Ok, I finally got it to work, which I'll include here in case other people are having problems. I think there's a few different ways to trigger the use of the old cwt, but one way is to have the first input a cell array stipulating the signal time (either lower & upper bounds, or a vector) and the signal itself;
>> sig = {voltage, time}; % my example has extracellular recording of neuron voltage
I put my wavelet values in to 'wav', rather than calling on the wavemngr using its shortname, and put my required scales into a positive vector called 'scales'. There may be other ways to do it, but I got it to work by then calling:
>> coeff = cwt({voltage, time}, scales, wav);