it would be great if you could hear your mix in a pro studio like chris lord alge's while you're
working on it well now you can from home kind of with the waves cla nx plugin this takes
mixing with headphones to the next level it puts you into cla's mix space virtually and you can
hear what your mix is going to sound like in a pro studio and hopefully it's going to help you to
make better mix decisions based on what you hear now in this video we're checking out the waves cla
NX plugin i'm zane welcome to audio tech tv where it's my goal to help you conquer the text you can
unleash your creative beast now this video is not sponsored by waves but they did send me early
access to the plugin so i could check it out and hopefully make a video on it which i'm doing now
and of course i've included a link down in the description so you can hop over to their website
check out the latest pricing get more info on it if you like and like all of waves plugins this is
available on mac and windows now let's jump in all right so first off who is this plugin for
well it's for most of us home studio musicians and producers that don't have a professional mix space
to do our mixes in a lot of us have converted bedrooms and basements and other spaces within
our home and we've changed those into our home studio now if you want to get accurate mixes
acoustics play a big role in that so this plug-in the waves cla nx takes your home acoustics right
out of the equation and it puts you into cla's mix room complete with his speakers and even his
boom box for referencing so this plug-in is for most of us who are mixing with headphones and
we don't want to disturb our neighbors or other people within the home but we still want to get
accurate mixes now one of the things i really like about the waves nx series of plugins is
they're extremely easy to use you just put it onto the mix bus as the last plug-in on your list and
that's kind of it but there are some things that you can adjust so let's have a look at what we can
adjust in the plug-in and the first thing that i normally go to is the headphone eq right here
and if you click this drop down box you can see there's some different headphones in here that
are fairly popular for mixing and if you have any of these headphones you could click on it
and then enable the headphone eq but if you don't have any of these headphones don't worry you can
still use this plug-in with great success i often use the waves nx plugins with another set of
headphones that i have and they're not listed in here but what it does when it's enabled is
it looks at the headphones in here and it understands the frequency response
of these headphones and it corrects the curve so you can get a flatter response
and this can result in some more accurate mixes but if you know your headphones already and
you know how to mix with them then you don't even need to worry about this even if you have
the same pair that are in here but today i'm using these audio technica ath m50x headphones for this
you can see on the top here i have the waves nx tracker and if you look on the screen there
you can see the way my head turns and what this does is if i turn my head this way i can hear what
it's going to sound like in that studio if i were to actually turn my head that way and this way and
up and down and all of that sort of thing so it really immerses you into the experience and it
really sounds like you're in the studio it's pretty cool if you can grab one of these waves
nx head trackers if not this will also work with your webcam on your computer and it can track
your movements that way but you don't have to use the head tracker if it's something you don't want
to it's just kind of an added experience it can turn the head tracking on and off right here so
that's usually the only things that i'll change in here is i'll either turn on the head tracking
and turn on the headphone eq but there are some other settings in here like you have this head
modeling where you can measure your head and put in those settings in here and that can make it
even more immersed for you if that's something you want to do but again it's not something that
you absolutely have to do you can also see you have your ambience and level controls here now
the ambiance controls how much of the room ambience you're hearing and it's by default
at 100 if you change this then it's not a hundred percent that makes room it's something that you've
customized now the levels if you start clipping within the plug-in you can adjust the levels
or if you're too low you can increase the levels whatever you need to do now here's
one thing that i always change throughout the mix process and this is your studio monitors so
by changing these it changes the speakers that you're actually listening through within
his studio so first up you have these cla 10s plus a sub and that's these speakers right here
and these are custom aventone speakers that crystal and algae has in his studio plus there's
a subwoofer under the desk and then you have your mains which are the big speakers back here
and those are two 15-inch speakers with one horn per speaker so a lot of bass definition in there
and then you have boombox and this is just a sony minidisc boombox that he has in his studio
so he can get a reference of what this might sound like in the real world
and this is a great addition because it allows you to have a more real world reference like what your
listeners might have so now i'm just going to play back my mix and i'm going to switch through these
speakers so you can hear the difference between each one but before i do that i just want to ask
if you're enjoying this video so far and getting some value out of it can you please give it a
thumbs up it really helps my channel out and i appreciate it so much now let's give this a listen
so you can hear a bit of a difference in there the cla 10 and sub and the mains are fairly the same
but i think the mains might have a little more bass definition in there but it's great to switch
around and you do want your mix to sound fairly the same across both of those and of course it's
going to sound a lot different in the boom box and of course it's going to sound a lot different in
the boombox but it should still sound good on there so now let's look at the rotate studio
feature and you can see if i click here and i turn this around like that we can see all around chris
lord algae studio you see has some nice guitars up there a ton of rack here if you want to quickly
get back to the default look you just press this zero degrees button and it brings you back there
and another cool thing is if you press the arrow underneath boom box it switches you to a behind
look where you're looking at the boombox so when you're enabling the boombox you can enable it by
pressing the top part and it's going to keep the default view so you're going to hear the boombox
coming from behind you or you can click this arrow and you're going to be looking at the boombox so
you're going to be staring it straight on and that's how it's going to sound in your head now
let's just listen to the mix as we rotate the studio so you can hear what that sounds like
now another thing you can adjust if you want is you can mute the left or the right side or
both together or you can solo the left and right side whatever you want to do there
now a very important thing to remember it's something i forget
quite often actually is you want to disable this plug-in when you do your rendering
so before you render your project down to the final wave or mp3 you want to make sure you
disable this plug-in because you don't want that on the final mix you just want to mix with it on
so be sure to turn this off before you do your mix down the waves cla nx plugin is a great way
to level up your mixes and get great results even if you're mixing with headphones now be
sure to click the link down in the description in case you want more information see the latest
pricing on this and if you want to check out my review of the waves ocean way nx plugin click the
video on the screen right now or click the one under it to see what youtube recommends if you
liked this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos like this
thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon