What do you think about Waves CLA Vocals?

Chris Lord-Alge on CLA Vocals: “The most important part of any song is the vocals. The CLA Vocals plugin makes this part of mixing an absolute joy. I have taken the very best settings which I use in my everyday mixes and crafted them into this chain. It works great on all styles of singers and, best of all, they will want that sound every time! You also get three flavors of the top six effects you need: the right amount of bass, treble, compression, reverb, delay, and chorusing/doubling.”

My new plugins shop

 

I think Waves are cringy plugin company and CLA is cringy salesman more than an audio engineer,
but my opinion doesn't matter, so don't take it too seriously

 

Tried it, don't use it. I use exactly one of those Waves namesake plugins out of all of them and that's Maserati GRP. That's it.
In fact I don't think I use any waves plugins at all any more apart from that one, except occasionally Abbey Road ADT.

 

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Last edited: Jun 4, 2024

i think those all-in-one style plugins are fine when you're first learning about signal processing. think they can also be a cool on the spot timesaver if you need to give an artist a quick preview of how something might sound when it's finished and you don't want to bother dialing in a bunch of different plugins

i typically don't like to use any plugin with such vague controls. i'll have a very specific goal in mind when i'm processing a piece of audio and i choose my tools accordingly. CLA stuff isn't for me

 

I found the reverb modes surprisingly good.
Compress Push useful, sounds a bit like RVox, Spank was already too distorting.
Bass and Treble useful for a sketch (but need more tweaking).
Pitch Stereo ok, the other modes, not.
Delay was the worse, IMHO. Needs more options for feedback and LP and HP.

 

I guess that's not too far from the truth.. but they do have some cool plugins from time to time.

 

It was good, there was a time when this is one of the best selling, most overly used plugin for vocals out there, before all these fancy new tHe mOsT fIRe vOcAL cHaIn eVa hype taking over. Everyone uses it, even pro mixers use it, atleast 20 episodes of MWTM you will see some of them use it when they opened their old project files.

It is good for setting up temporary vocal processing just to make the vocals bearable while working on other part of the songs (also ad libs tracking), atleast that's how I use it now. It lacks a lot of controls, the premade setting aint that bad at all but there's too much other better options out there now. Still I think if you can't get a good vocal sound out of this plugin alone plus a proper DeEsser, it's the vocal recordings or worse you.

 

Maseraty GRP and ACG Acoustic Guitar stand out among all Waves things.

 

Udi, my thumbs up for you is for your post. Not for Waves. I think some of the CLA ones are decent in a mix, I like the Guitar one a bit. I'll always keep fond memories of Waves Kramer Tape and S1 Stereo Imager. That's about it.

 

what year is it? 2010? why are we discussing 12 year old repacks of 17 year old plugins.

 

Why did you join this thread if you don't want to discuss it? Just to stop the others from doing what you think is unnecessary?

0:20

 

well now we know why you joined this thread at least

did you already decipher what message i have left?

 

the codes get warmer sounding and produce a lot of desirable artifacts

 

Well, I doubt that you know this, but I'll tell you:

1. As a member, to make an on-topic comment.

2. As a mod, to tell you that your comment was unnecessary and off-topic (meanwhile two).

3. For guitar lessons.

 

Honestly, those plugins are more or less like channel strips, and I personally use neither of them.
Though if you use channel strips but shit on these kind of plugins you're sort of a hypocrite, ngl.

I think that you can get decent results from this thing, though keep in mind that you can do so much with vocals, so if this is your only vocal processing tool then yeah, I'd advice you to check out other tools as well.

*Cocaine plug. Ftfy

 

Thank you. I think at the end of the day it's about what results you are looking for, the tools you can afford and your know-how. If you just starting out mixing or tracking. Also not everyone aim to be a mix engineer and they mix for fun, or for demo or they just starting with production

 

personally i love those artist series, to reveal how they would recreate their workflow digitally really provided some insights. sad part is that they had to rely on waves plugins solely

 

Why suddenly so much hate about CLA Vocal plugin ? from a week ago there is "George T Music" YT channel talked about the same topic!
if you don't like the plugins please don't use it but in the same time don't force other people to do the same for sake of professionally !! anyway it depends on the project you work with , as well as the recording and what your are thinking about the final tune you want !

 

Last edited: Nov 13, 2022

I always figured all the signature stuff was just noob fodder, but some are surprisingly decent. CLA Bass for example is simple but has a lot of flexibility. I use it often on live bass. CLA MixHub is pretty good too, but I haven't used the others much.

I've also been surprised at the number of well-known mix engineers/producers I've seen use them in tutorial videos. Rather than feeling it's cheating or unprofessional, I guess many actual pros just use what works/sounds good without caring what a nobody on a forum will think of them.

Many of the engineers are already rich enough, but do have unique chains they've come up with and seem to put time into making sure plugins with their name on them don't suck. It allows people to get similar sounds, without revealing their exact "secret sauce" (which may just be a stack crappy Waves plugins they've been using for decades)