The Waves Ltd. Maserati ACG Acoustic Guitar Designer is a unique plug-in that is part of the Tony Maserati Collection of plug-ins from Waves and designed in tandem with legendary producer Tony Maserati. You can only get this plug-in and the others in the bundle within this collection. The ACG in particular is a really cool plug-in, as it's unlike any that I've really seen out there. I installed the plug-in in the full Waves Complete bundle, so I didn't need to install this plug-in individually. However, the whole process was easy enough where it wasn't even worth thinking about a second time. Learning the plug-in's interface isn't all that difficult, but there are a decent amount of parameters and settings to be aware of. The plug-in essentially has equalizer, dynamic processing, and some other controls as well. The specific parameters includes are for sensitivity, punch, mid and high EQ bands, output level, excite, dry/wet, predelay, FX, and two separate modes, one of which has a bit more of a compression level. I haven't had a need to look at the manual for this plug-in, so I can't speak to it's make up.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

As far as performance goes, I've yet to have any issues with the Waves Ltd. Maserati ACG Acoustic Guitar Designer. I'm running it in Pro Tools LE 8 that I run with a Digi 002R audio interface, and the computer I use is a Mac Book Pro lap top consisting of 4 GB of RAM and a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I monitor with a set of Adam A7's as well. This system has definitely been stable enough to support my use of the Waves Maserati ACG plug-in, which has to date only been one or two instances at a time within a single session. It hasn't slowed my system down at all, but I've never needed to run more than a few at once...

OVERALL OPINION

I'm a big fan of the plug-ins in the Waves Ltd. Maserati bundle, and the ACG Acoustic Guitar Designer is one of my favorites in the bunch. I've used it mostly on a few sessions for a live recording session series that I've been apart of, so it was on an acoustic guitar that was being played live in the room with the other players. It has been perfect for this application, as it helps the guitar to cut through a mix, and when used in tandem with equalization, you can do a pretty good job of cutting down bleed from other instruments as well. In the future I'd like to use it more for mixing records with isolated instruments, as I think it will work well across the board. The whole Waves Tony Maserati bundle is worth looking at if you've got an interest in this one.