hey what's going on out there I'm Sean Divine hope you all are doing well in this tutorial we
are going to be taking an inside look at the all-new Waves Studio Rack there's some very
exciting new functionality here that allows you to load third-party plugins yes that's right any
third-party plug-in not a waves plug-in you can load it directly into Studio rack Yes you heard me
right any plugin that has a vst3 version most of them will load without a hiccup and then you also
get all the functionality that you've come to know and love from the studio rack plug-in chainer like
internal side chaining you can do parallel splits you can set macros for all of these third-party
plugins but today we're gonna build a vocal chain from scratch we are going to utilize some
third-party plug-ins that I find are the absolute best options to recreate this vocal chain that's
used by artists like Big Sean Drake Dr Dre future so many others it's a hardware chain that's used
in the studio but I've got some plugins here that are going to get you very close and will replicate
a lot of the the processing that's going on with those hardware chains so let's go ahead and dive
in here and talk about how to first get your third-party plugins going in studio rack if you
click on the menu up here and go to vst3 you can select scan plugins so if I do that I've already
scanned mine but it will go through and scan all of your vst3 plugins and then we'll add them so
that you can see them in this vst3 menu now if for some reason you don't see those you will
likely want to clear this cache and rescan and you can also direct it to wherever the folder is so if
for some reason your vst3 plugins are stored in a different location just select custom folder and
then you'll be able to navigate to wherever you keep those on your computer scan them and then
they're all going to start showing up here in the vst3 menu all right so let's get started building
our Holy Grail rap vocal chain here in Waves Studio Rack first piece of gear that we're going
to need here is a 1073 style preamp and EQ so there's a lot of plugins out here that replicate
the 1073 or emulate the sound and the style but if I'm going to go with any just like the best
one out there I personally like the Scheps 73 this is a waves plug-in I also like the arturia
the pre 1973 that one is good as well so let's go ahead and take a listen to this verse just
dry and then I'll start dialing in some of these preamp settings as well as the EQ and then we'll
dive into our opto compressor some of the other famous pieces of this Holy Grail rap vocal chain
so that gives you an idea here don't worry about the clipping all you folks out here
worry about red dots on your plugins I just wanted to make sure that you could
hear that we're going to turn that down we're also going to go ahead and just put a limiter
here on the end of this just so that we're keeping things in check those of you who
are more sensitive about your gain staging I know that is a sensitive subject now let's go
ahead and I'm going to download the preamp section again I really like what this does
and it gives you a bit of the grit and some of the forwardness of that 1073 style pre
listen closely it's adding a little bit of that saturation again a little bit of that grit and
character that we would expect from a 1073 pre and I just like what it does it's not too much
or too overly aggressive in that sense now if you do want to get heavy-handed with it we can always
turn this drive control on but right now just want to get a little bit of that pre-flavor now let's
go ahead and move on to the highs I'm going to add some 12K great vocal boost here in the 1073.
all right so we got a little bit of the Boost in the highs and then I took out a bit of 1.6 another
notch into 1073 that's very useful for vocals is the mids that 1.6 and 3.2 especially for me I like
to take that out of my vocals more often than not rather than actually boosting anything in
that area most mics I'm getting too much of that information so removing a little bit of that is
very helpful now also I'm gonna go to this 220 Notch I spoke about about this in the previous
video about optimizing the frequency response of your mic no matter what mic you have whether it's
you know a Neumann u87 or a manley reference or a rode nt1 you can start to kind of optimize Things
based on the frequency response curve again I'll put a link if you want to get more in depth with
that but this mic has a particular build up in 220 so to cut through on narration and vo that's
what this mic is designed to do really so I'm going to take a little bit of that out as well
all right so the second element we need to add here to our Holy Grail rap vocal chain
is going to be generally an opto compressor now if you're not familiar with opto compression this
is a compressor like the one you would find in a 737 or the compression that you're gonna find in
a c01b which we're going to cover here in just a minute but there's also a variation of this
where you actually use two compressors so you would you use something like a VCA compressor
like an 1176 and then feed that into something like the cl1b which that's what we're going to
do today on the 1176 side I'm going to use the CLA 76 now I know we've used just waves plugins
up to this point don't worry we're going to get to the third party ones here in just a
minute but these are just my favorite in terms of a 1073 and an 1176. so when we load up this
preset Start Me Up it does just that this is a really great starting point and I usually will
just leave it at four to one turn the analog off and then we're just going to dial in a couple of
DB of compression you're going to notice the signal is not necessarily the level wise where
we want it but just trust me these attack and release settings are generally okay for
this we're just going to dial it in so that we're getting you know two or three DB of gain reduction
just a tiny bit of glue there gonna bring uh the lead as well as those dubs that were running to
the same aux just kind of glue everything together all right so now we're gonna feed
this into an opto compressor which is usually the Tube Tech cl1b I know you all have seen this
blue box in a lot of people's studios famous artists are using this to my knowledge the uh
the officially licensed one that I'm aware of anyway is the soft tube one and I really like
the the Mark II it just has a nice effect to me if there are other alternatives of this
that you all know of I would be curious this is the only cl1b plug-in emulation that I've
tried and I do like it but again if you have any recommendations there leave those for us
in the comments below but let's go ahead and dial something in here again I'm not going
for heavy gain reduction I just want a little bit bit of control and then I'm going to add a little
bit of volume just as a makeup gain to kind of bring us back to the level that we need to be at
all right so we get a nice gentle sort of glue there you saw that I did adjust the parallel
compression just so that we're not getting too much of that and I also have a relatively
fast attack and release again this is is all to taste so here with this particular vocal in this
performance I'm setting it that way but most of you out there would probably go with a little bit
slower attack and that's okay also the side chain the low cut you know if you set these to sidechain
out some of those lows it will just enable the compressor to react a little bit more smoothly so
next thing we're going to do is we're going to add a de-esser and in this case I'm going to add the
Fab filter Pro DS aside from the waves de-essers which are you know sibilance waves deesser and
then also the the Manny Marroquin triple D Pro DS is a great de-esser and I use this for certain
things it's very versatile so we're going to dial this in this is another piece of the Holy Grail
rap vocal chain that is not talked about but I can guarantee you that this 1073 opto compressor
combo is then being run through a de-esser in the box or in Hardware form at some point
after you've dialed in the de-esser you know depending on how intense you said
that you can then go back to your EQ here with the 1073 and you can
usually boost a little bit more aggressively when you're following it with the de-esser
just for fun let's go ahead and set up a parallel split and we're gonna run this to a Reverb so
we'll activate the split here this is going to be our dry signal and this is going to be where
where we're going to place a Reverb and guess what we can use one of my favorite third-party
plugins a Reverb plugin actually and it is from Valhalla DSP it's the Valhalla vintage verb so
the beauty of Studio rack is right here in the plugin I didn't have to set up a send I don't
have to do anything on the mixer we have the dry signal and then we have the split for the
Reverb and we have a mix control here which is like your dry wet for your Reverb you also have
side chaining options which I'm going to show you how to do that here and you can even control the
width so if you wanted to Mono out the Reverb or if you wanted to even go wider than 100 it
gives you ability to do that so let's just slowly bring in some Reverb sorry if I came
developing a better reason I'm breathing no more people pleasing started doing it for the low side
knowing that my ego couldn't provide we can now side chain that Reverb with the internal studio
rack signal so if I go and I select a waves compressor like maybe R comp you see that SC
notated there so if I click this and then we go up to our side chain menu if I click that SC there we
can either select the studio rack input or we can do the parallel split input which in this
case I'm going to do since we already have some of that processing there so we'll select that and
you'll see that our Reverb will now duck based on the signal so we can avoid you know having
something really washy and then we can adjust the attack and release time accordingly as well
we can also create macros for any of the plugins in the chain and then you can combine them to
control multiple parameters let's say we wanted to control the mix or the parallel
compression of both of these compressors so I'm going to select mix on the CLA 76 and
then I'm gonna right click again and then I'm going to go select parallel compression on the
tube Tech so now if I pin that you'll notice on the macro I'm controlling the parallel
compression there on the tube Tech and then I'm also controlling the mix control on the
76 so we can really dial in the amount of compression with both of those at the same
time so let's go ahead and take a listen to our verse with and without all the processing
all right y'all so with that we have rebuilt the Holy Grail rap vocal chain here in the new version
of Waves Studio Rack you can now utilize this to load your favorite third-party plugins and
utilize all the powerful workflow enhancements that studio rack provides you this is by far one
of my favorite tools a plug-in that has changed my entire uh workflow and the way that I approach
mixing and production and mastering so I'm excited for those of you all who may have been on the
fence because you weren't able to use some of your favorite plugins now you can take advantage of
this same workflow below if you have any questions about what we did here with the latest version of
waves Studio rack feel free to leave a comment below if you learn anything in the video please
like subscribe and consider sharing hit that notification Bell for more we'll talk to you soon