Waves VoiceCentric: The little bit of extra for your VO?

When you watch the product video of Greg Well’s VoiceCentric plugin, you will hear the sentence “I just can open it and within 5 seconds, I get the sound I’m looking for.” Sounds interesting, so let’s see whether this is right!

Beside big, detailed plugins, you will also find smaller ones with a very transparent number of controls. Some people might say that such one knob plugins are frown up. But I’m sure that there are days, these plugins might be a saver.

Overview

The plugin has just a few knobs. Meters for in and output at the sides including relevant sliders. A big knob in the middle is the main part of the plugin. It is named with ‘Intensity’. So this stand for the amount of processing which will be applied. But which kind of processing? Well, it is a combination of EQ, Deesser and Compression. The precise settings will be kept as a secret, but in my ears this is a very solid chain. Three extra knobs to the right add delay, doubler, and reverb. The delay and the doubler sound great, but the reverb sounds like a plate reverb. Too old for my feeling and won’t fit for my application.

Handling

So the workflow is pretty simple: Add the effect and turn up the intensity to a level, which suits best for you. The EQ adds a nice sense of bite to the vocals and the compressor won’t pump at higher levels. It doesn’t tend to be a too aggressive compressor, but it sounds good in context. Even at 100% the result was still nice. Then, I like to add the doubler and turn it up to a value around 10. But don’t go too high with this one. Then turn up the output level to make up the lost gain, without clipping the signal. I do not use a delay for my standard chain. For this I set up an extra track, if I want to delay my stuff.

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Verdict

Generally I’m not a fan when the control about my sounds is taken away. And it seems that this plugin won’t add a super creative effect to your voice. But it is a nice little helper to polish your VO for further processing. Imagine you get a new voice, you’ve never worked with before. Your template is designed for another voice, but you don’t have time to set up a complete new processing chain. Put Voice Centric on it and the result will be really nice.

So in my opinion Greg Well is right when saying that it’s a plugin, which helps to set up a proper sound pretty fast. And except for the reverb, I really like the sound of this tool. While Butch Vig Vocals was a voice processing tool for rock formats, this one might close the gap to cleaner formats.
Voice Centric is on sale right now for $99 (reg. 149$). Download the Demo and see yourself!