Nearly every producer has a few Waves plugins in their arsenal, and with every Waves plugin reduced to just $29.99, now’s the time to add some more. Waves’ wide-ranging selection of studio tools means that whether you’re producing post-punk bands or mixing techno, you’ll find something useful in the sale that covers creative saturation tools right through to utilitarian channel strips.
With a whopping 239 plugins (yeah, we counted them) in the sale, plus a free plugin if you spend $50, or two free plugins when you spend $70, there aren’t many better sales opportunities to fill any gaps you have in your existing plugin collection. There are some select exclusions from the sale, but with so many on offer, we can’t see anyone missing these too much. There’s no word on when the sale will end either, so get clicking quickly to take advantage.
Of course, we couldn’t resist having a look at the sale ourselves to see if there was anything we wanted, so if you’re looking for suggestions these are what we’d go for. Scheps Omni Channel is probably one of the best channel strip plugins ever made, giving you some incredibly useful tools for shaping the elements of your mix. It features five modules with a preamp, EQ, de-esser, compressor, and gate that will have you covered for pretty much any mixing scenario. Designed with Scheps himself, there are also loads of great presets to give you a starting point for dialling in your mix, whether you need to tame a dynamic bass guitar or add some sparkle to a piano.
We love the sound of tape saturation, so Waves’ J37 tape plugin was the next one that caught our eye. Great for enhancing individual elements or just being placed on your mix as a whole, it's based on the famous Studer machine at Abbey Road Studios. While it’ll work on pretty much anything, we love using it on drums and other groups of tracks to really bring the performance together. The wow and flutter settings are powerful for creative moves, allowing you to add unique touches to your tracks that you won’t find elsewhere, pushing way beyond any traditional tape tones you might have heard before.
Finally, we can always recommend the classic Waves Renaissance Bass plugin. It’s such a simple tool yet completely transformative when it comes to adjusting the low end of your mix. It adds harmonics to both the low and high frequencies of your bass tracks, giving more weight and clarity to the low end, which is especially useful as your music will likely be played on smaller speakers. You’ll need a gentle touch to get the best out of it, but for us, there’s really nothing else quite like it on the market, and at $29.99, it’s an absolute steal.
