Most DAW controllers are DOOMED!

everybody that has ever used a plug-in controller knows what the benefits are and how much they can improve your workflow however they will also know how much of a pain it is to get them set up and mapped correctly and that kind of stuff and SSL has tried to make this experience a lot more fluent but did they succeed and what will that mean for the future let's find out [Music] unless you have a lot of money to waste on an avid Pro Tools setup the controller Market is pretty scarce yes there are a lot of very cool midi controllers but the user experience and more importantly the Daw integration is just horrible why is that well first of all we are relying on two very ancient protocols and one a bit more modern protocol but all of them are not really integrated in our dolls and why are we stuck with these protocols and bad integration well I think it's for the same reason that we're still using a vsd3 and there's so much more that I would love to be able to do in a Daw with plugins but were simply stuck and my guess is that it has something to do with the fact that there are a lot more Daws out there right now that all have to support things and that there isn't an independent standards Organization for these type of things now of course companies can go sit in a corner and whine about it or develop something new and that's basically what SSL did with this controller combination because this basically is a virtual SSL console and that is really cool now instead of relying on those ancient protocols SSL made an app called 360 and what that app does is it glues together the SSL Channel strip and boost compressor plugins with the controllers and it kind of feels like indeed working on an external big mixing board because it it you know works in the same way you root it to your mixing board and you use the mixing board workflow and what I think a lot of people underestimate is how efficient a mixing board workflow actually is like if I'm only using the Virtual Console workflow I can go from this sound [Music] all the way to this sound [Music] in under 10 minutes and if you want to see the full process that video will be available for members so make sure to join the channel using the join button down below and the side effects will be that you're helping me to stay independent which this review also is by the way now at this current moment SSL only supports their Channel strip plugins and the bush compressor the other plugins from SSL do not work on the controllers but like literally they are not even mapped to the rotaries on the uf8 while this from my perspective would be easily possible like you can basically control all the features of the channel strip from the uf8 already so why not integrate other plugins in there as well I think it's something that will be coming in the future though because SSL does do a lot of very good software updates on this software and on these controllers now plugins from other brands definitely do not work with the 360 workflow unfortunately now another thing to note is that traditional protocols like MCU and UE do work on the uf8 and it of course the depends on your Dow if it will work correctly in Reaper it kind of works using the CSI extension but yeah I didn't really like it however that's not ssl's fault that's literally a protocol integration faults most of all on the reaper side right now I do think that the Virtual Console workflow is pretty much the best way to go and if you're looking for good controllers I think that the SSL ones are your like highest end option they're really well built and within the Virtual Console workflow everything works well pretty much flawlessly now I want to add one more thing to this video because I can fully understand why SSL has taken the route of developing their own software and workflow but it's not really something that I as an end user would like to see yes this works really well but as soon as it needs to be combined with other brands the workflow basically breaks and this is an ecosystem thing if you stay within the ecosystem it works great but if you combine it with other brands which let's be honest it happens things will start to get a lot more difficult and imagine the future now where every brand will start to create their own ecosystem both out of Marketing reasons but also out of necessity because they want to do things that are not possible within our Open Standards that is going to be a big mess and I really hope that there will be Open Standards coming soon and that adoption and integration will also happen across a wide variety of those I really hope that because if this is the route that the industry is going it's not going to be better for the end user for the engineers for us I don't know what I can do about that if you know something please leave a comment down below now the big question of course which I also asked in a live stream where I did the first look with these controllers is am I going to keep them because I really like being able to control my dog with something else than a mouse and a keyboard and unfortunately I'm not going to keep them and that's basically because of two reasons first of all they are pretty big and if I'm going to put them somewhere in my desk it basically takes up too much space and I cannot have my analog equipment in there anymore and I'm still leaning very heavily on analog equipment for my workflow and that's also the second reason why I'm not going to keep them because if I want to integrate them with my analog workflow I've tried I've really tried but I can't really combine this with my analog workflow so yeah it would either be going 100 in the books with this which would be great or using my traditional workflow with analog gear and just a few plugins so yeah that will be the reason why I'm sending it back but that doesn't mean that these aren't good controllers like really if you have a chance to check them out really do and I'll link to my Affiliates down below if you're thinking of buying them use my affiliate link it will be highly appreciated if you do now as said this review is 100 independent SSL did loan me these controller so that I could check them out for all of you but they have no saying in this video or my opinion or whatsoever and if you appreciate that make sure to support Channel by for instance becoming a member the join button is down below and as a member you get early access to content and some exclusive content for instance the one in which I'm mixing drums on this setup I'll link that video over here and if you just want to watch more videos which also supports the channel I'll link an Instagram video over here thanks a lot for watching keep pushing and bye bye

Channel: White Sea Studio

Views: 134,079

Keywords: studio, audio engineering, mixing, mastering, recording, music production, white sea studio, wytse gerichhausen

Id: Q-Xom5-JQP4

Length: 7min 29sec (449 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2023