Waves Jack Joseph Puig Vocals

I was skeptical about these artist plugin's but I'm a big fan of Jack's work so I decided to take the plunge. Setup of course is easy. Waves offers so many options for those with different setups. Stereo, mono, vst, whatever. I use cubase and I never have a problem with their stuff. Regardless of how much I like it I always find they have a consistent quality. The Puig vocal plugin isn't rocket science. You only have a handful of controls and the presets are pretty usable depending on what music you're doing.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I'm guessing that this plugin was intended to work in a large band mix. That's how I use it at least. I'm not running a ton of channels in cubase. Just drums. bass, guitar. some synth, and the rare string track every so often. So my mixes probably aren't quite as dense as some. I do layer guitars a lot though. I will say this plugin does make the vocals cut through in a pleasant way. The tone shaping is great. But it seems like the plugin has this crazy strong compression that makes me want to rip my headphones out. I tried dialing it out and it's hard to get rid of it. Basically on all but the most meager of settings, my vocals end up sounding like they've been compressed to the absolute limits and back.

Honestly though, I think if you have a super thick mix this would come in handy. Sometimes you really have to push vocals for them to come through in a large cluster of tracks. I can see the excessive compression being useful for that capacity and I guess I should've known better knowing JJP's catalog. He is known for epic mixes. I just wish there was a way to tone that whole thing down. For my uses I'll give it a 5 but I think for the right person it could be a 9.

OVERALL OPINION

I like how easy this plugin is to use and I think if it didn't sound so dynamically processed it might be my #1. The "magic" button is a mystery to me really. The manual doesn't really explain jack about it. Well, it tries but does more harm than good I think. I get the feeling this vst was supposed to be geared toward beginners. Makes sense. But honestly I still think it's a quality plug. I have the other JJP plugins and I have used some more than others. This one for me is a bit of a miss. I have found other waves plugs I like better for vocals.

Jack Joseph Puig is one of the most famous music producers and engineers out there. Considering his popularity, it was only natural for Waves to do a plugin in collaboration with him. The Waves JJP Vocals plugin is a plugin to help mix and master vocals in a very easy "all-in-one" solution. The plugin has knobs for sensitivity, lows, highs, de-esser and comp, toggle switches for male, male 2 and female, and sliders for main, magic, space, attack, presence, master and attitude.

The plugin works by combining an EQ, de-esser and compressor all in one with its own little flare and character. To use this, you simply enable it on your vocal buss and go from there. It's super simple to use, and the interface is laid out nicely. I never read the manual, so I can't comment on that. However, you shouldn't have any issues using this if you're a first time user.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

Waves plugins are amazing when it comes to stability and performance. First of all, these plugins are all cross platform compatible. That means that they'll work on both Windows and OS X without any problems whatsoever. They're usually fairly lightweight, and they don't take up too much processing power, nor RAM. There are a few exceptions, but this plugin is fairly lightweight. I do have one problem, however. The plugins are not 64 bit in OS X. To use these in my 64 bit environment, my DAW needs to enable a special bridge application to utilize these. I find it a bit annoying, and I'm hoping that Waves will update this down the road. I've been using the Mercury bundle for about half a year, and it's been amazing so far.

OVERALL OPINION

Vocals can be real tricky to master, but I like to treat them as lead guitars. I don't like to throw too many effects on them if I can help it, and this plugin is usually a good go-to solution for treating vocals. However, I usually find myself just using my own little concoction of plugins that I've come up with in the years I've been recording. To me, it's just easier that way. Also, I'm usually recording death metal vocals, so I don't get to use this plugin as often as I probably should.

The Waves Ltd. Jack Joseph Puig Vocals is one of six plug-ins that make up the Jack Joseph Puig Collection of plug-ins. The plug-in and the full bundle is available in all formats for every DAW that I'm aware of. It has a pretty easy to use interface that stuffs a lot of different types of sounds in one place. The plug-in has three modes - two for male vocals and one for female to go along with knobs for controlling the sensitivity of the effects, lows and highs (frequencies), a de-esser, and compression. It then has sliders for the main level of the effects, master level, and then more ambiguous parameters like 'magic,' space, attack, attitude, and presence. Once you mess around with these a little bit it's not too hard to see how they'll affect your overall sound. I haven't had a look at the manual for this plug-in or any of the others in the bundle...

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

Right now I've got the Waves Ltd. Jack Joseph Puig Vocals and the full bundle running on my system at home, and have also used it on a number of systems at the studio complex where I work. My home studio is made up of a Mac Book Pro lap top with a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of RAM along with Pro Tools 9 and a Digi 002R audio interface. It has been more than enough for me to run this plug-in for my purposes, but haven't yet had a need to run more than one instance of it anyway.

OVERALL OPINION

Waves' Jack Joseph Puig Vocals plug-in has a lot to offer and is a great one stop shop for vocal processing. I can't say that I like it better than Chris Lord-Alge's version of the plug-in, but it's still effective and there's definitely a good amount that can be done with it that differs from the CLA and other versions in the Signature Series bundles. It's not really the kind of plug-in you'd really want to use to get your initial vocal processing done, rather I've been using it for touching up here and there, although certainly it's useful either way. The Jack Joseph Puig Collection of plug-ins is definitely one worth looking into as it's quite cheap for Waves plug-ins and contains six plug-ins in total like this for all different applications...