Waves Cla Echosphere - Review and Tutorial - Great Slap Delay and Plate Reverb Plugin

The Waves Echosphere is a delay and plate reverb plugin which can add life, space and depth to a mix. It’s been developed in collaboration with world famous engineer Chris Lorde-Alge. and like all plugins by Waves which carry the name CLA they have one thing in common. They get you great results fast with an easy to understand interface. The Echosphere is no exception. Visually it somewhat resembles the LARC remote of the legendary Lexicon 480L reverb Waves states that this plugin, even with all faders down, still has a sound, the legendary CLA rock sound.

00:39 - So on this funk track this is the sound with the Echosphere on all channels disabled and this is with Echosphere enabled with all faders down on all channels. And now I will toggle between them. So there’s something happening for sure. It’s sound a bit louder and punchier and it’s not just volume. Now let’s focus on the actual Delay and Plate reverb. The interface is simple to use. You have the large info display where you can tweak settings and the controls down here. With the input slider you set how hard you hit the plugin. And with the output you set the output level. The faders for slap and plate set the level for the delay and reverb. You can solo or mute slap and plate individually here or here. And the slap and plate both have their own hi and low pass filters for sound tweaking. The dry wet mixcontrol sets how much of the effect you want.

02:25 - When you use the plugin as an insert effect, find the balance between direct sound and effect with this and when you use echosphere as a send effect you will probably set mix to 100% wet, effect only. Now the large display is where you will do the most tweaking for the slap delay and plate reverb. You can access the settings for slap and plate individually by clicking any slap or plate control like this. First let’s do the slap delay and use this clap track as an example. You set the delay time here. The VSO settings simulate common tapespeed settings found on a tape machine.

03:10 - So 7,5 means 7,5 inch per second and translates into 332ms of delay, 15 inches per second will be 166ms and 30inch per second will translate into a 83ms delay This will instantly give you familiarsounding tape delay settings If you want to set the delay to a different setting, just simply drag the ms counter up and down or double click to type a number. You can sync the delay to the tempo of the beat here and select several note values. You see the delay in milliseconds changing too. So if you want a delay which sounds slightly off, select a note value you want, turn the sync off and tweak the milliseconds value. With feedback you set how often the delay is repeated. The extra delays only turn down in volume, there’s no lowpassing happening. You can change the routing of the slap delay with the output and routing switches. By turning on the plate switch the slap delay will feed into the plate reverb By turning on just the output, the slap will be in parallel with the plate reverb so not feeding into the plate, but going directly to the output. By turning both plate and output on it will feed into the plate and also go separately to the output. And you can set the volume for each of these individually.

05:03 - The plate settings are a bit simpeler but have a few handy features. Let’s switch over to this tik tok sound so you can really hear how the plate sounds. The Echosphere is used here as a send effect, so the mix control is set to 100% wet. First you can set the predelay like this. This is handy if you want the reverb sound so be more separated from the dry signal. You can then have a shorter reverb which will stand out a bit more, without the need to have a longer reverb tail. That’s a little mixing tip right here.

05:41 - The Reverb time sets how long it will take for the plate to die out, so it sets the length of the reverb. Reverb Time Low and Reverb Time high set the amount of high and low frequencies independantly by changing the decay time. Both go from divided by four to 4 times as much. I’ll use a snare to demonstrate this. Now both slap and plate have a mod control up here. these mod dials do the same for slap and plate, but separately from each other. The dial adds modulation to the output of the effect. It can go from enhancing width to warbly effects. You can see it’s divided up in 4 sections. Each section has a different depth and each part will go from 0 to 100 with the modulation rate. So when you turn it up, the modulation changes and then it switches to a greater depth and you start dialing it in from 0 to 100 and then it switches again and so on.

07:00 - On this snare reverb with the first section you can hear subtle modulation. And when you turn the dial you’ll get a bit of a phasey effect. You can already hear the CLA Echosphere on the track I used for this video. And now I will play around with the Echosphere on the synth of this track, so you will get an idea to of how easy it is to get a great sound with this plugin. I also want to point out that using the plate in the shortest reverbtime is really useful.

09:47 - It will make the track sound more close to you or more to the back. The Waves CLA Echosphere is free on this Black Friday. To get it for free you need to register using the link in the description below. After Black Friday it will cost the normal price and you have to wait for a Waves Sale to get a better deal which will not be better then… Free Check out the video displayed on screen right now for another cool and easy to use effect. Please remember to subscribe to teh channel and like this video. I’m Marlon, thanks you for watching and i’ll see you in the next one. Bye! .