@JunkyardSam you described exactly the problem I have been struggling with. CLA talks in those videos about how he uses those sends by “feathering them in” to individual tracks, which makes sense. And I love how he just kind of “sets and forgets” the verbs and delays. However his approach seems much easier to do on his console with the real gear than in a DAW. Your approach of 8 separate sends setup as he directed seems to be the closest setup to what he actually does. However, then you still need to open separate sends and adjust send levels of individual tracks (or groups) as desired. He makes it so quick on the console, but it’s a lot of clicks and screwing around on a DAW.
I’m curious if you have refined your template further in the last few years? I’d love to learn more of what you found. I also want to mix like CLA, and I get the impressions watching his videos that it’s not quite as easy in a DAW as he leads us to believe. I noticed in a full mixdown 2 years after those Epic videos in a DAW that he did that he had setup 4 aux tracks with drum verb, vocal verb, short delay, and long delay. So I wonder if he’s coming to the same conclusion, lol.
Curious your thoughts. (BTW, I moved from Pro Tools to Reaper a few years ago, but the basic concepts are the same. Just seemed a bit more stable to me.)
If you use CLA Epic and follow CLA’s advice to set up a palette of spatial effects like he describes in the video — you need to run 8 instances of CLA Epic.
However, each instance of CLA Epic 8 total reverbs/delays running… So what you end up with is 64 reverbs & delays eating CPU cycles, but you’re only using 8!!! So that’s 56 reverbs and delays wasting CPU for nothing.
CLA’s technique just doesn’t work with the plugin it’s promoting! (not without a lot of unnecessary processing.)
This would be fixed if they would either 1) allow disabling modules, selectively (which would be relatively easy as far as new features go) … or 2) release the modules individually.
I would LOVE to have the modules separated, but there’s no way Waves will ever do that… There’s a small chance they would make it possible to CPU-disable modules, though.
It wouldn’t even require more UI. They would just bind it to the mute button and have an option in the settings to “disable CPU when muting.” You wouldn’t use that if you’re automating mutes, obviously, as Simon pointed out…
But that would make the plugin way more efficient (in this context, and in general) and actually compatible with CLA’s technique!