New Studio Gear PART 1: Plugins

A couple of months back I felt it was time to get some outboard gear and plugins for my Project Studio. My setup was a one-year-old Mac/Pro Tools/Reason platform with a Digidesign 003. I had enough outputs and inputs on the 003 to set up a few outboard configurations and enough computer grunt to handle high-end plugins. So I thought - why not?

Before I go on, I should mention I'm not a "tech head". I'm a singer/songwriter/producer with a passion for recording songs. I'm not loyal to any brands, so much so I often struggle to remember the model names of my gear, but I'm also very critical of audio gear and demand great results.

Firstly, for Part 1 I'll discuss the plugins.

In the past I had used Waves plugins for various projects and although I was never happy with the complete bundle, the Ultramaximizer limiter can prove to be quite valuable in any studio application - and used by most studios (even if they don't admit it, I'm told!). My main concerns with Waves were the compressors and equalizers. However, I was growing to prefer the sound of tubes, so perhaps I was a little biased.

At Macquarie University (where I'm doing a Master of Recording Arts) I had some experience with UAD DSP plugins. First reactions: The reverb was amazing!! There was so much control with so many parameters within the plugin; superb, accurate sounding reverberation. Bare in mind though, at this point I had been persevering with D-Verb in Pro Tools for about a year, and it was testing my patience well beyond its limits. You might think perhaps some of my reaction to UAD was clouded by the fact I had been working with this poor excuse for reverberation for over a year! Listening to the recording just the other day, I'm still just as impressed by the quality.

The equalizer and compression plugins in UAD were equally as good- although admittedly I didn't have much use for them in the project I was working on (soft acoustic vocal/piano song with a lot of dynamic range, but at the same time a lot of room to work with), so I didn't get a proper chance to try them out. I had them running though for subtle dynamic control and frequency manipulation (the singer I was working with had a lot of presence at 250Hz - something most male vocalists lack!)

At this point I was convinced to get UAD over Waves. This was until I found out the iMac doesn't support DSP plugins. My understanding was the advantage of DSP is it doesn't drain the CPU on the computer, rather has a separate external processor assigned for coping with the quite hungry plugins. One day (in a far away fantasy world) I hope to get a Mac Pro which I can slowly build into a super computer (with DSP), but for now I'm stuck with my iMac - which despite its fault is light years ahead of anything commercial Windows systems have to offer.I did my research and Waves was really the only other option. This would have to be my most reluctant $2000 purchase ever. However, I took the view even if I wasn't happy with the equalizer and compressors in Waves Gold the Ultramaximizer was very useful, and I had also heard the reverbs had improved in the past couple of years - I was never really critical with the reverberation to begin with though.

A couple of months has passed and I couldn't be happier with Waves Gold. The equalizers do the job and the compressors are also more useful than I thought they would be (although I mainly prefer my outboard compressor - which i'll discuss in my next blog). I've found the compressors struggled when pushed hard - i.e. you want a large dynamic range reduced to relatively small one. But maybe that is more of a personal issue than a limitation of the application.If you're not gonna have a recording professionally mastered the Ultramaximizer is a must. It stops the audio from clipping and lets you get the volume up to a sufficient level for hi-fi systems or mp3 players. Which is basically what mastering is!

The new reverbs in Waves Gold are amazing. A lot of reverbs struggle between 15kHz -20kHz, but the reverbation in Waves handles it great....so far.Next blog I'll discuss outboard gear.