging by ear on the full mix. If the Delta sounds like it is pulling tone out of the note rather than just the ring, back off Tone Protect''s threshold rather than the overall amount.
QUANCE is not a replacement for a well-tuned EQ, and it will not fix a bass sound that is wrong at the source. What it is good for is the specific, annoying case a static cut cannot handle: a resonance that moves when the note does. That is a narrow use case, but it is a real one, and it is one this plugin was not built to advertise.