SSL 360 Link: Insanely simple plugin control

so last week I got an email that SSL announced their new 360 software now the software allows you to control almost any plugin using their uc1 control surface if you've been watching my videos for a long time and really paying attention you would notice that above the Shadow Hills and the curve Bender rack over here behind me is a SSL uc1 and a uf8 now I got these because in the studio I just got so used to using my hands to control EQ and compression and obviously the faders and so it was really nice to be able to just have a unit ready to go that I could control some of the eqs and the compressors and stuff like that the limitation that I found of course whenever I bought it was that it only controlled SSL plugins I love SSL plugins I'm obviously a huge fan of SSL I mean I'm sitting at a 96 Channel SSL Duality fuse but I love using other plugins too there's so many other good companies out there and I still haven't found a way to get by with just using one brand of plugins so a month or two ago whenever I was at N I saw that they announced that they were going to come out with this new 360 where you could use this uc1 to control everything and then it finally came out and I got really excited about it and so I took my uc1 and put it on top of the console and and started kind of playing around with it and seeing how well it worked how easy it was to use and in this video today I really just want to show you how cool it is and how simple it is and the freedom that it gives you uh in controlling your plugins and and ultimately controlling your mixes now SSL did not pay me anything to say any of this they they're not they're not giving me any kind of compensation or or any free stuff for making this video this is just completely out of my own interest and I just thought it would be really fun to share with you and again if you've been watching for a while you know the sponsorship of these videos is quiz tones quiz tones is my number one favorite app for learning how to listen for frequencies in music and vocals and drums it's a really easy to use app and if you're interested at developing your skills and getting better at mixing and understanding frequencies just click the link down in the description and grab it it's free so why not all right so in Protools right now I have just a simple session that I that I grabbed just to kind of play around with you can see on the big screen here I also have the SSL 360 software this just kind of gives you like a console view of everything that's going on I'm not really in this very much it's just kind of cool to At a Glance be able to see everything and if I needed to I don't know adjust something but I still am primarily inside of Pro Tools so let's just listen to this mix that we have going on here uh it's just a rough mix just just trying to get everything to sound kind of decent for you uh let's play it see what we [Music] got the moon breaks day a whiskey and a smoke for me sweet so in this session I've got just my my drums here we've got uh bass here guitars uh saxophone some background vocals the lead vocal and then I went ahead and oh let's hide this I went ahead and uh added just some effects here that are all kind of just ready to go this send looks kind of crazy but I was trying to sort of make this feel like I was on the console and so I just went ahead and added all these sends almost like I had gear and these are being sent over here to this uh these effects let's go ahead and go to this kick so basically on the UC one here it's very very simple whenever you're again talking about the SSL plugins as soon as you click on a plugin your uc1 pops up and it says kick out which is the plugin that we have selected SED and then anything that you grab just like this gain here uh is working directly on the controller and then you have these little lights which are kind of cool that sort of tell you what's going on along with a readout that tells you what the DB is same thing goes for the compressor over here and the gate you can also turn stuff off and on which is nice you can switch to the E Series instead of the G Series works really well and then this Center section right here this is the mix bus compressor so just for fun I tried to set up a mix bus that was kind of similar to what I have in the studio and what I came up with is I've got the bus compressor to that's kind of taking the place of my Shadow Hills compressor then I've got the Vintage Drive that I use on the SSL on the fusion section of the console I kind of just match the settings to see if it was similar and then we've got the uh Violet EQ now I'm going to show you this in a second but the Violet EQ isn't automatically mapped to the uc1 but through this update and this software release I was able to map this straight from Protools to this uc1 and you can see on this is it shows that this is the SSL Fusion Violet EQ it's the main output and I custom mapped the knobs to the correct knobs here and then we've got my my uh trusty G here that's just doing a tiny bit of taming um on the output what I really want to show you is how easy it is to map controls to this UC one from a plugin so we're going to go to the drums here I'm going to solo the drums and the drums sound like kind of decent but I want them to be bigger and Fuller and kind of match the intensity of the rest of the track so let's just hear what these sound like real quick [Music] so you can hear a little bit of guitar in there one thing to note on this session is this is a live session so these guys were all in the same room there's tons of bleed everywhere uh that's just how it was recorded I have all the drums going to my drums Ox which is right here and then I also have all the drums going to this drums Crush so what I want to do is I'm going to mute this drums ax we're going to bring up my drum Crush which is just at this point the same exact thing as this [Music] Ox now what I want to do is basically compress the crap out of this drums crush and make it super dramatic and then I'm going to blend it back in with the drums Ox to get a really nice blend to just give it a little bit more punch normally what I would do is I would go to my compressors and I would pick some sort of uh compressor but today we are going to go to this SSL 360 link this is the plugin that basically allows you to link anything that you want straight onto your uc1 I can already see right now on my uc1 it says drums crush and 29 and that basically is confirming right here drums Crush oops drums Crush 29 that's just telling you that the uc1 sees this 360 plugin now in order to load a plugin there's this whole kind of startup process where you have to scan all of your plugins and get them all to work with 360 and it kind of tells you the ones that work and don't work and you can go through and create favorites and all that kind of thing for this example we're going to use the uh dbx 160 compressor so I'm going to go to click to load here go to dbx 160 stereo all all right so we have our plugin here now basically what this does is every time we click to click the 360 plugin to bring up the the actual plugin it's going to bring up these both these windows so it'll bring up the 360 link plugin and then the associated um actual waves Plugin or whatever plugin that you have uh set up it is so simple to set up these plugins and create custom maps for them it's wild so all I have to do is I basically just have to select any one of these controls and you can see that it's selecting on this side here as well any of this stuff so I'm going to select threshold and then I just touch whatever knob or switch that I want to control that with so I'm going to go to the compressor here just to make it simple because this is a compressor and we're going to have threshold here so I'm going to move threshold and now you can see threshold left SL mono is is actually this threshold so now I have full control and I can swing this around and do whatever I want which is really cool now it looks like we have a ratio right here so I'm going to select this ratio knob and I'm going to move the ratio on this plug-in and now we can control full ratio so now all of a sudden I've got control of of this plugin anytime that I want to control this let's just say that I'm in a totally different plugin we'll open up this SSL Channel strip which will reset our uc1 to snare top now I'm going to load my 360 and boom we're ready to go we've got it open all right so let's just uh let's play with this let's see what this sounds like [Music] [Music] awesome that sounds fine let's go ahead just for fun I'm going to I'm going to add a well actually let's just add another 360 plugin cuz I want to do some eqing a little bit so we're going to add another 360 plugin I'm going to load these are some of my favorites here I'm going to load the Shep 73 oops oops oh I hit mono stereo all right so this plugin it looks like I have not mapped which is perfect so this is of course an EQ plugin now I'm going to go ahead and create my own custom map for it so I'm going to hit this High Gain this is what the high gain and I'm going to do the High Gain here set that to zero I'm going to do mid gain and since we only have three bands I'm going to keep it uh on the lower one right here so we're going to do mid gain perfect set that back to zero then we're going to do frequencies here which is going to be this guy yep so now I've got full frequency control we're going to go to low gain yep and then we're going to go to oh there's oh yeah frequencies frequencies perfect awesome now I do have this High Pass f fil which is pretty cool and I do have a high pass filter knob so I'm going to go ahead and select that and assign that um it looks like I have a button to turn it on and off since my highend I don't necessarily need to switch that to a bell because it's always a shelf I'm just going to use this button as my as my uh onof perfect and see it lights up it it's smart it lights up and tells you like oh you've got your highpass filter on and it's off and it's on and it's off which is pretty sweet pretty sweet so now this plugin's completely mapped and we're we're done I did everything right yep because there's no Q there's nothing like that so sweet now let's just make this sound different and more [Music] fun [Music] awesome and that's it that's like that's literally it that's how you map plugins and you're already ready to go and the cool part about this let's just say I want that same plugin the same the Shep 73 on my drums like my main ax so I'll go ahead and just do the same thing SSL 360 link and then we're going to go ahead and load our Shep 73 and now it's already linked so it saves my last link and what I did and it's just ready to go so now we we actually have control over the entire drum bus um which is pretty freaking cool so let's turn off this mute I'm going to bring down our drum crush and let's just try to make this a little bigger [Music] here [Music] so it just made it bigger made it Fuller made it match the ENT intensity of the Bas and also that that saxophone player one more example just to show you how how awesome this can be is we're going to solo this guitar two [Music] here I'm using the uh SSL Channel strip 2 uh let's let's for fun we'll just turn this off and on using the uc1 so you can hear what it sounds like [Music] so it's very subtle the only the only thing I'm really doing is adding just a little bit of 2.4k cutting out a tiny bit of 550 htz and then adding some 96 Hertz in there just to give it a little bit more beef for fun let's uh bypass this plugin and we're going to go ahead and load that SSL 360 and map out one one more thing SSL 360 we're going to load the virtual mix rack by Steven slate see if it's going to work I haven't used this stuff in a long time so maybe hopefully it works all right so let's just say I had a I wanted to make a preset here so we have the typical this kind of looks like how the SSL looks so that's going to be really easy to map out and I also want to add let's do some kind of a compressor just just as an example I love this fg16 a lot it's one of my favorite compressors that slate has let's just add the Vintage one in here so we're just going to stick it in its slot so now we're going to go ahead and just just map these which oh man actually so funny story I didn't even know this while recording this but it looks like the virtual mix rack stuff already is mapped and it's ready to go I could be wrong let's see if I see comp ratio okay it looks like that's mapping something different what about my gain okay so gain does work it's looking at it's probably looking at that default compressor that that came in I'm learning as as we're going here trying to figure this out we're going to hit settings here h i see clear this link clear this link and clear this link we're learning so you clear the links if you want to change them and then you can select it looks like not all plugins are supported maybe that's what it is so it looks like this plugin isn't supported so maybe we need to load this one so I'm going to clear my links here threshold okay interesting so certain plugins aren't uh controllable I'm sure that's going to come with an update but we have our VCA compressor this is also a really good compressor so now I have full control we'll hit my ratio I can control my ratio now and then oh release and I've got a release so that's cool release and then attack um which I could change to really any of this stuff but we're just going to keep that what it is just for now and I'm going to make I'm going to clear this link and I'm going to make this be this so cool so I just made the power to turn this compressor off and on the actual in button on the compressor sweet so let's uh let's just hear how this sounds get a get a sound and kind of compare [Music] it [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] let's see the difference here so this is the Slate EQ and [Music] [Laughter] [Music] compressor now [Music] SSL sounds pretty good sounds kind of awesome I wish I had the like a little SSL compressor to kind of compare that too cuz I like actually like the compression compression of the Slate stuff but I do definitely still like the EQ on the SSL better that may just be me being a fan of SSL every time I see SSL I think it's better I don't know what do you think as you can see there's a lot of power in this uc1 controller it's kind of ridiculous like just to be able to have a quick control of what's going on in your mix and to use your hand hands to be able to manipulate your plugins another plugin I use all the time is the Fab filter stuff so I made a preset that's got a few bands and has a highpass filter here and it's automatically mapped to my fab filter plugin which is really nice because I I typically use this to kind of clean up like really sharp frequencies and stuff like that and to be able to just open up the plugin and and have immediate control over these bands you can kind of see how it could be so much faster than sitting here and like really trying to get it with the mouse you know clicking your way through it it's really really handy so this last week we had a student from a nearby college that came in to check out the studio and to ask questions and kind of have like like a good hour just just to get familiar with how a studio operates and what we do here and one of the things that he told me that kind of blew my mind and made me remember sort of how I felt whenever I was going to school for audio is that this this analog console is very intimidating and seems much more complicated than the digital console we have in the other room now for me that's not really true the digital console is kind of like a computer and you're in the computer which is which is so much more complicated if you really think about it the analog console is really simple you want an EQ you just turn it on and you start to move knobs like you want a compressor you turn it on you start to move knobs you want a Reverb you just turn on your effect send and turn it up and you have a Reverb that comes out and we had this conversation about how this this gentleman is so used to seeing the EQ seeing Fab filter and these bands and how they're shaped and making sure that the shape is right and the Cut Is Right compared to the the kind of the frequency response that you're visually seeing within the plugin and I totally remember being in that camp and and relying so much on what I'm seeing visually and the best advice I ever got was to close your eyes and EQ so if you're trying to find a frequency that's not working you do this and grab the frequency guy and close your eyes and sweep around and listen to to what you're doing and what you're what you're moving without visually seeing it and it just is a really good practice to get your your ears out of your eyes if that makes any sense like the whole point of music is to listen to it and know if it's right or make a judgment call if it's wrong and if you're constantly just looking at everything the way you make decisions is is just so much different and what I love about this uc1 is it gives you practice not only to close your eyes but you could just pull up the plugin not even have to look and be messing with knobs and and something that's tan ible and something that's moving and I think finding yourself in a workflow that suits you where you're moving through a session physically using your hands to manipulate your audio that you're working on can be a really powerful experience that can progress your skills further than you even realize and that's why I am a huge fan of this uc1 and I want to do some more mix videos for you to using this stuff to kind of just see how easy it is to implement into your own sessions so that's the video today if you've been wondering this whole time I've been using the Telefunken u47 for this this video mainly cuz I thought it would just be fun to use it and it is going through a DW Fern vt2 preamp so it's kind of tube on tube hopefully it sounds good I haven't even listened to it to be honest thank you so much for watching this video I hope you found it helpful I hope you found it a little bit different than all the uc1 stuff that's out there and don't forget if you are are curious about learning those frequencies definitely check out quiz tones if you want to learn audio you got to get quiz tones it's it's like the secret sauce to progressing your skills more than you thought you could which is which is awesome thanks so much for watching I will catch you guys on the next one [Music] [Music] peace [Music]

Channel: Josh West Mix

Views: 1,665

Keywords: analog console, analog mix, analog summing, analog vs digital, digital vs analog, mixing analog, outboard gear, professional mix, SSL360, UC1ControlSurface, MixingSoftware, AudioPlugins, StudioGear, HandsOnMixing, SSL, MusicProduction, AudioEngineering, QuizTones, josh west mix, joshwestmix, recording studio, uc1, solidstatelogic, solid state logic

Id: igvpPO-4fd0

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024