Hi!
Waves sells now 3 plugins for $50. I thought of buying these 3 plugins for the 50 bucks:

1) Curves Equator - (I have Soothe2 - is it better that Soothe2 ?)

2) Waves Silk Vocal (if I buy Curves Equator, will I benefit anything from having SilkVocal too?)

3) Waves Harmony - do harmonies and octaves created by this plugin sound as good as if they were sung by a human? Or do they only sound good when they're low in the mix?


Btw. When I tried waves VocalRider I had an impression that it can do more harm than good (when trying to reduce the vocals dynamic range)...

Thanks for your opinions!

 

Curves - its a good plugin. I wouldnt call it better than soothe, but its good. Different. I prefer soothe, as it has more control and functionality. I actually prefer Acustica Dove, as far as sound goes, but its performance, cpu and ui are less than ideal.

Silk vocal - i dont know why you would need this if you are getting Curves, basically the same thing as far as i can tell, but i havent tried it.

waves harmony - they are not that great, best tucked in a mix. Sound Id AI from Sonarworks replaces your vocal with another vocalist. Its actually surprisingly good. It doesnt do harmonies, but you could create a harmony using any pitch software, and then have sound Id replace that. its also on sale.

VocalRider is good in small amounts. 3-5 db range. Even better in stages. a couple db pre compression, and then a couple more post vocal processing, maybe sitting on the vocal bus.

 

If you have soothe 2, you don't need equator imho. You could also try out TBProAudio dseq 3 from the sister site to see if you like it vs. soothe 2.

You're not missing out on anything with silk vocal.

Can't speak for waves harmony.

Save your money for better things to come in the world of audio processing!

 

It's actually different to soothe 2 in many ways. If you have both available, try this - specify each frequency you wish to dull or boost the resonance in identically in each plugin. They don't work the same way, neither does Gulfoss. Equator also has a decent analysis tool as well - I do not see better or worse, only different. After Soothe 2, it was only a matter of time before other devs released similar products. Same will happen with Bloom. Actually, it already has and Equator has bits of both. As I mentioned, different.

 

Just try and decide youself if one is "better". I prefer one time payments in contrast to waves lame upgrade plan

 

I think I'm on Waves v12 (legit).
Do you think that to be able to install new waves plugins and use my old v12 plugins (at the same time) I'll need to buy the waves update?

 

What are peoples opinion on Speccraft vs Curves Equator (vs Soothe2) for that matter

 

waves?
go to ss probably better anyway, no hassle

 

i tried equator. not impressed by it. soothe and gullfoss are way better

 

I just did a test on a master bus to see the differences between Equator, Soothe 2 and Gulfoss. Honestly they all do much the same thing with some exceptions. Also my results will be different to many because I did mine all on real instruments and what was pleasing to my ears, so this may possibly not be anyone else's.

Soothe does a decent job of removing harsh resonances but it is fiddly and you can customize it and save your presets..
Equator allows you to drill right down to specifics and has a decent global analysis tool.
Gulfoss I found for me, to be the most useful for two reasons, its simplicity and its two realtime analysis tools which determine which frequencies are dominant and what is being lost and you can adjust % values of boost or cut to your taste. For example if you want more or less of the dominant you can.

Are any of the above better? I actually do not believe so, but my personal preference on a master bus would be Gulfoss, though soothe seems to work better on some individual instruments, especially for cymbals in overheads or a digital acoustic piano that sounds too digital. Equator does one thing slightly better in my opinion which is it can de-mud many things quite well. On a master drum bus it seems to tame the muddy parts well. That said they all can but my statements are without too much fiddling around, straight as they are presented to you with only 5 minutes spent on each plugin. The above tests are without too much mucking around, so with a lot of time spent, my personal results might be different to the above.

 

Last edited: Nov 28, 2024

Should be OK, maybe just install.

 

We also no longer invest into Waves. They simply do not care about their customers.
Their Plugins are behaving odd under Logic apple silicon since apple silicon arise.
We wrote them multiple bug reports and they always say it is apple fault, even tho other Plugin developers can hande it properly.
Eg CR8 wasnt improved for ages. the latest 'update' just makes it say version 15 with some tweaks but no BUGS has been fixed.
So why shoudl be continiously infest money for this crap where wqe could invest in other caring devilopers.

in that way **** *** Waves

PS: the **** *** stands for FUCK YOU