Motus Mentis

I mentioned in the previous post that I’ve just made some improvements to my mixing studio. I haven’t written very often about music and recording lately, so here’s a post about some of that.

For most of my recording career (I got my start as a staff member at Power Station Studios back in the late 70s), I mixed records on large analog consoles. I was trained on consoles made by Neve and Solid State Logic (SSL), and they’ve been my favorites ever since. When I first came to Power Station we had two Neve 8068s (there’s still one of these in Power Station’s legendary Studio A) but when SSL appeared on the scene we were among the first studios in America to get one. I’ve been using SSL consoles ever since; they have fantastic ergonomics and a distinctive sound. My mentor, Bob Clearmountain, was among the first adopters of SSL consoles, and mixed countless classic albums on them. (If, for example, you like the sound of “Avalon”, by Roxy Music, or “Let’s Dance”, by David Bowie, those were both mixed by Clearmountain on SSL consoles. He still has one at his studio in LA.)

Anyway, things have changed, and the advent of digital music-production equipment has made it possible to create virtual consoles that run entirely inside your computer. The technology evolved gradually, and at first was mostly used in professional studios just as a replacement for analog tape-machines, but in recent years the technology has improved so much that engineers have been able to forgo the physical console altogether, and do everything — recording, editing, overdubbing, and mixing — entirely in the virtual domain. (It’s called working “in the box”.) One platform in particular, called Pro Tools, emerged as the industry-dominating software for doing this.

This has all been enormously liberating: it means that instead of having to build a multimillion-dollar facility to make records (with a gigantic console that all by itself cost a fortune to buy and to maintain), an engineer can put together a fully operational, state-of-the-art mixing studio in his home for the cost of a decent computer, some (admittedly rather expensive) software, a digital audio interface, and some good monitor speakers. Some years ago, I did just that, and I’ve been mixing at home ever since.

The drawback to all of this is that your virtual mixing console, despite being capable of anything (and more!) that a physical console can do, is still just a display on a computer screen. For someone like me, who spent decades developing the complex “muscle memory” for all those knobs and faders on a physical console, mixing “in the box” felt, at first, like trying to play a piano with a mouse. You get used to it, but it’s never really the same, and you miss that intuitive expressiveness you felt when you could actually put your hands on the controls. Various companies have made physical controllers for digital audio workstations (DAWs), and for a few years I’ve had a little single-fader controller, but it never felt like what I’d been used to for all those years.

Last week, though, life got better: I decided to buy two newly released items from Solid State Logic, the company who made the consoles I’d earned my living on for so long.

The first is the UF8: a beautifully made controller, with eight motorized faders, that also has an assortment of user-assignable knobs and buttons for putting direct control of Pro Tools channel functions back in the engineer’s hands.

The second is the UC1. For a veteran SSL user who has rather reluctantly come round to in-the-box mixing, this thing is a godsend: it is a physical recreation of the SSL console’s channel-strip (filters, EQ, and compressor/expander), and it ships with SSL’s meticulously modeled software version of the original console-channel’s audio processors. What this means is that, by inserting an instance of this software “plugin” on each channel of your virtual console in Pro Tools, you can use the UC1 to work the channel settings with just the same tactile, “hands-on” feel as working on the analog console itself. Together, the UF8/UC1 setup looks like this (picture taken from an article here; I’d show you the thing in my own studio, but the camera on my phone is broken):

The UC1 also comes with a software version of SSL’s iconic stereo-bus compressor, and it has a set of controls — and an analog meter! — for that as well.

I’m writing this post just to go on record as saying that for me, having these two pieces of equipment on my desk is an absolute game-changer. I suppose there are lots of younger engineers who came up without ever getting their hands on a physical console, and for whom a dedicated channel-strip controller may seem an expensive luxury, but for professional engineers “of a certain age” — those for whom sitting at an SSL console was like learning to play an instrument, and who have felt a bit “numb” all these years staring at a screen with a mouse in their hand — the UF8/UC1 combination is like suddenly getting your feeling back. What’s more, the latest version of the SSL channel-strip plugin that ships with the UC1 is a fantastic recreation of the sound of the old consoles. There are other SSL plugins out there from licensed manufacturers — and they’re pretty good — but when you hear this one you realize what you’ve been missing.

If you’re an engineer reading this, and want to learn more, you can have a look at them here and here. And if you’re going to take the plunge, I recommend that you buy them from Sweetwater: best customer service in the industry.

P.S. I know all this sounds like a paid endorsement, but it isn’t; I’ve never done endorsements. I really just think these things are so good that I wanted to let others know. (And Sweetwater really is the best place to buy gear.)