Chris Lord-Alge Gets Put to the Test: The Quest to Create CLA MixHub

Ever tried to cram a console into that computer screen? Just wrap your paws around the mainframe, give it a heave ho and see what happens?

Probably not, with the resultant hernia being just one of the many impractical outcomes of this act. Another argument against is that the typical audio engineer may feel that that’s already been taken care of, as they peruse the glowing channels of their DAW.

For super mixer Chris Lord-Alge, however, this was an assumption ripe to be challenged. After previously creating a plethora of plugins with longtime developer partner Waves, the five-time GRAMMY Award winner (Green Day, Madonna, U2, Prince, Foo Fighters, Rolling Stones and many more), set out to really challenge himself.

What resulted required stepping outside of his comfort zone with plugin creation. How could he go beyond fashioning the typical ITB tool? The answer arrived when he shifted the picture away from simply sound shaping, and instead re-examined workflow.

Chris Lord-Alge launched his latest Waves plugin, CLA MixHub, at Winter NAMM 2019.

The result: CLA MixHub, launched with no small fanfare during a 2019 Winter NAMM-spanning marathon. Described by Waves as a first-of-its kind plugin, CLA MixHub allows users to mix up to 64 tracks — from one plugin window — using channel strips modeled from Lord-Alge’s custom SSL 4000. With its ability to work in buckets of up to 8 channels, the plugin lets ITB mixers come much closer to “playing the board” like the creative instrument that it’s analog equivalent can be.

But the quest to best his past efforts would prove to be far tougher than he imagined. Despite having an original vision, Lord-Alge and his colleagues soon discovered that making it a reality would force them all to level up, again and again.

Speaking from his LA studio, Lord-Alge shared the odyssey with SonicScoop. Get ready for an in-depth perspective on how a new type of plugin is conceived, the painstaking process that gets it assembled — and why it ain’t always easy being CLA.

Chris, firstly it seems to me that CLA MixHub represents a different approach to plugin design. What differentiates it from more traditional plugins?

What makes the CLA MixHub different from most plugins is this: Most plugins out there are emulations of gear or an emulation of a channel strip, or an API this or a Neve that.

Not that CLA MixHub is not an emulation of some analog gear, but this is the ultimate channel strip that I would want, based on what I use, but also with things it doesn’t have. It’s not like I’m being tried-and-true to make a channel strip. No — I’m making my own CLA channel strip that has multiple limiters, has a super-gate, has an overdrive feature, has clearly cool things that I’m used to in my analog chain, but also adds things that I think are important.

What takes it to the next level is the ability to use it as a multitrack plugin and to be able to see up to 64 tracks at once on one screen, all EQs, all compressors, any combination, which we break down into buckets. What no other plugin will let you do is to be able to see 48 or 64 tracks at once and be able to adjust parameters on 64 EQs all within the course of a short period of time, while actually listening to the music.

For a better understanding of CLA MixHub, take the time to view this run through:

What was the original impetus for CLA MixHub? What was the “aha” moment, that made you realize that a plugin with this kind of thinking was needed?

Here’s the impetus: Because my workflow is based on a 72-input (custom SSL 4000) console, I’m seeing 72 channels at once. I’m seeing 48 channels of EQ and compressors at once. My whole mixing life has been this workflow.

With Pro Tools, it’s so annoying to have to look at one thing at a time. I can’t remember the EQ I have on the acoustics versus the electrics. I can’t remember my EQ on the toms versus the overheads. I’ve never had to worry about that because I just glance over [at the SSL console], and I can see 64 EQs in one look.

To me, that’s the most important thing. My big moment to (Waves Product Manager) Mike Fradis was, “How can we size the GUI’s so I can see eight EQs at once?” At first that seemed impossible. Then I said, “Why can’t we make it where we can see a bucket of eight EQs at once?” The aha moment was like, “Wait, maybe we can do that. Why can’t we just make what I’m looking at right here happen in a plugin?” The simple fact of it is, by putting that plugin on every channel, we were able to create a way where it would work.

That sounds like a big undertaking to execute from there.

It’s a huge task. No one had ever been able to solve this problem, and it took a couple of years of experimenting, because there were so many bugs involved in doing it. You’ve got to remember, you’re trying to look at 48 or 64 plugins on one screen.

That’s the aha moment there, is that I just wanted to take my workflow, that I’ve been sitting in front of my whole life and done 20,000 mixes that way, and put it into a workflow so you can do it the same way in the box. You can at least get the same feeling.

Bigger and Bolder

Chris, in terms of plugin evolution in general, do you think more of this type of thinking is needed? Do you think that top mixers such as yourself, that are called on to help develop these plugins, need to shift their mindset a little and rethink things?

I’m making tools that I think are necessary to have. I feel that what I do, the way I mix, is a step forward. It’s been a step forwards for 30 years, and by making this plugin, I think this is the first step forward into my workflow — into the workflow of a large-format console without literally creating a mixer in a plugin.

Lord-Alge sought to bring the SSL at his home studio Mix LA inside the box.

You started to tell me about how this was two-year process to develop CLA MixHub. Did you know for sure that you were going to partner with Waves on it?

Of course. I’ve had a relationship with Waves forever and we’ve done really well together, and they were like, “Chris, we want the best you’ve got to offer,” so I said, “Maybe we don’t just want to emulate a piece of gear, we want the biggest challenge,” so I came up with this idea, but I said, “Wow, I don’t know if this is something we can do.”

Well, it took a lot of steps to make it happen. It took a trip to Tel Aviv [where Waves is headquartered], it took a trip for Mike to come here. The problem with it is that every idea we put in it, we create a hundred bugs we have to fix, because its dealing with 48 tracks or 64.

There was a lot of other things I wanted to have in there which would make it more like a console, like a Solo button and a Mute button and a Pan pot, but since that’s all controlled by the DAW, we couldn’t put those in. Maybe in the future we’ll have an update, but right now, you use your DAW for soloing and panning and muting, and you use the plugin for being able to deal with all of it at once.

There were a lot of steps to having multiple compressors on a channel, making it so the two compressors, when you flip between them, were the exact same level and the exact same gain staging. Now, you know, an 1176-style compressor versus the dbx 160 style, they’re two opposite compressors, so it took a lot of time just to match that. Creating a super-gate, just to be able to have the Hold feature on it, took a month of debugging to get it to work.

The metering took me three days of videotaping my meters, because I wanted the meters to look like my meters and to match the color. Once we got the meters in, it took us one full day of back and forth with Waves to keep changing mods until we got the meters to look right. When I do something, it’s got to be right. I keep tweaking until it’s right, so it was a long process, you know?

Basically, I made a plugin that’s kind of like a mini-workstation, rather than just coming out with another tool. I’ve already come out with screwdrivers and hammers, but I wanted to come out with something bigger and bolder, not just another esoteric plugin. I wanted to come out with something that everyone could use.

“Whatever It Takes”

Chris, some people are going to be reading this and be thinking, “Chris Lord-Alge is a busy mixer.” Is it complicated to have to shoehorn the development of this into your sessions, into your work week, to rope off time? How does that get done?

I have to work around it. You just make your schedule work. I had to actually be there at Tel Aviv to video the commercial, to work with the techs on the plugin, for a solid week before Christmas to make sure we could have it for (Winter) NAMM (2019), because I wanted it for NAMM and I wasn’t taking no for an answer, so we hustled.

When I did an interview with Michael Brauer about making his panning plugin Brauer Motion, he told me that there were times where he really had to do a gut check to get through it. Because they hit the wall sometimes, then they found a way to keep going.

Sure. Well, the same thing happened. Everyone was hitting the wall on it, but I had to go into the meeting with all the heads of all the departments. I went on a rally meeting. I went in there and said, “Look, if I had to fly here before Christmas to make sure everything happens, I believe in this. I’m here to make sure we do what we’ve got to do to get this done. We’re making NAMM, and whatever it takes, it’s got to be done. We’re not going to miss this window to release.”

I went to every single department and went through every problem they were having, and tried to help them walk through and see if we could eliminate certain things, change certain things and modify it. The only way to get the plugin done is to actually go where they’re writing the code and make sure you get what needs to be done in there, and be able to modify your dream stuff into stuff that’s manageable.

Mapping Out MixHub

Are you able to kind of give me a rough sequence of how the plugin came together? Once everyone committed and was on board, what are the stages you went through to complete it?

Inside the buckets: The dynamics section.

Here’s how the road to the MixHub worked. It basically started with Mike (Fradis) and I having dinner, shooting out ideas and writing them down. We shot a bunch of ideas up in the air until he said, “That one right there looks like one we should go after.”

Then it’s like, “Well, the first thing we have do is we have to take your hardware and model it,” so he took a few pieces of my hardware, we shipped it to Tel Aviv, and the first thing we do is model it and make sure that the modeling is right.

The very first thing we did, before we even got into the buckets, before we even got into the multitracking version of it, was to make the channel strip first and make sure the sound is right. That was about two-thirds of the process, making that work. Once we got the sound right, then it was the time to stack them into buckets. Once you get one bucket working, getting eight working is fine.

Then it was down to all the details of colors and buttons and what should be here and there, the ergonomics of the actual plugin. Does this need to light up, does that need to light up? Every aspect of how the thing shadows, and how bright this knob is, if this pot lights up, was put under the microscope.

I wanted to make sure, when you turned the filters on, a light came on and let you know you had filters in. I wanted to make sure when you switched modes that it was bright enough to notice that you were engaged, so it was as idiot-proof as possible. Then, as you get toward the end, it’s the GUI, the interface, the name.

Naming a plugin is probably as difficult as naming a band.

The name didn’t happen overnight. We had a lot of different names out there. We threw them all in a hat. They researched some ideas, and MixHub became the winner. There was a lot of different ideas. I went with MixHub because I wanted the shortest name possible, and it had to have CLA in the front because that’s who I am.

Backing up for a second to modeling your console. How is that done? Were 64 different channels modeled?

Nope, I modeled one. I know every channel. I picked a channel that I could do without that I knew that how it responded was exactly how it comes from the factory. I picked out a channel that was closest to spec. I want my bucket so that every channel’s exactly the same. Now, I know there’s another plugin out there that every channel has a different character, and that’s a great idea — it gives people something to play with: “Hey, I love the way 17 sounds.” “Oh, I love the way 41 sounds.”

But I didn’t need to have that. I just wanted to have my channel strip at spec, 64 channels of it, all exactly the same. I already have a console where each channel’s slightly different. I didn’t want that in a plugin. I wanted it to be perfect. I didn’t want any variables.

How was the channel from the console modeled?

Waves took the channel to the mothership and then they took it apart. They take it into the laboratory and for weeks they go through and test it. They test it with every setting and they sweep it. I mean, it’s a big deal. The same with the limiters I use. They have to sweep all the stuff. I also had to send a stereo module, because my stereo module is built completely different, and has a different sound.

I take it you feel like Waves did a faithful model of the strip? How close did the emulation come?

When I checked it, I was happy with it. And then I made it a little bit more. I made it a little bit supercharged, you know what I’m saying?

The EQ section of CLA MixHub.

I didn’t try to make it exactly like the module. I wanted it to have all the sonics of the module, but I wanted it to be more aggressive. I wanted it to be able to overdrive and distort with a lot more headroom, because it’s digital. I wanted it to have all the sound that I’m used to, but I wanted it to be able to go further than I can go.

So yeah, when a lot of these questions came up to make it exactly the same, I was like, “Well, no. I want it to bend even farther,” so I stretched it outside the box a bit more. I mean, what’s the point of just cloning something? You want to say, “Okay, it’s got everything I need in it, but what else can we do?” I don’t want it stock from the market. I want an AMG version. It’s like the AMG version with the F1 chip. It’s more down that road. It’s more like when you put the pedal down, it frickin’ hammers, you know? I didn’t want it to be subtle.

As the plugin progressed, what were some additional possibilities that revealed themselves beyond the original idea?

One of the things we came across was we put a mic pre in it, so we’re able to add 50 dB of gain in the line input, and that lets you get a really good distorted sound. If you want distortion, you literally turn the mic level up, and you can start to add grit and distortion into your sound. Putting an insert on each channel strip is something that we thought that we didn’t think about it, but became a great possibility, so you can put a limiter or something, or just a reverb in there.

That was really helpful, but the possibilities became endless. Right now, the possibility of getting this MixHub to work on a Slate RAVEN, is going to make that workflow amazing, because it’s going to be a full touchscreen version of it.

And by having our own fader on there — it’s not a fader that’s controlled by the DAW, it’s another fader —my brother Tom Lord-Alge came up with this idea that you can use the faders in the plugin to control your level, and leave your faders at zero in virtual. You can set up sessions where the faders are at zero, and then your plugins are the levels. You can really use it in both ways, to organize or not.

You’ve already told me about some of the challenges. What sticks out in your mind? What was the biggest hump you had to get over?

The biggest challenge we had to come across was to make it so you’d be able to run 64 channels without sucking down all the bandwidth. The problem with plugins is they eat up a lot of RAM, they eat up a lot of computer energy. To make 64 plugins of this work without shutting your computer down, it was a big feat. That was the hardest thing to do, is to make it low-calorie.

Literally, our first build, eight channels, and the computer was running at like 90%. We had to go through every aspect that we could chisel down without compromising sound quality to get it to be low-calorie, and that took forever. Now we have it so you can run 64 on a laptop and it works.

What are the places that you had to look to do that? Was that in the GUI, then?

The code. We talked about, “I don’t need it to do anything more than this. I don’t need these extra things.” They would send me an updated version that was more low-cal and say, “Okay, does it still sound the same? Is it still reacting right?” I would compare the high-cal to the low-cal. I’d do that for hours.

Getting to the Goal Line

How do you power through something like that? All audio engineers get involved in things that are very tedious, and probably people in most professions. But for you personally, how do you get through something that painstaking?

The bottom line is that I can focus really well. I have a lot of discipline, but to me, the goal line is everything. I have to have it a certain way, and whatever it takes. It’s like my mixes: They happen pretty quickly, but I’m 100% focused. I get exactly what I want. I don’t let go of it ’til I’ve tapped into everything.

Plasma-style faders improve the view.

If you want to win the race, you’ve got to run your ass off. I’m sorry, but there’s no shortcut to a good mix. There’s no shortcut to a good plugin. There’s no shortcut for hard work. Hard work pays off. You have to go after it.

Too many people are too busy looking at their Facebook status or checking their Instagram. I don’t have time during my workday to play social media. I’m trying to make music here, and making the plugins is a killer. I’m very detail-oriented: I like to go to sleep at night knowing that I didn’t take a shortcut or skip over anything.

You have to take this job seriously, and when I mean serious, that means you’ve got to put the pipe down, put the beer down, quit screwing around with the TV, and you’ve got to get in there and focus your energies 100% on what you’re doing. Engineering, mixing, creating, writing music, building gear, whatever it is — the devil’s in the details.

It’s Not Easy Going Live

Chris, as you mentioned, you launched CLA MixHub at Winter NAMM 2019. What was the response like? What were some of the questions that kept coming up that you found you had to answer the most?

It was that I had to explain, “This is my channel strip,” and then we go to the wow factor: “But you can see it all at once.”

I think people were really trying to wrap their head around being able to see it all at once. Most of the questions were that they thought it was a mixer, but I’m saying, “No, you’re able to see the song at once.” It was really getting them to wrap their head around actually being able to see all their settings for a song in one screen, and I was showing them, “Look, you can mix your whole song with all the same plugin.”

I was at NAMM. I was there demonstrating it for four days in a row. Waves had a big setup. I put the effort in. I put all my energy in. Believe me, when I left on Sunday, I was exhausted, but I talked to every single person that came by the Waves booth.

I had a lot of friends, a lot of my clients, a lot of artists come by, and I’d explain it to them. In the beginning, they’re not understanding what it’s doing, but when I showed them that this is not just a plugin, it’s a way to organize and it’s a workflow, then they realize it’s beyond a plugin: It’s more of a workflow, and the plugin is just one part of it.

Talking about all the appearances you had to do over the four days. Arguably you’re one of the most visible mixers working today. Was that status part of your plan? To what extent has that been a pleasure for you, but is there also pressure that comes with that?

I put the pressure on myself. I have a level of quality and a level of things I want to do that are above and beyond even myself, right? I’m always looking to do greater things, and there’s not enough hours in the day. It’s like whether it’s a mix, whether it’s a plugin, whether it’s an appearance, whether I’m shaking the hand of a 12-year-old kid or someone that’s 50 or 90 it’s all the same. It’s all the same focus, all the same energy.

The center section provides additional flexibility and options.

Doing the demos is a lot of work, time and effort, but I enjoy it because I think that’s what I have to do for people, in my plugins, and my way of thinking and my teaching. I think people really dig it, and it’s a great learning experience.

CLA MixHub has only been out for a few weeks, but are you finding out about any unexpected applications yet? Have you had the opportunity to be surprised with its uses or any feedback you’re getting?

So far I’ve gotten a lot of text messages, a lot of people contacting me saying how much fun they’re having with it, and saying that this is a big eye-opener for them. You know, to get positive feedback is great. I tried to nail all the bugs, but I hope people dig deep enough to find maybe a bug that I missed. That means they show interest in it.

We’re getting a really good response, because it’s a new kind of plugin. I like to come out with things that are big and cool, so I’m happy with it.

So what was The Big Lesson you learned from creating CLA MixHub? What did it teach you not just about plugin design, but your own approach to audio and mixing?

The Big Lesson is if you want to do something great, it’s going to take 10 times the effort. You can get your dream done: If you dream up something, you can turn it into something with the right team. It’s not impossible.

CLA MixHub did teach me that you have to be patient. It just shows you that you’re only as good as your ideas. I have ideas for other plugins, other things, but I wanted to go for something big, so this is showing me that I can go even further, that I’m not going to take “no” for an answer and that it can be done.

It’s possible to break into new boundaries, but you have to have a good team. You have to have a lot of patience and a lot of respect for the people helping you do what you want to do. I’m just trying to create the greatest tools ever used in making music.

Chris, here’s my last question: Was becoming a plugin designer and developer a skill set that you anticipated adding into your portfolio? Is that part of how you think of yourself now?

The last thing I thought was that I’d be making plugins, but the way our business is, designing tools for the next generation is a perfect segue.

It’s just part of what I do, whether it’s teaching, whether it’s designing plugins, whether it’s helping create programs, it’s just part of the job. It’s another finger on the hand of what we do.

• David Weiss

“I put the pressure on myself.” CLA in his element at Mix LA.

Please note: When you buy products through links on this page, we may earn an affiliate commission.