Some of the Renaissance plug-ins are turning 20 in a few months.

Talk to your local studio pro's or check out various youtube videos of production engineers showing what gear / software they actually use and to this day a lot of them are using the R-series plug-ins.

I have been using RComp, RVox, RAxx, RDeEsser, RBass and REQ pretty much since they came out. Nothing wrong with RVerb either and it still gets occasional use (very simple and quick to tweak, very usable "plate" sounds).

These were some of the first plugins designed to sound like "analog gear". They got it pretty right the first time. What I especially like about the R-series is how easy, quick and effortless they all are to use. Someone put real thought into these in the late 90's. And of course they are very resource friendly.

edit: *appreciation

 

Last edited: Mar 30, 2018

Many of these end up in my mixes, they sound good, easy to use and CPU Friendly.

 

RenComp, if you run it clean, is one of the cleanest compressors there is. Up there with Kjaerhus Audio's GCO1. As clean as clean can be.

All the rest are perfectly useable too.

 

RVox is the BEST COMPRESSOR for me

 

I used Rvox and it is just simply great. However, there are people around the net that say these Waves plugins are old and bad sounding. I am looking forward to a sonic example of their awfulness.

 

waves rox

 

I've always really liked RenComp and RenVox, and they were certainly among my gotos for a looong time...

 

been user 20 years of it here, and still strong !

 

been user 20 years of it here, and still strong !

 

They're definitely great. I think people would use them more if Waves changed the fugly GUI.

 

Although I have UAD Little Labs VOG, I still use or go back to RBass. Not sure why, because soundwise UAD is 9 out of 10 times better in comparison with other emulations (talking about tools in general). But with adding more energy to sub and bass (synths, not guitars) the RBass works each time almost immediately. Just dial in the right frequency and balance the intensity with the gain (the meters are very helpful). That's it.

Sometimes I also use the RComp btw. The REQ's are just too ugly to use haha. But I'm a Pro-Q2 user anyway. Maybe Waves will update the GUI just like they did with the Q10 25th anniversary upgrade.

 

Yes I don't know why so many people give Waves such a hard time, there are not many developers where you can load an old session from 15 years ago and all the plugins still work. GUI is butt ugly though.
As for price, never pay full price, it will be $29 next week...

 

REQ EQ's regularly get used in my mixes, most often for simple baby cuts or boosts. Especially on my pre and final masters.

 

The two plugins aren't built to do the same thing at all. VOG enhances bass by applying a boost after a sharp HPF, RBass takes the bass frequencies and synthesizes higher octaves of them to emphasize the bass.

 

They don't sound bad. They don't have condensers or ICs that makes them sound bad after 20 years since they're DSP. They sound good and always will as DSP is clean and good sounding. However, a lot of things have happened since then and today's plugins sound *even better*. That's all. Nobody is saying these are suddenly crap. At least I'm not saying that... I can always mix with these, no problem, especially at 96k, but I'd miss *even better* compressor, much better reverb, much better EQ. And then I would miss Waves' low CPU usage.

GUI? I think they have great GUIs! Incredibly easy and fast to use. That's one of Waves' features from that time that "sold" them! However, the EQ is really too small and a bit fiddly to use due to that. RVerb, too. Compressors and RBass are just fine as they are.

 

Last edited: Mar 31, 2018

Coming to think of it, I remember seeing Waves plugin skins on the sister site. Are those official skins or user made? I can probably work out a nice GUI for them if it was possible for users.

 

Ah that explains it.

 

Virtual sliders > virtual knobs.

Only thing I don't like about REQ is you can't control the q value with mouse wheel. It boggles my mind why they keep doing that even with their newer eq's since it drastically slows down work flow and you can still lock the frequency value with ctrl when needed.

Many of the Waves brand name modelling plugins are a nightmare to use. The layouts are messy and everything is a knob. The 550A with it's "knob on top of a knob" -design is just a disaster.

 

I can only agree with this. It is often just a nuisance to use a GUI that emulates the look and function of real hardware. These dual knobs are especially stupid and hard to use. Hardware not so much. It's usually API, Neve, SSL emulations that work that way. It would be better if they just emulated the sound... tried to emulate the sound even better than they managed so far. ;)