TOP 7 Waves Hidden Gem Plugins

in this video today I'm going to share with you my top seven waves Hidden Gem plugins and what those are just basically plugins that not many people talk about but they're actually really really useful and valuable these are plugins I found myself using over and over again they're just fast and easy to use and sound good and if you need more free plugins for mixing or mastering your music I also have a free downloadable guide in the description it has literally like every kind of plugin and some different samples that you can download totally for free so if that sounds interesting to you definitely go and check that out in the description as well okay let's hop into a session and show you how to use these plugins to make your music sound better so the first plugin I have to share with you today is called D Breath by waves and it does exactly what it sounds like it literally will attenuate or remove the breaths out of a vocal this is awesome if you do hip-hop or if you just have a really breathy vocalist so let me just show you how to use this plugin you basically just have these few options here the reduction allows you to dial in how much you want to lower the breath by and then you have two different threshold parameters one is for the breath and one is for what's called Energy breasts have less energy so you want to set this above uh the dip of the energy plot and then for the breath you just want to make sure that you're biting into the top of it all right so let's try to remove this breath right here this one's really loud okay so all we need to do is lower this threshold in the breath one so that the breath Peak jumps above it I'll do hold two oh back right there is good because there's the breath and then we're gonna raise up this energy plot so that Valley is below that threshold there we go so now it's able to identify that breath and because we have the reduction set to Infinity it's literally going to remove the entire breath but if you want to leave some of the breath in there you can just raise this up and if you want to just listen to the breasts like when you're dialing in these settings you just click this breath monitor button and then you could hear just the breath coming out it's kind of funny that sounds kind of ridiculous that's okay and if you think it sounds too obvious like it's taking too much away and there's like silence you can just click this room tone button all that does is add some white noise underneath that to help blend in the attenuated breath now another plug-in that I think is a just an absolutely incredible plugin that not a lot of people talk about is wave C6 I have a lot of videos on how I use this plugin on a vocal chain so if you want to check out one of those videos I'll put a link up here somewhere so check it out if that sounds interesting to you C6 is a multi-band compressor what's awesome about this is you get two independent bands in addition to all the bands that range from the bass frequencies all the way to the treble frequencies so if you're working on vocals and you want to add some sparkle you can just boost this top end here and at the same time you can attenuate so this gives you that nice breathy Airy sound and because we can lower the range here we can attenuate it if it gets too bright so this is basically just changing the tonality of the vocal so that it always tends to be a little bit brighter uh it seems so full to me and what I really like about C6 is that we have these independent bands that we can then move into the muddy region of the vocal usually around 200 or 300 Hertz and that allows us to really Target that range and you can adjust the Q value which is the width of the band and then we can go in and pull that down and so now we can selectively remove the mud out of the vocal check this out [Music] oh fix it wait a while till the end awesome let me uh bypass this so you can hear how much of a difference this is making on this vocal sword except wait a while till the end of the vocal now has this nice air to it and it's not muddy at all so this is the easiest way to get that modern vocal sound that everybody is going for Hidden Gem number three is h-comp why do I like this compressor I actually just did an extensive video on this but it has so many cool features that I really don't see in a lot of other compressor plugins the biggest one being that you can Tempo sync your compressor to your music which is incredible you can either enter in your beats per minute here or you could set it to host and then it will pull the tempo information from your session so if you have a bunch of tempo changes and you want your compressor to adapt to the rhythm of the song you can just sync it to it and it will automatically import that information and then provide that Tempo synced compression and you can adjust the note length of the compression right here so if you want it to bob up and down on a on a quarter note for example you can do that and I find that this sounds really nice on a master bus if you just gently hit it it also has a wet dry mix knob so you can do parallel compression and then it has these different analog settings basically this first one is like a Transformer or a tube saturation the second and third settings are transistor and Tube saturation based I think they also add in a little bit of noise to model analog gear if you don't want that noise then you can just go to this the force setting here and it'll be totally clean another really cool feature is this punch knob and then you also have your attack and release settings and again that release setting is tempo synced if you want it to be alright so let's just quickly dial this in for this vocal but let's be aggressive so we can really hear the sound of this compressor and then we can just change this mix knob to find the right Middle Ground so that it'll just help glue the vocal into this track oh I just wish I could see that clearly and why do all the words replace empty cup Detroit this punch knob gives the vocal a nice little emphasis on the beginning of the syllables so this is kind of a cool thing to have uh especially if you want a more aggressive sound and if you really want to emphasize that initial transient on a vocal open up the attack a little bit more that'll let those sounds come through and just bring a little bit more aggression it also brings a little bit more air to the song as well okay so then let's just set our mix and we're all set I to all the words replace done there you have it candy chores and Y two it doesn't sound like there's compression going on but it's thickening the vocal giving a little bit more Sparkle and air and a little bit more aggression which is what this vocal track needed all right my fourth waves Hidden Gem plug-in is this crazy compressor called Kramer pie there's some magic that happens in it I don't know some saturation something but there's a very special way that you have to set this thing up to make it really sound amazing I find that if you put this on a drum bus it really just makes the drums come to life so I have this on my drum shells bus let me just play the drums for you foreign just doing a few DB of compression but it really makes the drums have this awesome movement to them so the trick to this plug-in is to actually take this threshold knob and Pull It basically all the way down so you're at -24 and then you want to crank your output all the way up to plus 18 and I got this trick probably from like Joey Sturgis or something I find that you if you have a really fast Decay time and then also you do relatively High ratios here like three to one or five to one it just really gets the drums moving but because you're digging in so deep at the threshold and then you're boosting your output by plus 18 you need to make sure that your gain staging is set up correctly so to properly do that you either need to put a plug-in before this Kramer Pi Plug-In or if you use Cubase you can simply just dial the gain the pre-gain back so that when the signal is fed into this compressor it's only doing about one to three DB Max on your drums now that's just a guideline your song might sound awesome if you do 20 DB of gain reduction I don't know in my experience it seems to be in a sweet spot around one to three DB so adjust your input gain so that it hits it just right so let me show you what it's going to sound like if you don't have that it's gonna be super loud here we go okay so we have to dial this back keep dialing it back until we're at like one to three DB like right there [Music] foreign but I use that compressor pretty much anytime I have hard-hitting aggressive drums or I want to add a cool movement let's talk about my fifth Hidden Gem plug-in by waves this one is called mv2 it is a compressor that does both upwards and downwards compression at the same time it's kind of cool very simple to use super fast and sounds awesome on bass guitar and vocals if you want to bring out more the breathiness I'll show you how to dial that in on both of those sources right now alright so here is my bass guitar that we have for this track sounds like this [Music] and this is mv2 basically all you have to do is decide if you want to raise up the lowest quietest parts of an audio track by bringing this slider up and then if you want to do compression you can think of this as a threshold setting to smash everything down below this if you see this green bar that tells you that you're adding that much gain to the signal and then if we hit play you'll see there'll be a red line here that's how much compression you're doing downwards okay so raising the signal up and compressing it at the same time so it has a unique sound to it and this is the reason why I use this on bass because it does this unique upwards and downwards compression thing doing both of these simultaneously basically makes it so the Bass Performance is incredibly consistent so if you have a long bass note in the bass player hits it a little bit off it's going to Decay and maybe you'll lose a lot of the sub bass information that's there what this plugin does is it will actually raise up the level as that base notes to Kane to keep it really really thick and Powerful the entire way through now if you overdo this you're never going to have a natural sounding Decay to your bass guitar but if you have you know just a few DB that kind of helps to basically gain ride the bass guitar so it stays consistent it just really makes the bass sound full and Powerful so let me just show you how I would dial this in so that's obviously way too much there and then I just want to squeeze the top end down a little bit right here okay let's game match it [Music] so especially this like staccato part you can hear that it's just making the bass guitar sound full the entire length of those down picks whereas without it it kind of feels like the bass is kind of swelling in and out okay so that's the entire reason why I love that plug-in all right if we use mv2 on a vocal it can help bring up some of the room Ambience or make it sound a little bit more intimate okay so if you maybe want to accentuate or make the breath sounds louder you can raise up the low level part of this compressor and leave the high level alone and that'll just wake up the track a little bit and make it sound a lot closer to the listener hey who I just wish I could see that clearly and why do although replace empty candy chores and why to hold the words seem so full to me so it has the effect of making the airiness of the vocal come out while at the same time not compressing the vocals down at all all right my six waves Hidden Gem plug-in is the linear multi-band compressor and this one gets no love from anybody except me but I want to show you how awesome this is if you have something that's just totally imbalanced or if you're trying to balance out a song that you have in the mastering stage this thing works awesome in both those cases so let's try this out on a bass guitar that might sound a little muddy or boomy [Music] clean as it needs to be so what I tend to do and every single time because it just seems to always work is I'll come into the presets and I literally choose multi-electro mastering okay and then I'll set the gain to zero because I don't really want to increase the gain at all and then essentially we just pull this range knob down and you can use this master control knob to adjust all the bands simultaneously so you don't have to come and individually move them and we're just going to pull this down until the base feels more balanced okay check this out okay so we pulled it down as far as it can go and it's still not really biting the track just because the the level is a little bit quieter so then what we can do is grab the master threshold and pull that down [Music] and then if we want to pull just this individual band down a little bit more to kind of tighten it up even further we can just grab this threshold and pull that band down [Music] perfect and you have independent attack and release settings for every single band so if you want a little bit more Clank just open up your attack [Music] or if you want to smooth the base out you just pull that down so that it clamps down on those high frequencies right away and let's give it a little before and after so you can hear it [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] it's so easy to use it is so fast and you can literally do the exact same thing on the master bus you can see I already have it on here so here are the settings that I use it's literally exactly what I showed you um and I've already pulled down the range all the way but let me just show you what it sounds like if we play it all in context and what it does to the master [Music] I'm just pulling that range knob down just gives this track a little bit more width and then also makes it sound again more polished right we don't have those like sharp edges jumping out of the mix from those guitars so just slide that range up and down take a few DB when it gets too rough and you're good to go I literally call this plug-in my insurance policy because it catches anything that I might have missed when I was mixing all right my seventh and final waves Hidden Gem plug-in is this one I've talked about it in some videos before but again I tend to use this on a master bus and this is how I'm able to achieve a really big width to a track without its sounding phasey or weird and this is called Center by waves plugin is deceptively simple looking you have Center Channel volume and you have the sides volume now it does a little bit more than just adjust the volume it actually changes the EQ slightly to maintain a phantom stereo image it just works if you want to make your song sound a little bit wider all you have to do is push this side volume up what I suggest doing is pushing up until the sides feel like they got pulled in line with your Center elements like your vocal so listen to the symbols listen to the guitars as I raise up the sides and then we'll find a spot where they sound like they're in line with the lead vocal and it's going to add this beautiful width to this track here we go [Music] so right here they feel like they're getting in front too much so we have to pull it back this sounds pretty good to me but let's bring in the vocals again [Music] cool so right there again it just feels like everything's in line so let's bypass it and check [Music] [Music] cool which one of these seven Waves plugins did you think sounded the best to you was it the center plugin I just showed was it the C6 was it the D breath plug-in let me know in the comments below and if you thought I missed a really impressive waves plug-in also let me know in the description what you're using on your songs I want to remind you that I have my favorite free mixing and mastering plugins guide available for free download in the description with that I want to thank you so much for your time and attention today my name is Bobby Balo I'm the mixing Mastery engineer at Raytown Productions and hope to see you in another video

Channel: Raytown Productions

Views: 13,944

Keywords: waves plugins, best waves plugins, how to use waves plugins, best plugins, free waves plugin, free plugin, how to mix, mixing music, mixing tutorial, how to mix music tutorial, h-comp hybrid compressor, mv2 plugin, waves debreath, debreathing plugin, waves c6 compressor plugin, waves h-comp plugin, h-comp free download, waves kramer PIE compressor, waves linmb, waves limb mastering, waves center plugin, top waves plugins, mixing with waves plugins, free plugins

Id: OXO_lxntGfY

Length: 19min 24sec (1164 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022