All user reviews for the Waves Eddie Kramer Drum Channel

Eddie Kramer is one of the world's most famous music engineers and producers. He's worked with everyone from Kiss to Hendrix and everyone in between. Waves has been working in conjunction with a lot of these famous producers to create plugins, so it's no wonder that this was created. The plugin takes an EQ/compressor approach to mixing with an all-in-one design. The plugin has knobs for sensitivity, gate, compress, bass, treble, output and fx. It also has buttons for bass drum, snare, hi-hats, overheads, toms and room.

The plugin is very simple to use. To utilize this, just put this on whatever drum busses you may have for the overall mixing and mastering. I've never read the manual, but it's not really needed with this as it's such a simple to use plugin.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

Waves is the king when it comes to things like stability and performance. This plugin is great at using very little RAM and processing power. Considering there may be multiple instances of this plugin being used, that's a life saver. It's also very stable. I've never experienced a crash in relation to this program, and I've had probably seven or so instances of it on various drum channels. There is one problem, however. It's a 32 bit plugin. In today's world, most computers are moving towards 64 bit OSes and DAWs. Because of that, your DAW needs to run a special bridge application to utilize the 32 bit plugin in a 64 bit environment. Ideally, I'd like to do away with that, and I'm hoping Waves makes these all 64 bit compatible in their next update. I've been using the Waves Mercury bundle for the past six or so months now.

OVERALL OPINION

This is a fairly solid plugin, but I find that it's extremely limiting when it comes to producing drums the way I like to do them. It delivers a solid sound, but it's usually not the sound I'm looking for. It works nicely for rock, but when I'm doing metal, there are a bunch of different tricks I have to do, and I'm constantly dealing with mixing triggers and acoustic drums. I just find that my method is a bit better than utilizing this plugin on all my drum channels.

The Waves Ltd. Eddie Kramer Drum Channel is a plug-in that is found in the Eddie Kramer bundle of plug-ins. For those who don't know, Eddie Kramer is one of, if not the most legendary audio engineer of all time, having worked with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zepplin, and The Beatles. This bundle of plug-ins is designed by Kramer and Waves in tandem, although I don't know exactly what Eddie's involvement was beyond giving his name and using the plug-ins. I didn't have any issues installing this plug-in, as I did so along with the full Waves Complete bundle of plug-ins. The Eddie Kramer Collection of plug-ins all share a similar interface, and this one in particular I find easy enough to use. It's got a series of parameters for compression level, a gate, treble and bass EQ's, sensitivity, FX, and output. It also has a series of buttons for making or choosing presets for individual drums like bass, snare, etc. I haven't seen the manual for this plug-in, so I can't speak to it's make up.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I'm currently running the Waves Ltd. Eddie Kramer Drum Channel and the full Eddie Kramer Collection of plug-ins in my home studio. I'm running everything in Pro Tools LE 8 with a Mac Book Pro lap top that has 4 GB of RAM and a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I run Pro Tools with a Digi 002R audio interface and I listen with a set of Adam A7 monitors. I can't say that I've had an issue running this plug-in at all, although I should say that I'll usually use this on a drum bus auxiliary channel.

OVERALL OPINION

The Waves Ltd. Eddie Kramer Drum Channel is a great all in one processor for all things drums. As I previously mentioned, I will mostly use this plug-in on a drum bus channel where I'd send most of the drum tracks to. This plug-in allows for a quick and easy way to get a nice overall sound with the built in compression and other processing. When I'm mixing and printing real drum tracks I'll use outboard gear when possible or if not, then I'll usually use individual processors, but if I'm just getting a quick mix happening and just want to throw something up, this is pretty much what I've been using. It definitely has a good enough sound to print with in my opinion, but I've yet to do so in my home studio. While the Eddie Kramer Drum Channel is great for drum busses, it also sounds great on individual drums of all kinds - especially bass drum I find. The bottom line is that this is a top tier drum processing channel and in my opinion the entire Waves Eddie Kramer Collection is something definitely worth trying.