mudgel
Hey Danny,
Are there some particular Waves plugs you have or did you get something like the Mercury bundle.
I keep thinking about them but now i have a UAD quad card to feed with expensive plugins. Toi many choices, not enough funds.
Hi Mike,
Yeah we got the Merc bundle. It's over-kill for sure and if I had to do it over again, I would have never went that route. But I've been with Waves since they used a HASP Key Dongle on the printer port..lol..so I'm one of those dopes that paid way too much money years ago when they were new and mind-blowing.
That said, there are quite a few plugs I use from them that I think are industry standard in my opinion. But these days other companies are doing lots of the same things and are doing them just as good or better actually. For example, I have the Waves, UAD and the Cakewalk versions of the LA2A. To me, the UAD version is the closest to the real one I had, but the Cake version is the one I use the most because it just sounds good. The one in Waves is ok too, but the Cake version is what I'd recommend to anyone.
I like the Waves L1, L2 L3 and the rest of their limiters. The reason being, they really work well for rock/metal and dirty blues, rap and anything you may want a little "good" dirt on because you can push them a bit and they don't give you that digital distortion type sound you get from other limiters like say, Boost 11. Their Q series eq's are great, the SSL stuff is really cool, and some of the Flanger, Mondo Mod/special effects plugs are unique because nothing else really does what they do the way they do it.
Their multi-band comps like the C-6 are really cool too. What I'm not too down with are the signature series plugs. I just don't see a use for most of them. It's like they crammed cheap effects algorithms or something into them. They just don't sound very good to me at all. Like some sort of economy plug that isn't as lush and transparent as you'd hope.
The API series is really good, especially that 2500 compressor. I consider it one of the best compressors ever made in plugin format. I can list a few more, but you get the idea. I would say if you buy anything Waves, be selective because you won't need the entire library really. If you ever have any questions about anything specific, feel free to pm me and I'll give you my take on whatever you may be looking for.
-Danny