Waves Eddie Kramer Vocal Channel

For those who don't know, Eddie Kramer has done everything from Led Zeppelin to Kiss to Hendrix and beyond. He's crazy famous in the music engineering/production world, and considering that Waves has been doing some engineer collaborations lately, it's no surprise that he got his own plugins. The Kramer Vocal Channel is basically a compressor, eq and effects unit in one. There are two different toggles to select between vocal types, sensitivity control, bass control, treble control, compression control, output control, different effects controls for reverb and delay, and a few other tricks up its sleeve.

To use this plugin, you simply enable it on whatever buss has your vocals and start adjusting. It's very simple to use. I haven't read the manual for this, but it's really not needed as it's crazy simple to use. Anybody should be able to start utilizing the tones out of this device within seconds.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

Waves is the king when it comes to things like stability and compatibility. The plugin is crazy stable. I've never experienced a single crash, stall or freeze while using these. It doesn't take up too much processing power, nor RAM. That's a good thing as there could be multiple instances of this plugin on different busses, depending on how you approach it. On top of all of that, it's also cross platform compatible, so just about anybody can use this. There is one problem, however. This plugin is a 32 bit plugin for OS X. That means that whenever I use this plugin in Logic Pro, it has to use a special application to work in the 64 bit environment. It's automatic, but it's a bit of a pain as it makes the plugin disappear when it's in the background. I've been using the Mercury bundle for about half a year now, and it's pretty awesome.

OVERALL OPINION

This works very nicely on clean vocals. Where as the JJP approach was more of a slider approach to mixing, this is more of a knob approach. Both work nicely, and it all depends on how you approach music. Personally, I have my own methods. That's not to say this plugin is bad; in fact, it's great. It's just that I have my own little methods for mixing and mastering vocals that works best for me. Waves gives you tons of options because they know everyone likes to do things differently.

The Waves Ltd. Eddie Kramer Vocal Channel is one of five plug-ins available in the Eddie Kramer Collection of plug-ins designed in tandem by Waves and the famed engineer Kramer. The plug-in is Mac and PC compatible, and available in RTAS/TDM, VST, and AU formats. I'm pretty sure that you can only get this plug-in within the Kramer Collection or if you have the Waves Complete bundle as I do. As far as the configuration of the plug-in is concerned, it has a good amount of parameters to work with that include equalization, simple compression, delay, and reverb. Everything is more or less self explanatory, and at the same time it's simple to follow since it gives you kinda of the best of all possible worlds. I haven't looked at a manual for this plug-in, nor do I anticipate ever needing one.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I've run the Waves Ltd. Eddie Kramer Vocal Channel on both my home system and on the professional studio's system where I work. At home I'm running it in Pro Tools LE, while at the studio we have all Pro Tools HD systems. I've mostly used it at home, where I've got a Mac Book Pro consisting of a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of RAM. My audio interface is a Digi 002R and I listen with a set of Adam A7's. I'll usually only run this on the vocal track of a session, so I haven't yet had a need to really test the performance of this plug-in.

OVERALL OPINION

While I generally like to use individual signal processing plug-ins rather than a conglomeration like this one, the Waves Ltd. Eddie Kramer Vocal Channel is still a great plug-in in it's own right. It's got a ton to offer within one plug-in, but does lack control over the specific processors. However, if you're looking to just get a quick vocal mix to help it stand out a bit, the Eddie Kramer Vocal Channel is perfect for that. The other plug-ins in the bundle definitely make it worthwhile, but out of the Kramer plug-ins I still like the HLS Channel the best. If you're interested in this plug-in I'd recommend checking out all of the Kramer plugs in the bundle.