NAMM: New Waves Bundle Targets Musicians

Renaissance Axx (Click for a close-up)

SuperTap (Click for a close-up)

MetaFlanger (Click for a close-up)

Waves has introduced a new package aimed at guitarists, vocalists, and other musicians using native, host-based systems: The Musician Bundle.

The Musician Bundle comprises five powerful processing plug-ins that are ideal for adding special character with presence, punch, and life to the sound of any track. Two plug-ins offer extraordinary control of dynamics, with intelligent compression, expansion, and gating capabilities: the Renaissance Axx, as its name suggests, is optimized for guitar, while the other, Voxx, offers control for vocals. Axx is ideal for enhancing the presence of a guitar part, whether it's a lead solo, rhythm, or powerful bass lines, and offering compression/limiting and gating/expansion. It's a tool to bring the guitar part out in a mix. Meanwhile, the Renaissance Voxx is designed to be powerful, yet easy to use. Created to enhance and focus vocal clarity while reducing background noise, the Voxx is ideal for lead vocals.

The other plug-ins in the Musician Bundle focus on time domain effects. The Doubler is an automatic double-tracking device that will make any instrument or vocal larger than life, adding depth and dimension to the sound. Employing a combination of delay and pitch modulation, the Waves Doubler creates a whole new gamut of time-domain doubling effects. The Super Tap features six multi-tap delays with up to six seconds of mono or stereo delay, EQ-style filtering, rotation, gain, and precision control of delay times. In addition, there's the ability to add modulation and different feedback modes, along with tempo/tap pattern insertion. Super Tap can create wild delays, incredible ambient effects, and unique room sounds. Finally, the MetaFlanger is the ideal and all-encompassing flanger for the guitarist. It can be used to create gentle choruses, sharp phasing, tape flanging, and a whole range of dual-delay flanging effects. Filters allow processing of just a portion of the input, and the phase can be inverted for even more effects.

A 14-day free demo of the Musician Bundle is available from authorized Waves dealers or from www.waves.com. The Musician Bundle ships in January 2004 and carries an MSRP of $199. It is available for native systems via RTAS, AudioSuite, VST, DirectX (Win), and MAS (Mac).