I also think the gate is awesome for vocals. The gate in the E-series plug-in does amazing things for drums, it can really clean up a mix and make your drums punch. I almost never used to use an expander/gate when mixing, but that was mostly because I had been using stock plug-ins in Pro Tools. The Expander/Gate is my favorite part of the plug-in. The compressor is intuitive and does exactly what you would want it to do. The eqs sound smooth, but more importantly I love the dynamics section. I have been using this plug-in on every session that I record since I bought the SSL bundle. I highly recommend using these, and at the very least just looking at the settings in the presets to give you some ideas for your own mixing. The SSL E-Series channel strip comes with tons of amazing presets from top producers. They are easy to get started with - Waves plug-ins come with great presets if you don't want to mess around with all the details or you aren't very experienced at mixing. They don't take up a lot of CPU - you can pretty much run this channel strip on every track in your session without maxing out your CPU. They are stable - you don't have to worry about it crashing your recording session.

They are easy to authorize - you can use any USB stick as a dongle, or use their software application to authorize if your computer connects to the internet. They are easy to install - you just download them off their website.

Waves ssl plugin