Manny Marroquin is a Grammy Award-winning mixing engineer who’s worked with some of music’s biggest stars - Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Rihanna and John Mayer to name just a few. Back in 2013, he put his name to a collection of signature Waves plugins, and now one of them - the Manny Marroquin Tone Shaper - is being given away for free.
Tone Shaper is Manny's multiband parallel compression beast, designed to tweak the tone of a sound in a way that EQ can't. There are four bands, each with a choice of three different frequency centres around which to focus the compression. Each band is compressed more as the slider is moved up, with the effect of lengthening the release tail. Auto-gain brings the balance back, and the end result is a more dominant band.
To all intents and purposes, it's EQ via a different process, and it's particularly good at delivering bottom-end weight and mid-range punch by compressing those bands and mixing them back in with the dry signal.
The promotion runs until 15 September (the plugin has a full retail price of $99, though it’s frequently on sale) and, if you want to download Tone Shaper, you’ll need to sign up for a Waves account. It runs in VST/AU/AAX formats on PC and Mac.
