Dave Johnson

That, sadly, doesn’t include any plugins so here’s the basics that I’d recommend;

C1 — $99 — I think that C1 is one of the most powerful, yet underrated, plugins that Waves currently sell. The compressor side of things is pretty standard but the gate side of things, especially once you introduce side chains, just blows everything else away. I don’t believe any current desk gate could match this.

H-Series — $599 — You may be sat there thinking $599 for a plugin? Well, no. This is the suite of waves Hybrid series and is made up of four plugins. H-EQ, H-Comp, H-Reverb and H-Delay. I own three out of the four. H-Reverb and H-Delay are my go to effects. H-Comp will easily do those 1176 and 3A compressor emulations. While I’ve not used H-EQ just yet there’s no reason to expect it wouldn’t sound great.

C6 — $299 — Yes, it’s expensive but it’s incredibly powerful. Maybe don’t just take my word for it, here’s a little video from David Stagl at Northpoint Community Church

If you got all these plugins when there was no sale on you’d be spending $1149 and that doesn’t sound like it’s great value until you compare it to other out the box solutions. A small external rack to upgrade the effects in an X32 could easily cost $1000. And a solution similar to my every day waves session could easily cost $8000 and take greater power and truck space.

However, as I mentioned at the start there are a LOT of Waves sales and ways to save money on plugins. As I write the cheapest way to get C6 is with Dave Audé EMP toolbox at an incredible $129 (18/03/2017) and that also includes H-Delay.

And it got me thinking I’ve been really lucky professionally in having some great people help get me up and running with both MultiRack and it’s more powerful brother, MultiRack SoundGrid, which offloads audio processing to a bespoke server. And I just wanted to give back a little to help and inspire others

I, mostly, use MultiRack in it’s beefed up SoundGrid version on a Yamaha M7 using two Yamaha WSG-Y16 cards allowing for a total of 32 bi-directional channels. These link to a regular gigabit network switch which also has a SoundGrid server and regular computer connected.

NOTE 1: The regular computer can be Mac OR Windows and acts ONLY as a Graphical Interface. No audio passes through it. Having said that it ONLY works with the MultiRackSG app open. Think of it as your insert cables.

There is some digital patching that you have to do both in the app and on the desk. Similar to below. With that done you get audio flowing both ways.

NOTE 2: You have to think about processing order just a little bit. In my situation all the bands monitors are mixed from the same desk as I mix Front of House from and I don’t want my house eq or compression going to monitors

I then use the MultiRackSG app in three different ways:

Inserts

Effects

Direct Outs