Waves releases CLA Epic Delays and Reverbs
by The Press Desk   30th November 2020

Happy times!

Worth it? Is the price dropping real, or is this a black friday joke?

Aside from emulations of CLA’s presets/gear, the point of this seems to be to simplify the technique CLA shows in the Depth videos.

But, what if I don’t want all these effects on each channel? Of course, I can use other effects or multiple instances of this, but then I am back to complexity. So, I might as well create my own 4x4 matrix for the most flexibility.

Are people planning on using this to replace most of their delays and reverbs? With one instance on a return using varying amounts of send levels on each channel?

Side question: if using the 4x4 method, do people tend to keep the send levels high or maxed and then mainly use the return faders for adjusting the amount of the effects? I do not recall CLA explaining that in the videos.

One idea might be to leave some headroom in the return faders and start with a medium amount of sends on each channel. Then perhaps get a good mix of the returns and tweak the sends to taste.

EVEN MORE EPIC THAN EPIC! I bought it, what the hell

Interesting concept but EPIC CPU consumption on my I7 Win10 Studio One 5 configuration. Not sure how practical multiple instances of this will be - certainly not on my box. The freebie, EchoSphere registers ~9 in SO5 and Epic registers ~23. It doesn't appear to reduce consumption when muting in the left panel. Would've been nicer IMO to have them as on-off to reduce consumption like in MixHub.

For me, this isn't the type of effect you can simply freeze and move on, like IK Tapes (the undisputed king of consumption in my collection of plugs).

YMMV.

You can mute each effect and only use the ones you like.

Inside the plugin you also have a routing feature to send delays to reverbs.

My thoughts exactly.

Looks like a cheaper more simplified version of Apogee's Clearmountain's Domain.

Was exited unitil installed to see windows 8.1 : nope !!

If you compare the real sound (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc0xm7pyTKw) to the plugin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ4wJpm1sIs), first thing that stands out is that the repeats (plus the ambience in general) on the console are much narrower and warmer than in the plugin, which makes them very cool in a way as they do add a whole other dimension to the vocals. In the plugin demo I think they're kind of overcrowding the direct vocals, "competing" with them in a sense, and not adding as much to the depth as the HW does.

I'll still probably end up buying as I like the concept and I think there are some pretty cool sounds to be had (with the help of the onboard filters and maybe some stereo imager)...

To me, this seems like a nice and quick option for setting up a bunch of delays and reverbs in a project. You just open the plugin and you have 4 delays and verbs ready to go.

I also find it nice that the gear emulated in the plugin is in some cases very rare and not stuff that I recall seeing in other plugins, and certainly not in the same plugin.

480L, Marshall Tape Eliminator, Yamaha Rev 1, Sony DRE 2000, Ursa Major space station. I've used a few of those original hardwares in the past. Very nice pieces.

I'll be grabbing this plugin for sure later on today after I come back from a few chores outside.

How do you send to each of the effects in different amounts?

This kinda misses the point of how CLA operates his efx. Although it appears he is riding the returns a lot overall, the sends from various tracks are varied quite a bit and customized to the track. For instance, elec guitars might be going to the room and the crowd, while the vocal may be going to the plate and slap and just a touch of the room by comparison.

So, I don’t really see how this in any way duplicates that process. Granted, I haven’t demoed it yet... but there would have to be a customized input matrix plug-in to pull this off properly.

The big question is wether you can replicate what CLA is doing in his videos with this plugin. Isn't he sending some tracks to a subset of the processors? How would we replicate this workflow? The naive option is to have the plugin in all tracks with different configurations, but that would be more complex than the usual workflow. The other is to have three buses with this plugin. One for vocals, on for in front elements and one with back elements. Then you send different amounts to place each track. Maybe in the last CLA video, coming this Thursday, he will explain his thought process on this.

The plugin is super interesting, but it doesn't really sound like the equipment it was based on. Did you notice how the plugin's Plate is much darker than the 480? Is Throw much cleaner than the Line 6 EP?

I think I'll pass this time.

Does these plugins GUI look messed up to you all?
Downloaded the other plugin and the GUI was useless.

Thanks, Marc

Yep. They are a bit weird. Not so straight forward. I guess you get used to them eventually.

It's a interesting concept of having a lot of different fx on one DAW channel.
Maybe hard to get used to also

That's pure genius. ?
Make a free version with limits which you can't make it sound like how cla use them.
Then release a full version with no limits.

The CPU usage is also EPIC for multi instances of this plugin.

Yeah it's called a send effect unit, how revolutionary.

Yeah, no one releases cut down versions for free.

what hw unit is each delay and each reverb, does anyone know?

There's a video on Waves YT channel where he talks about all the units.

saw that, but that doesnt match the plugin of course. what is hall? what is space.... etc

Does anyone know if the reverbs are algorithmic or sampled impulse responses?

Gave Waves CLA Epic (Mercury...) a shot this evening. It shares a similar approach to the Apogee: an easy tweakable delay / reverb chain, a lot of nice presets to get you started, few parameters to tweak it and a famous name for marketing
I admit I really like stuff like this - the Waves Manny Delay is another example of stuff like this: no hassle, easy tweakable, nice workflow, inspiring, fast.
Think about chaining up your favourite delays, and verbs wading through their params and usually end up tweaking the same presets again and again...

And - when you really found something you like with the Waves or Apogee stuff the chain you came up with is very easy to replicate with your favourite top-notch plugins - if you think it's worth it.

The CLA needs quite a bit of CPU, the UI is terrible (as the Apogee's by the way....) it sounds quite nice on its own and comes with some very inspiring presets. It never claims to be a 480 which it definitely isn't.

BTW: after the V9 --> V10 disaster: no problem to run and install V10, V11 and V12 plugs side by side.

cheers Ralf

OMG how smart are you!

Thanks for the info. I am looking in at jumping up from my Horizon Bundle and other qualifying plugins to the Mercury Bundle at some point so might wait for it till I do that upgrade.

If I WUP before upgrading do you get a Waves Voucher still for how much the WUP costs that you can then put towards the upgrade cost to Mercury for instance?

Cheers.

I would never use this on a send unless for just one track or a stack doing all the same part. For multiple tracks you just wont have separate proportions of delay to reverb amount. Multiple tracks can send to the aux channel in different amounts sure, but you can't have more percent delay on one and less on another.

So would I use this on an insert per track? Maybe and it would allow individual delay/reverb percentages and every other setting separately but then there's some other issues one of which is the unusually high CPU useage this thing takes.

The other issue I have is no EQ for delays or reverb. I always EQ my reverb return. If I do that here, I'm EQing the delays the exact same way as well. I may want to do that but I don't want to HAVE to. Sure there's individual hipass and lopass for the 8 returns but thats not the same as EQ and actually would be pretty time consuming to set 4 reverb hi and lopass if filtering the whole thing is what I wanted.

This brings me to actually a limitation of something impossible on this plugin I do that also happens in CLAs console. The way I EQ my reverb returns is with an entire SSL console plugin channel to simulate what would happen on a board. Not just is my EQ and filters there but the input saturates and compresses some. How that sounds depends on the amount and tone of signal going through there, with CLA Epic, this would have your delays also hitting so would sound different.

Ultimately the whole thing about this plugin is flexibility and fun of mixing and matching stuff quickly but in order to do that you lose some flexibility too. It's a great idea and I'll experiment with it, but I'd actually like to see an even more "Epic" version of this idea. The whole thing here is really this matrix concept. Imagine if you could have this matrix thing going on and each of the 8 channels could be 8 chains instead. 4 delay chains, and 4 reverb chains. You could have a few inserts pre and post on each chain of whatever waves plugins you want, even other waves reverbs and delays. I'd love to do the abbey road plates in there followed by a couple SSL channels. You could do the same for the delays. Throw a couple mic pre or tape sat emulators. This matrix concept could be a big fun delay and reverb playground, a not limited version of the concept. They would actually sell more of their other plugins too from this concept. For instance I use the Plugin Alliance SSL consoles, but If I could stick some ssl consoles in the "EPIC MATRIX" I totally would buy the waves versions.

I enjoy exploring this plugin. Some interesting sounds and effects to be had. But good granny, what a resource hog! I will use it very sparingly from time to time, though.