My Waves Native Pack arrived today. It’s awesome. I like it a lot, and have already started mastering the hell out of things. My ears are very tired.
However, bastards that they are, they included demos of their otehr products. Including the official “Waves mastering edition” and some other plugs.
The mastering edition is cool mainly for L2. The mutliband is nice but…it seems to be lacking something for me a bit.
The demo of C4 multiband Compressor/Expander/EQ blew me away and me wantee. However, I can’t seem to find out if it’s sold separately anywhere other than waves.com, and ther MSRP is insane. I can buy a whole other bundle for even more exorbitant prices and with it I’d get…a lot of stuff I don’t really care about. I don’t need a doppler-shifting pluign, thanks.
C4 lives up to the hype, though. It’s a really amazing multiband, and has a fairly intuitive interface. I opened it up and immediately knew what to do.
The masteres bundle didn’t color the mix as much, admittedly, but frankly I think the fine-granularity is lost on productions of my caliber – sure, if I had been doing recordings at The Strongroom or something, I’d have something that coudl take advantage of the linear phase stuff, but I’m still just a guy in the basement.
I’m coming to the conclusion though that my mixdowns are starting to show that I know what I’m doing. I’m having to apply significantly less EQ to the overall mix, and I don’t need to compress things nearly as much to get some sound out, so I can be more subtle in the mastering phase. This is a good sign.
Now I just need to get C4…it’s almost be worth it to pay Waves’ stupid singleton price – which I might add would be more than I paid for the whole damned bundle…