Designed to emulate not only the sound but the feel of working on a large-format mixing console, the Waves CLA MixHub is a downloadable plug-in that works across channel strips to provide you with the sonics and workflow of the analog days. The plug-in was modeled on the console of famed, hat-wearing mixing engineer Chris Lord-Alge, giving you its sonic imprint.

More than the sonics, the plug-in offers a different way of working with channel strips, giving you access to eight tracks at a time within its GUI. Eight banks are accessible within this eight-channel grouping, so you can effectively mix 64 individual tracks from one plug-in window.

Say you’re equalizing a piano and a vocal at the same time. To switch between them in your DAW, you’d have to click out of one equalizer plug-in, and click into the other. Load up the MixHub on all your channels, however, and the workflow is different: now you can tweak an SSL-style EQ on the vocal and switch immediately to the piano in the same window, making complementary adjustments quite quickly. This workflow allows you to judge the impact one track has on another exceedingly quickly.

The plug-in provides an input section, a dynamics section, an EQ, an output, and an insert point for adding additional Waves plug-ins. It’s compatible with both Mac and Windows platforms and can operate in AU, VST, and AAX formats.