Hi Tony, "long time listener/first time caller". Congratulations on your own plugin pack by Waves! Could you talk a little bit about the development and background behind the plugins? Thanks!

first of all it's wonderful to have you on this forum, thank you very much for being here.

i've been playing with the Waves/Maserati plugs and what i'd like to know is a little more of what's going on under the hood if possible (if you aren't able to speak about it in a public forum please disregard the question).

i don't know if i'm enthralled by the newness of these things but it just seems they make everything easy to ballpark quickly, and are a great help in decision making. the contour switches on the vocals for example make it real easy to decide in what direction you want to go, fast. also the kick plug added the oomph i usually attribute to pultecs. haven't A/Bd or anything but man i had the kick slamming in a second (with a little help from an SSL EQ/Gate).

also would like to ask you if you use them and if you do, if you use them to ballpark and go form there, etc. any tips would be appreciated.

congratulations on this novel approach to plugins and thank you again for your time.

I have heard the Waves Maserati plug ins and was very pleased with the results. They appear to give a track a great results rather quickly. Can you give a little more info about the plug ins. Are they an EQ and compressor combined on certain settings, or something very different? How did you come up with these settings....where they certain hardware or software combinations you created that Waves they emulated?

For starters - have a look at all the information here Waves Signature Series | The Tony Maserati Collection

hey Glenn,
thanks for asking. Basically, I asked Waves to help me create plug-in from a few of my pre-set patches, that I'd been working with for a number of years. So we basically dissected the 'patches' I'd been using; part analog, part plug-in, including any side chains and filters. I went through my patches for drums, vocals etc.. and tried to recreate them directly via Waves' Q Clone or perseived sonic character.

I wanted to the set to be usable by Producers and Writers as well as young Engineers. Differing from the usual 'big name' plug-in release focused on the already established professional. Although, I do think this set will be useful to all. I tried to come up with real world usefulness folks can enjoy wihtout getting overly tweaky

I'm planning on a pre-set sharing page on my site sometime in the next month. I'd love to get some of your touches up there!

thanks,
t

Tony,

Kudos on the Collection.

IMHO, excellent gear can have 8000 knobs or simply one 'better' knob.

From what I've seen thus far, your Collection is a well thought-out, unique, and powerful compound toolset with ample tweakability which can compliment other eq's, compressors, etc..

I look forward to demoing the Collection on a variety of tracks.

Tony, your plug is amazing. It always makes people in the room say "what did you just do?" Thanks for creating an original product. thumbsup

Exactly the response I was hoping for! Keep it rockin'
yeee

Hey Guys,
I'd also like to throw this out to Mike Fradis who can be more delicate with the ones and zeros... he'll jump in on this discussion at some point tomorrow I think...
t

just tried them myself.

Mostly vibed by the bass one actually. Very good. Does the job nicely!!

I bypassed and engaged the Maserati plugs on a mix and you should have seen the artist's face. Best new plugs. Love them.

Hi everyone,

My Name is Mike Fradis, I’m a project/product manager @ Waves Audio. I had the privilege of overseeing the Tony Maserati Collection, as well as some of our other products (Waves SSL4000 Collection, Waves V-Series, Waves API Collection, JJP Collection, Waves Tune, etc). I wanted to join in and let you have a small taste of the development side behind the Tony Maserati Collection plug-ins.

The whole idea started when Waves realized that a lot of our users are spending hours trying to tweak plug-ins with endless options, and that this process impacts there creativity in a negative way.

A lot of our users send us amazing feedback on the R-Vox, which is a one-control compressor that either does the job or not. Users claimed they enjoy working with it due to the fact that it is easy to use and get results very fast. So we figured, “Why only a compressor, why not build a plug-in that will give the user complete results and great sound, and give it to them fast?” And who better for the job then our superstar mixing engineers. Tony Maserati was one of the natural candidates being an analog domain and digital domain mixer, with a very impressive record of handling all kind of genres (R&B, hip hop, pop, etc).

I called Tony and described the project to him, he was very enthusiastic and understood the need for these kind of tools right away. We decided that he would go through his mixes and try to understand what makes his mixes tick, and then re-create those sounds.

Tony came up with amazing chains both from the analog domain and the plug-ins domain. Those chains were great but we needed to tweak them to make them fit a wide range of sources. Next came the hard part for us: How do we translate those complex chains into a plug-in and keeping the integrity of his sound?

We first turned to our existing arsenal of audio processing engines and tried to get as close as possible to his chains (EQ-wise, compression-wise, and gain stages including harmonic distortion, reverb sounds, modulation, etc). In some cases, we achieved good results, in others we had to create new blocks of process code.

But that wasn’t enough. Tony is working on a desk and in ProTools. We created a mixer that could faithfully recreate the complex routing and different scenarios that Tony needs when mixing a song. Some new algorithms were created as well because we all wanted it to be as close to his original chains as possible.

So, if you think about it, behind every plug-in there is a whole mixer with different parallel processes that were created together with Tony to fit his needs and the needs of our users. After we got the sound right and Tony approved it, we jumped on to a second task: Deciding which controls were the most important in the process. This meant presenting them to the user in a way that will keep it close to Tony’s idea of sound, but tweakable enough to make Tony’s sound work on a variety of sources. We found our self creating crazy link laws between different controls in different process stages, so no matter what the user does it will always try to keep him inside Tony’s general “sound neighborhood.”

Eventually we found ourselves with this monstrosity of a plug-in that does exactly what we wanted it to do, and we’re really happy with the results.

The reason we did not produce a TDM version is because these processors will not fit on a TDM chip. Hopefully, in the future, the TDM chips will get bigger and we will have that option.

For Waves this is just the beginning—we have many Signature Series plug-ins in the works. And we have found that this new approach is very helpful to our users, who are constantly looking for a way to get better sound faster.

For me working with Tony Maserati was a great experience, and I learned so much from the process. I think that anyone who plays around with these plug-ins will learn a lot about his incredible sound.

I want to thank GearSlutz for hosting this thread, and the people of this forum for taking interest in what we do.

And of course Tony Maserati--we couldn’t have done it without him.

Feel free to ask me any question, and hopefully I will have some answers for you.

Hi Tony or Mike, can you give us an example of the exact chain of gear and signal flow used on one of the Maserati plugins? How about describing the Vocal, and/or Bass plugin?

So your plug ins are a combination of EQ and compression...both favorite hardware and plug ins? Could you give a little more info on what hardware? The plug ins sound amazing!

Thank you

Many Thnx Mr. Fradis, is nice to hear the process from the developers themselves, not an easy task and sometimes under estimated by us, the users... thumbsup

Thanks guys for all the explanations.

Mike, you made a really great and explicative post.

I'm curious to see what this year 2009 will bring in the Signature Series, but I also hope that you'll continue in the analog modeling series, lke the JJP Collection...

Word Up !

+1 the original chains might be more interessting for us