All user reviews of 4/5 for the Waves Kramer Guitar Channel

Eddie Kramer is one of the more famous engineers out there. He comes from Cape Town and has done everything from Hendrix to Kiss and beyond. Waves has been doing quite a few different plugins like this to promote engineers or vise-versa, so it's no real surprise they made this. This plugin is basically a little effects/master plugin for guitars. It has knobs for sensitivity, compress, treble, mids, output, effects, depth, flange mix, reverb mix, delay and delay mix. There are also three buttons to select between rhythm 1, rhythm 2 and lead.

To use this plugin, you simply enable it on your guitar buss(es) inside of your DAW. It's an extremely easy to use plugin, and you shouldn't need to use a manual. I never read it, personally. I never experienced any issues when it comes to compatibility, either.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

Waves is the master when it comes to stuff like compatibility and stability. First, this plugin is truly rock solid. I've never experienced any slow downs, crashes or instability while using this plugin inside of Logic Pro. It never takes up too much processing power, and that's a pretty good thing considering that there could potentially be multiple instances of this plugin being used on different busses. The one problem I do have, however, is that this plugin is a 32 bit plugin. I know it's a touch old, but I'd like to see this rewritten in 64 bit. With 32 bit plugins, you generally have to run some sort of bridge/wrapper application to allow you to use them in a 64 bit environment. I'm hoping they'll update it later on. I've been using the Mercury bundle for about half a year or so, and it's been awesome so far.

OVERALL OPINION

This seems to work decent on lower gain stuff. Keep in mind that I'm a death metal guitarist, so that skews my view a bit. My guitars are already super compressed due to the natural gain from the amps. I don't really want to compress them anymore. If I start adding tons of effects, they'll get buried in the mix. This plugin works decently for leads, and seems to do midgain stuff well, but I don't recommend it for high gain. I never tried it on cleans, so I can't comment on that part.