Music Production Overview: Waves TG12345

In the Music Production Overview column we explore the world of music production. The text is supposed to be a fast read, condensed to offer a quick glance at the product.

This plugin from renowned plugin developer Waves offers the sound of the classic EMI TG12345 channel strip that was used on many influential records.

Waves collaborated with EMI to recreate the sound of the console for in-the-box mixing. The plugin is split into 3 parts: a compressor / limiter, EQ, and the master section, featuring many advanced features like mid-side processing, drive (a pleasing sounding distortion), and a stereo spread control.

The dynamics section features a VCA based compressor / limiter with a fixed ratio of 2:1 (compressor) and 7:1 (limiter). This works very different from typical compressors: instead of a threshold you are given an input and a hold control with which you can set the desired amount of compression. The attack parameter is fixed to 1 ms and the release is flexible from 100 ms all the way to 5 seconds. A mix knob is there for parallel compression.

The EQ is divided into 3 parts: bass, presence, and treble. Bass provides a low shelf at 50 Hz, treble is a peak / bell filter fixed at 5 kHz (when boosting, for attenuation it’s a 10 kHz shelving EQ). Presence is flexible from 500 Hz to 10 kHz. The amount of gain you can push or attenuate is +/- 10 dB.

The routing switch lets you change the order in which the channel strip processes the audio signal.