How to use the Waves CLA Epic - Tutorial and Walkthrough

The Waves CLA Epic is a delay and reverb developed with world renowned engineer Chris Lord-Alge and delivers an epic sounding reverb. Hi I’m Marlon and welcome to the White Noise Studio. The CLA EPIC is the Big Brother, or Sister, of EchoSphere. EPIC works in the same way as Echosphere Its based around the technique of having a delay feeding into a reverb to smoothen out the delay and creating a bigger, deeper sound. On the backingtrack you can hear EPIC already, it’s on all instrument groups.

00:34 - This is without EPIC… and this is with…. The plugin shares the same controls as echosphere but has added more, way more of them. The CLA EPIC plugin works like this. On the left side, in blue, you have 4 independent delays, they work in parallel to eachother. On the right side, in red, you will find 4 reverbs. These reverbs also work parallel to eachother. So the delays are not feeding into eachother and the same goes for the reverbs.

01:22 - The delays can be fed into the reverbs though, that is what this plugin is about. For that , there’s a routing matrix on the delay side. Open the matrix here. For each of the delays you can set if the delay is fed into the reverbs A to D. You can select just one , or all, or whichever configuration you want. It can also bypass the reverb section and be routed directly to the output Or do a reverb and output split And you can set the send level to each of these destinations. Very flexible.

01:57 - Now you know the basic setup of this plugin and let’s dive into the 8 effects. Each of these 8 have their own set of controls and you can access them by clicking here or here , it’s the same for each effect. And you can swap between the effect by clicking on these controls on the different effect or by clicking here. Let’s start with the delays and the first is tape. It’s obviously a tape delay effect with a rich, fat sound. It offers two taps, left tap sets the left delay and the right sets the right delay. You can sync them to the tempo of the project or set a delay time manually. They are not syncable. If you want a mono tape delay, set both sides to the exact same setting. Feedback sets how often each delay is repeated. The offset lets you pivot between the delay times of each channel. It works like this.

Let me set the left to 200ms and the right to 100 ms. By lowering the offset you’ll see the left side delay time decrease while the right increases by the percentage you chave set. And increasing the percentage amount does the exact opposite. Very nice to play with and use in automation. Next up is Throw. You should see throw as a one off delay to accent certain parts of words, a one off snare delay accent and so on.

03:45 - It’s the same as the tape delay, also with it’s controls but it has this trigger button which let’s you manually of with automation, open up the delay . It’s not the same as bypassing or muting the tape delay, it works like quickly opening a send to an effect and closing it. So you can use it to accent within this plugin on top of the other delays. If you leave it on, you can use it as a permanent secondairy tape delay too. Slap is the same delay as featured in Echosphere, with the same settings. Check out my echosphere video for an in depth review. It features tapestyle delay times presets here to quickly get well know tape delay settings and you can manually change the delay time here to work in note values. And there’s a feedback of course. The 4th is Crowd which is the most simple to use with just 1 fader. It sets a series of delay time which get increasingly longer when you go from tight to wide. This is almost a reverb, but has a different character.

05:08 - Tight will give a presence , an ambiance around a dry sound and the widest setting resembles a gated reverb and is widest. Now let’s go to the 4 Reverbs. Reverbs a, b and C have the same exact controls, they are only different in algorithm. A is Plate and is the same as in Echosphere, again check the echosphere review I did, B is Room and C is Hall. Now you can set the predelay on each of these three. This will help to seperate the original audio from the reverb to get more clarity.

05:55 - It also can help to make the reverb more audible and you can shorten the reverb then which opens up the mix. Reverb time sets the length of the reverb from 100ms to 2 0 seconds for these three. The reverb time hi and low settings are interesting. With these you can change how the low end and hi frequency reverb responds. You can go from a dampened big reverb to splashy and lively with this. The 4th reverb is called Space. This one offers the ability to have a non linear behaviour of the reverb tail. If you set the decay to non linear and also the reverb time long enough, you can use the reverb for reverb gating. Add a gate plugin afterwards of course. Now each of the sections have their own independent mod control This will add modulation width and depth to each section. From phasey chorussy sound to warbly effects. The modulation is divided into 4 sections and each new section will have a new modulation depth and by increasing it will change the speed in each section from slow to fast. There’s an input and output level and mix control.

07:43 - Set to 100 when used as a send effect and play with the dry/wet balance when you use the CLA epic as an insert effect. Now like I said in the beginning, the music you hear in this video uses the EPIC plugin for reverb and depth. It’s on every instrument group and there are 7 instances of this plugin used. Leave a comment if you recognize some parts of the backing track. To remind you , this is the backing track without all 7 instances of epic, and this is with. To remind you , this is the backing track without all 7 instances of epic, and this is with. I basically went through the many presets and choose a few for this track. Let’s go over the instruments groups in solo to check out how they sound and work and you might pick up some mixing tips alon g the line. Let’s start with drums. I used 2 instances here. The first is used as insert on the mono room mic. This is without and this is with.

08:52 - The Preset is CLA The Room #4 there are two room tracks, one is more slammed then the other and I didn’t want to automate. I used an eq before the EPIC plugin to have the audio going in sound optimal for the reverb. This preset is all reverbs, no delays. And I dialed in quite some wet signal, it’s used as an insert. The second instance is used as send effect for snare toms and overheads. This is with and this is without. And again I used an eq before having the reverb. The eq does this : It removes some midrangey spikes which I dislike. The preset is CLA Snare top where I tweaked the hi and low reverb times a bit and set the plugin to 100% wet. On the bass I used preset factory > roombiance where I adjusted the delays and mod to have a more choressy widening effect. This is without and this is with.

10:15 - It’ s mostly used to add a bit more width and the dry wet is set to 23.6 % wet. There are 3 instances of epic on guitars, each one is used for a different part. On the verse guitars is a simple one, and I just added it because I could It’s really subtle, preset cla> Guitar> the stereo March number 1 And for the chorus guitar I saw Devin Townsend made a bunch of presets so I needed to use one of those. This is without and this is with. The preset is Devin Townsend > Heavy Gtr Echo.

10:59 - I only adjusted the mix balance and output volume. The last one for guitars is on the lead guitars. The preset is CLA> Guitar> Dancing Delays. It adds a lot of epicness of a big sound and no changes. This is without and this is with. On keys I used preset CLA> Keys> Big Strings, with no changes. This is without and this is without. A few things to mention. The plugin has a sound by itself which can be described as punchiers, moother and a bit louder without changing the volume. Check the echosphere video for a comparison. And the CPU usage. It’s by no means a light plugin. I run 32 samples latency on an AMD 3900x cpu and with these seven instances the performance meter in cubase jumps from about 30% to 70% usage on this project.

12:09 - It’s not cpu light, but considering that the plugin is basically 4 reverbs and 4 delays I’m not surprised. Check out the video displayed on screen right now to know more about a cool delay and reverb plugin. Please remember to subscribe and like this video. Thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one. Bye! .