All user reviews of 5/5 for the Waves CLA Drums

The Waves Ltd. CLA (Chris Lord-Alge) Drums plug-in is one that is only found in the Chris Lord-Alge bundle of custom plug-ins. Waves has a few different engineer co-designed plug-in bundles with Lord-Alge's being one of the most popular. I installed this plug-in along with the full bundle of Waves plug-ins, so installing this wasn't any different than installing the rest of the Waves plug-ins out there. Once you've got past this process, it's on to learning how to use the plug-in, which I haven't found to be very difficult. The interface consists of a series of sliders for bass and treble, compression, reverb, a gate, and for both input and output levels. It also has a knob for controlling different presets for different individual sorts of drums. It's easy enough to use that I don't believe a manual is necessary.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

The Waves Ltd. CLA Drums isn't the type of plug-in that's going to max our your processing space, but it really just depends on the type of system you're running it on. It should be safe to assume that if you've got this or you're looking into getting it that you've already got a pretty sturdy system. The one that I'm running it on is Pro Tools LE based and consists of a Mac Book Pro with 4 GB of RAM and a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I run Pro Tools LE with a Digi 002R audio interface and monitor with a set of Adam A7's. This has been more than adequate for me to run the native version of this plug-in, but it's definitely worth mentioning that I usually run it on an auxiliary channel for a drum bus.

OVERALL OPINION

The Waves Ltd. CLA Drums plug-in is the perfect place to start for getting a nice overall drum set sound using an auxiliary channel and busing your individual drum tracks to it. It's definitely also useful as an individual processor, but I've personally found it to be best suited for use on a full drum kit due to the nature of the parameters. Like all of the Chris Lord-Alge plug-in, it's got an incredibly crisp and smooth sound, with all of the processors in here being of a very high quality. In order to get the CLA Drums plug-in, you'll have to pick up the full CLA bundle, so if you're interested in this one I'd recommend checking out the rest of the plug-ins in the bundle as well.