Waves Plugins For Vocals Free Download
Giancarlo Stewart
Waves sells an absurd number of plugins so it can be difficult to identify which ones are relevant to you. In this article, we'll take a look at 10 of the best Waves plugins for processing vocals. This list includes a wide variety of plugins, ranging from vocal cleanup plugins to creative vocal effects.
You can reduce the effects of sibilance when tracking vocals by setting up your microphone off-axis so that it's not directly in front of your vocalist's mouth. Recording with a pop filter helps tame low-end transients (plosives) by absorbing bursts of air but this does almost nothing to tame sibilance.
The Waves SSL G-Master Buss Compressor provides clear, punchy, and snappy compression. It's great for acoustic, pop, EDM, and country vocals. This plugin is based on the master buss center compressor of the SSL 4000 G console, which has become a renowned piece of hardware.
In the following video, I demonstrate how to use the SSL G-Master Buss Compressor to control the level of vocals. If you never know which settings to use when compressing vocals, this video is a great resource.
You can set a superfast attack time on the CLA-76, making it a great choice for aggressive transient control. When you set a fast attack time using this plugin, it's prone to pleasant distortion that suits rap and metal vocals well. These characteristics also make the CLA-76 an excellent drum compressor.
The API 550A is a three-band equalizer with five fixed cutoff points per band that provides a focused sound. It's great for sculpting the tone of vocals. You can individually toggle the high and low bands between a peak mode and shelving mode, allowing you to roll off low-end rumble and harsh high-frequency content.
Each filter's bandwidth narrows as you increase or decrease the gain applied, leading to musical results. It's possible to boost or cut up to 12 dB per band in 2-3 dB steps, which is more than enough for shaping vocals.
Saturation can help turn a thin and brittle vocal recording into a rich and radiating performance. The Waves Abbey Road Saturator provides the sound of classic tubes and transistors. You can use it to add warmth and harmonics to vocals, acoustic guitar, drums, and more.
The plugin's EMI TG12321 Compander excites the input signal, pre-saturation, resulting in an airy high-frequency emphasis will make pop vocals shine. You can use the Abbey Road Saturator to help both vocals and instruments cut through your mix.
The H-Reverb Hybrid Reverb supplies lush, spacious, and warm reverberation effects that are perfect for processing vocals. It includes a collection of halls, rooms, plates, and nonlinear reverb presets, in addition to some advanced processing options.
I'm a big fan of H-Delay Hybrid Delay because it's simple to operate, which is exactly what I'm looking for when applying delay to vocals. Typically, I like to add a 1/4 note or 1/8th note delay, while cutting away some low-end and top-end for clarity; H-Delay has a built-in filter section so it's easy to do this.
You can use Retro Fi to achieve vintage cassette tones. It allows you to add the sound of deep vinyl grooves to your music. There's also a palette of lofi noises, spaces, devices, and textures that will send your vocals back in time.
This plugin also comes with built-in reverb and echo effects, along with an era-specific 50s/60s/70s/80s Styler. The Squash control provides colorful upwards and downwards compression that you can use to control the dynamic range of vocals.
Within the Master section, there are high-pass and low-pass filters as well as a Mono slimmer. If your vocals feel too clean and modern, Retro Fi will help infuse them with the vibe and style of vocal recordings from the past.
A friend asked me to mix his vocals for a song he's making, the problem is I'm used to mixing beats and instrumental pieces and not very familiar with the process of mixing vocals, I'm trying the basics (pitch correction, eq, compression, etc) but it's not sounding right. Can someone please help me and share your process for mixing modern trap vocals or your typical mixing chain for this style? I would really appreciate it.
Btw I use Waves plugins for almost everything on my mixes, so if you can tell me which options are better to each function (ex: SSL for EQ, CLA 76 for compression) regarding vocals it would be extra helpful.
If you're looking for real time vocal tuning, though (like a live autotune effect), be sure to check out Waves Tune Realtime. Waves Tune Realtime helps keep live vocals - or recordings on pitch. Just set the key and the adjustment times and you're set!
The Aphex Vintage Aural Exciter is a strange little saturation plugin that was modeled after the original Aphex hardware. The beauty of this plugin is that it delivers brilliance and presence to vocals, allowing you to keep them forward in a mix without ever having to use EQ. It also has a great way of increasing presence without raising levels.
If you know anything about vocal reverb, you probably know that plates are the most commonly used type of reverb for vocals. They add space and depth to a vocal without dragging it to the back of a mix, thanks to their clean, metallic characteristics.
The beauty of this particular plate plugin is that you can start off by selecting one of the four plates, each of which has a unique tone. Once you find the right place, you can dial in the decay time with the damper and clean up the high and low-end using the EQ controls, and add a bit of pre-delay to keep your vocals at the front of your mix.
While I typically use this reverb as a send for my vocals, Waves left the option of using it as an insert by adding a Dry/Wet knob, which can be useful for background or group vocal busses. If you want to learn more, read this article on how to use reverb on vocals.
I much prefer the Butch Vig Vocals plugin over the other vocal chain plugins from Waves, such as the Maserati VX1 and the Waves CLA Vocals, as it focuses on functional and finely calibrated controls rather than tons of effects. You get the tools you need to craft a quality vocal mix, which you can add your own effects to down the line.
Waves makes great plugins at great prices, and I'd heartily recommend all of these below. Their plugins especially excel at removing unwanted sounds and leveling the vocals. That said, if you're looking to upgrade your sound even further, especially for EQ, compression, and reverb, be sure to check out this roundup of the best plugins for vocals. And if you're totally "team Waves," here's my line up of the best Waves plugins.
Waves DeBreath is a useful companion for mixing vocals. Breath sounds are often a problem as the microphone picks them up much louder than they actually are, and compression tends to make it worse. This results in breath sounds and gasps that poke through the mix in a nasty way.
The Scheps Omni Channel is both powerful and flexible. You can rearrange the different processing sections in any way like. The insert slot is very useful for vocals, as you could insert a reverb or a chorus right inside the chain, for example (it only works with other Waves plugins though).
First, a disclaimer. In the context of music, I do recommend controlling the level of your vocals manually by ear and volume automation. This is because sometimes you might not want everything to be totally even. You might lose some expression by handing that task over to an algorithm.
There are a ton of plugins in the Waves catalogue to choose from for mixing vocals. When I started thinking about what are the best Waves plugins for vocals specifically, I used three pointers for narrowing down the options: 1) Sound, 2) Ease of use and 3) Value for money.
for vocals the waves 1176 plugs are good for compression. the Puigtec EQs are great on kick drums. I also use waves F6 as a dynamic eq, but it might be complex for some users. lots of Wave stuff is real good and the UAD plugs are excellent, but very expensive.
I have been using the Waves CLA Plugins for a while now. I have been dealing with latency with those plugins ever since I have gotten them. I can not have them on a track in ANY session without getting latency when trying to record. Even if I Bypass the plugins I still get latency. I have to delete all CLA Plugins from the session entirely to get rid of the latency.
This makes for a huge problem if I have worked on a mix and the client wants to come back and change a part. I have to make a preset, completely delete the plugins from the session and then add them back after we are done tracking the new / fixed part. Its very frustrating.
Higher latencies are the result of an increased amount of calculations that are required to serve the plugins purpose. Somethings are just more computationally expensive than other things. Throw in oversampling and the latencies just multiply.
I use 5 different Waves plugins which are low on CPU, cheap, and just sound great. These are all common Waves plugins that you can buy individually or get almost all of them in a bundle (which go on sale often!).
Vegas 12 user: 64 bit PC with 32 gigs of ram. Audio stutters when using Waves plugins. Quad-core processor, Vegas runs all plugins through only one thread of the core. When will Magix re-configure to allow the Waves plugins to be multi- threaded?
I've been writing/complaining about this issue since Vegas 12.0. Search the forums and read the threads...there are dozens of comments, but none from Sony or Magix. Most WAVES plugins will not play properly in Vegas 12 and up, plus they removed support for older video monitor cards. I"m still using Vegas 11.0 32bit because of these issues, even tho I paid for upgrades.....which I cannot use. jmm
I'm glad to know that I'm not the only person with this problem. I'm not very well versed on the tech side, but I still think Vegas developers need to address the issue of multi-threading the waves plugins. I've read that other DAWs are capable of doing this. Going back to V11/32 bit, though it may be my only solution, would mean reloading current projects from the ground up.
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