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What are the Most Popular Waves Plugins of all Time?

Sep 16, 2024

See the faithful favorites and recent plugin releases that have shaped signal chains the world over. Is your favorite Waves plugin in this list of 11 considered by many top producers as some of our best plugins?

What are the Most Popular Waves Plugins of all Time?

It’s no secret: Waves has been in the plugin development game for a while, 30+ years, but who’s counting?. While we’ve had some successes that have become go-to plugins for music producers everywhere, we’ve also had some that didn’t quite make the impact we thought they would.

This article concentrates on the success stories, rounding up the most popular Waves plugins we’ve had the honor and privilege of sharing with you over the years. If you ever wanted to know which Waves plugins you should try, maybe even buy, we’ve got the time-tested answers below.

In part, this is a bit of a trip down memory lane, but it’s not just for nostalgia’s sake. There are more recent plugins that have quickly and recently made strong names for themselves as well.

How we Measured Our Most Popular Plugins of All Time

There are different ways to be popular and successful: some plugins generate huge interest in their first year; some are very well reviewed by professionals and critics; some build momentum and become part of everyone’s mixing workflow after a while; some may not surpass others in sales, but become super-famous in their own right.

For this list, we didn’t just measure historic sales figures, which would be unfair to more recently released plugins. Instead, we used a number of methods to evaluate the best Waves plugins ever, and the final say was had by the Waves staff who have seen it all happen.

The Most Popular Waves Plugins of All Time Are:

Waves Tune Real-Time

Although Waves Tune gives great pitch correction when loading in a vocal, it’s the Real-Time version of the software that’s seen the most traction and has been the more talked about of the two.

Select a key and a range for your vocal, and set the all-important Speed and Note Transition knobs low to get yourself that robotic vocal effect.

Going further, you can change formants, tweak vibrato, and ease off the strength of the effect. And all as a real-time pitch-correction effect that works just as well in a live context. It all goes together to make Waves Tune Real-Time one of the best Waves plugins for vocals – but certainly not the only one you can benefit from, as you’ll see elsewhere in this article.

SSL G-Master Buss Compressor

What does the G stand for? In the hearts and minds of many, many producers, it’s that elusive factor: Glue.

SSL 4000 G-Series mixing consoles have a master compressor that has just the mojo to tie a mix together on the stereo buss, and it’s exactly that mojo that’s in our officially licensed and validated version.

The SSL G-Master Buss Compressor isn’t simply for your master buss, either: that glue is also just right for getting cohesive drum mixes, vocals and many more – G is also for Group. The hard-to-pin-down processing and its array of applications make the SSL G-Master Buss Compressor one of the best Waves plugins for mixing and drums.

You can get your copy of the SSL G-Master Buss Compressor to get stuck into its mix-melding talents for your own projects.

Abbey Road J37 Tape

It’s not just any tape machine – it’s an Abbey Road tape machine that’s imparted its character to recordings by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and loaded with a choice of virtual tape styles to mimic early 60s, mid 60s and early 70s recordings.

It’s no wonder that our J37 plugin has continued to feature on chart-topping popular music since its release in 2013.

Abbey Road J37 Tape is great for both individual tracks and master channels, making it one of Waves’ best plugins for mastering and more. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a full tape delay circuit for creative effects!

CLA Vocals

Not every plugin has to look like a spaceship console to become popular. CLA Vocals is anything but complicated, but that’s entirely the point of it! With six faders applying its effects, give any vocal track that professional radio ready quality.

The key reason these six faders are so effective, though, is that they apply the processes of legendary mixing engineer – and long-time Waves collaborator – Chris Lord-Alge.

CLA Vocals keeps things hugely simple but highly effective with its Bass, Treble, Compress, Reverb, Delay and Pitch faders, and there are many presets to make things even simpler. Despite being one of the easiest-to-use Waves plugins for vocals, it’s still one of the best.

SSL E Channel & SSL EV2

Today, our go-to SSL channel plugin is our SSL EV2 Channel Strip, offering a legendary ‘4000’ style mixing setup in a virtual console. The forerunner to the EV2, our SSL E Channel is still available too, and the two together represent one of the most popular plugins in the Waves catalog, and one of Waves’ best options if you’re looking for mixing plugins.

Both plugins give you the legendary SSL punch, great for drums, vocals, submixes, bass and more. Both authorized by SSL but it’s EV2 that gives you a choice between ‘brown’ and ‘black’ EQ types and authentic preamp drive, making it today’s ideal.

OVox

Use your voice as a synth with OVox, which replicates classic vocal and ‘talking synth’ effects, but pushing way further with digital resynthesis and extra effects processing.

OVox first hit the virtual shelves in January 2020, right before much of the world was plunged into lockdown. The extra time at home turned out to be a creative time for many, and as our most recent plugin at the time, OVox became one of our best selling.

OVox makes it simple to use your voice as an instrument or even to power instruments by other developers thanks to its MIDI Out capability. It also comes stocked with over 500 presets to get you in the right direction, making it one of the top vocal plugins in the world right now!

Clarity Vx

Released in 2022, Clarity Vx saw us taking on noise reduction from a new angle. While our previous plugins had tackled the problem algorithmically, Clarity Vx is a Waves Neural Networks plugin armed with processes derived from machine learning.

It’s an AI noise reduction plugin that’s been trained on perfect and imperfect vocal recordings, deriving the difference between the two so that it can apply that difference and remove the noise from your audio.

Clarity Vx is great for anyone recording vocals, no matter the quality of the recording.

Abbey Road Reverb Plates

What’s better than a plate reverb? How about the four plate reverbs used in Abbey Road, as heard on recordings by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Radiohead… need we say more?

Our Abbey Road Reverb Plates were made in close collaboration with Abbey Road Studios, and include pre-delay, EQ, crosstalk and drive to meet modern producers’ needs. The plugin is arguably the best Waves reverb plugin, although each use case depends on the material in question.

L2 Ultramaximizer

Despite there being a multiband alternative in Waves L3, it’s L2 that stands out as one of history’s most loved Waves plugins.

The majority of L2’s workflow may be simple – set the Out Ceiling and lower the Threshold for instant results – but further settings like Release time and the Shaping (noise shaping) selection allow for customization over the finer aspects of limiting.

For those in the know, there was also once a hardware version of L2, but the plugin version remains a far, far better deal, and is still a great plugin for mastering to this day.

CLA-2A and CLA-3A

Modeled off Chris Lord-Alge’s personal vintage LA-2A and LA-3A units, these two classic compressors are sought-after units that have appeared on much of the producer’s work – and with his presets included, you’re only missing a face transplant and a baseball cap before you can actually be Chris Lord-Alge.

So which one to choose? We’ve published a shoot-out between the two units, but both are available together as part of the CLA Classic Compressors bundle, so you don’t necessarily have to choose.

Renaissance Maxx

Now that we’ve shown you our top plugins, what about our bundles? We do of course offer a wide range from the super legendary Abbey Road Series to the uber creative OneKnob series and everything between. Of all the Waves plugins, ranges and bundles, it’s Renaissance that’s had a huge impact, with some of the standout ‘R’ highlights being Renaissance Bass, Renaissance Vox, Renaissance Compressor and Renaissance Reverb. These plugins are standout members of a standout collection, and have truly lived up to their name over the years, rewriting mixing history with their simple operation.

You might be so used to hearing about and using these plugins that you know them better in the ‘R’ tense, as RVox, Rverb and so on. RBass could just be the best Waves plugin for bass, giving your kick, bassline or any other low-down frequency area a hard-to-copy mojo that many producers swear by.

All the individual ‘R’ plugins are available individually, and the bundle, Renaissance Maxx, gives you the full capacity.

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All of these plugins can be downloaded and trialed for free. Alternative, get full access to all of these plugins along with every single Waves mixing plugin, virtual instrument and sampler in our catalog. Check out Wave Creative Access for more information.

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