The first two control how much bass or treble you are adding or subtracting, compression, reverb, and delay are self explanatory, and pitch is a stereo spreader/doubler, that can give a bit of chorusing effect. From left to right the effects you controll are, bass, treble, compression, reverb, delay, and pitch. A fader for input level, a fader for output level, and six faders for the six available effects/parameters. The interface is ridiculously simple to use. Take a look for yourself below.Īfter watching the demo I had to buy the CLA Vocals plugin right away. One of the demos featured Chris Lord-Alge himself, and is really fun to watch as it gives you a glimpse into his sense of humor and how that intertwines itself into his workflow. I read the Waves CLA vocals product description on the waves site, and then watched a couple of demos of it on YouTube. But I knew of Chris Lord-Alge’s work, so I thought I would take a look at the product he would be confident enough in to put his name on. When I first saw the Chris Lord-Alge (CLA) series of plugins from Waves I will admit that my first impression was “oh no, another bunch of plugins made with a fancy analog-hardware-looking interface that will be a pain in the neck to use, or will be a complete CPU resource hog”. I strive for elegance and efficiency in workflow.

I don’t have time to fight with an interface, or struggle with plugins that make my workflow harder.

Makes an instant noticeable improvement to the signal I am processing.

The basic requirements a plugin must meet for me to even bother adding it to my arsenal of audio tools are: I’m really picky about what plugins I will bother to buy, since I don’t want to waste time and money on tons of plugins I will never use, or don’t use well. These days I generally use it in parallel and feather in the effect to my overall vocal mix. You can use it on the vocal channel itself, or on the vocal bus, or even in parallel if you like. The Waves CLA Vocals plugin makes my list of top favorites and is always in the running to be used in my mixes because of its simplicity of use, and the instant noticeable improvement as soon as you apply it to a channel. As audio engineers we all have our favorite DAWs and our favorite plugins that we tend to use in every mix.

Waves complete review