I've been through Waves entire Labor Day plugin sale and these 5 gems at $34.99 each are unmissable - plus get 2 free when you buy 2
Waves' latest sale sees 200 plugins drop to just $34.99 each for Labor Day

If you’re looking to grab yourself some cheap plugins in the Labor Day sales, then you should go check out the deals over at Waves, where you can bag 200 of their plugins for just $34.99 each. To make things even sweeter, if you buy two, you’ll get another two plugins completely free of charge, making it a great way to stock up your mixing arsenal for less.
The sale will be running for this week only, so if you’ve been saving your cash for some new software, it’s a great opportunity to bag something for less. Waves plugins get a lot of hate online, but they have some genuinely great bits of software that offer intuitive ways to craft your mixes, and at this price, they’re more than worthy of investing your hard-earned money into.
Like all good mixers, I use a variety of plugins depending on the style of music I’m working with and the amount of work needed to bring them up to scratch. Some of these I’ve been using for well over ten years now, so you can rest assured that they’ll do the job for you, too. If you’re not sure where to start with the sale, then here are five of the best Waves plugins to get you started.
I've used the Scheps Omni Channel on pretty much every instrument at some point, whether adding a light touch of vibe or totally transforming the properties of an audio source. It's a 5-module channel strip that features preamp, EQ, de-essing, compressor, and gating, making it a proper Swiss-army knife tool for your productions. There are loads of great presets built into it that make a good starting point for beginners, and if you know your stuff, plenty of options to tweak and shape your sounds.
One of the all-time classic compressor plugins, Waves CLA-76 is many producers' go-to for drum busses. It can add a specific character that will make your drums sound like they're being hit harder, without drastically increasing your peak levels. It's not just viable on drums, though; it really is a Swiss-army style comp that can do the job on guitars, vocals, pianos, and pretty much anything else, so well worth picking up at this bargain price point.
Waves Smack Attack enables boosting or cutting of the attack and release parts of the transients in audio - a drum hit or string pluck, for example - to give them much more impact. Smack Attack is a fantastically useful plugin and does a great job on all sounds with transient components, particularly on basses, pianos, guitars, and synth plucks.
Waves Renaissance Bass, or R-Bass as it's more commonly known, has been many producers' go-to for a long time now. Designed to enhance low-end instruments like bass guitars, kick drums, and synths, it's an easy-to-use yet powerful plugin that will add extra low-end to any source.
If you've got an instrument track that just isn't quite sitting right, or you want to add some extra texture to the whole mix, Waves Kramer Master Tape is a fantastic analogue tape emulation. It adds a really punchy sound and is based on a machine that has featured on loads of classic records. There are plenty of controls for tweaking it to your exact specifications, which makes it super versatile in the mix.
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Matt is a Junior Deals Writer here at MusicRadar. He regularly tests and reviews music gear with a focus on audio interfaces, studio headphones, studio monitors, and pretty much anything else recording-related. Matt worked in music retail for 5 years at Dawsons Music and Northwest Guitars and has written for various music sites including Guitar World, Guitar Player, Guitar.com, Ultimate Guitar, and Thomann’s t.blog. A regularly gigging guitarist with over 20 years of experience playing live and producing bands, he's also an alumnus of Spirit Studios, where he studied studio engineering and music production.
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