Solid State Logic complete their controller circle with a clever way of integrating third‑party plug‑ins into the 360 system.
With the launch of the UF1 in mid‑2023, Solid State Logic completed the hardware dimension of their popular controller range. The range comprises three complementary units: the UF8 fader surface, the UC1 plug‑in controller, and the aforementioned UF1, which combines a single fader with comprehensive metering, transport controls, assignable buttons and more. When the UF1 was reviewed in the July 2023 issue of SOS, the software ecosystem that is designed to support this triumvirate was already very sophisticated, but one killer feature remained to be implemented. That feature is particularly pertinent to the UC1, and so its implementation seems a good time to review what is perhaps the most interesting of the three controllers.
U And Me
If you’re new to SSL’s controller range, I’d recommend reading the Sound On Sound reviews of the UF8 and especially the UF1 for background, as the entire system is pretty deep. In a nutshell, it combines old‑fashioned MIDI‑based DAW control using the HUI or MCU protocols with an additional proprietary technology called SSL 360. This has been developed over the years, to the point where SSL plug‑ins can now be used to assemble a sort of ‘shadow’ virtual mixer that makes redundant a lot of your DAW’s mixer functionality in order to offer better hardware integration.
The broad idea behind this SSL Plug‑in Mixer is not dissimilar to Softube’s Console 1, but there are also many differences. Console 1 workflow is designed to keep you within the DAW environment: touching or turning an EQ or compressor knob causes the Console 1 control window to appear as a temporary overlay on top of your DAW, which disappears again once you’ve finished making changes. There is only a single Console 1 plug‑in, although it’s possible to load different styles of EQ and dynamics into it.
By contrast, the SSL controllers and especially UC1 are designed to work with multiple plug‑ins, and there’s no equivalent of the Console 1 ‘heads‑up display’ overlay. Instead, a button labelled 360 can be used to tab from your DAW interface to the separate SSL 360 application, which displays all the relevant plug‑in parameters across all channels as a virtual SSL‑style mixer. Reflecting the design heritage of SSL consoles, the UC1 is actually intended to work with two types of plug‑in at once. The controls at either side are intended to handle a typical mixer channel strip with filters, multiple EQ bands, compressor and expander/gate, while the central section is tailored to work with an SSL‑style bus compressor. It even features a genuine moving‑coil gain‑reduction meter.
At launch, both segments of the UC1 were limited to controlling SSL’s own channel strip and compressor plug‑ins. However, the major development I alluded to earlier on is apparent in the introduction of two new plug‑ins called SSL 360 Link and SSL 360 Link Bus Compressor. These are both host or shell plug‑ins that permit third‑party VST3 plug‑ins to be loaded and manipulated from SSL’s hardware controllers. So, in principle, the UC1 can be used to work with any EQ or dynamics plug‑in that has a VST3 version.
Proper Channels
All of SSL’s recent hardware launches have been highly impressive in the look and feel department, and the UC1 is no exception. Without the UF8’s moving faders and the UF1’s large metering panel, it’s perhaps the most understated of the three, but build quality feels equally good, and of course it’s designed to fit neatly alongside a UF1 and one or more UF8s, with the same optional feet to tilt it. Connection to your computer is made over USB, and the UC1 requires an external power supply.
The channel strip and bus compressor sections map perfectly onto SSL’s own plug‑ins, as you’d expect. Buying a UC1 gets you a licence for both the Channel Strip 2 plug‑in, which is derived from SSL’s XL 9000K mixer, and the 4K B channel strip based on the classic B‑series design, giving you effectively the same feature set in ultra‑clean and more characterful guises. You also get SSL’s Bus Compressor 2 plug‑in, an emulation of the renowned G‑series bus compressor with enhancements such as wet/dry mixing for parallel compression and a variable side‑chain high‑pass filter, both of which have dedicated controls on the UC1.
As with the Console 1, the basic idea is that you build what is in effect an alternative virtual console by inserting one or more supported plug‑ins on every channel in your DAW. Unlike the Console 1, though, the SSL system encourages you to view this console on screen as a virtual mixer. Pressing the 360 button brings up the SSL Plug‑in Mixer, displaying all of your instantiated channel strips and bus compressors in a row, along with faders, solo and mute buttons. The controller, of course, can only address one channel strip and one bus compressor at a time, and you can choose which ones are ‘in focus’ either by selecting them on screen or by using a pair of rotary dials to scroll through. Depending on which DAW you work in, it may also be possible to have Plug‑in Mixer channel selection follow DAW mixer channel selection. And, of course, you can use the mouse to adjust controls on other channels than the ‘focus’ one.
The rotaries that are used to change focus are located in front of the bus compressor section of the UC1. Also present there is a small but clear colour display, plus a handful of buttons. Pressing these buttons allows the rotaries to be temporarily repurposed to step through plug‑in presets or channel‑strip routing configurations, but it’s also possible to use these buttons as transport controls. In order to do so, you’ll need to add the UC1 as an MCU or HUI controller in your DAW.
Whan Is A DAW Not Adored?
Both Softube and SSL have attempted to create parallel mixing architectures that essentially bypass much of your DAW’s mixing functionality, but in both cases, a certain amount of DAW integration and support is necessary to deliver a rewarding user experience. For example, it’s highly desirable to have the order of channel strips in the Plug‑in Mixer mirror the track order in your DAW. In Reaper, Luna, DP, Bitwig, Live, Studio One, Logic Pro and Cubase, bi‑directional communication ensures that the two orders always correspond. In Pro Tools, by contrast, the channel strips in Plug‑in Mixer show up in the order in which you added the plug‑ins, and there’s no easy way to change this.
Likewise, in most DAWs, UC1 controls can operate the fader, pan, mute and solo buttons on the DAW mixer channel rather than the same parameters within SSL’s plug‑ins. Where that’s not the case, solo and pan in particular require some clumsy workarounds. The takeaway for both the Console 1 and UC1 is that you’ll get a much smoother experience in most other DAWs than in Logic Pro or Pro Tools; these systems are usable in Apple and Avid environments, but you’ll typically need to do more setup within each DAW session, and return to the DAW more often during use.
Because the SSL channel strip plug‑ins are so well featured, each channel within the Plug‑in Mixer presents an enormous number of controls. These are sensibly grouped into sections labelled (top to bottom) Chan, In, Dyn, Filt, EQ, Trk and Out. These sections can be collapsed globally across the entire mixer, but even so, I struggled to fit just the dynamics and EQ simultaneously on a laptop screen without scrolling. You’d need a huge monitor to make the entire channel strip visible from top to bottom. There is an Auto Scroll option which shunts the channels left or right to automatically display the one that’s being adjusted; it would be nice to have a similar feature that auto‑scrolls up or down to show whichever control is being turned.
However, one of the aims of this sort of system is that you should be able to mix without looking at the screen for most of the time. From this point of view, I missed the navigation system that the Console 1 provides, whereby you can select the focus channel using a row of buttons, but in other respects the UC1 is very well thought‑out. Everything works very slickly with SSL’s own plug‑ins, and if you’re happy to mix on a virtual 4000 or 9000 console, the UC1 lets you do nearly everything you need without having to constantly return to your DAW or pick up the mouse. In that respect, it succeeds on similar terms to the Console 1, despite the differences in implementation. The UC1 does lack some hardware features compared with the most recent Console 1 Mk3, perhaps most notably the touch‑sensitive controls and the large screen — but there’s also a fairly large price differential in SSL’s favour. (Meanwhile, if you’re looking for something even more affordable, Rocksolid’s Micro4k would be worth investigating.)
Liquid States
Where the UC1 parts company with Softube’s creation is when you want to mix on something that’s not a virtual SSL console. Softube have met this desire by extending what’s possible in the Console 1 plug‑in itself. There are now quite a few extensions available, which aim to package the sound of mixers from the likes of API and Neve within the Console 1 control scheme and layout. Softube have also worked with Universal Audio to bring some of their Powered Plug‑ins into the Console 1 universe. But, at the end of the day, the Console 1 remains a proprietary system, and it’s Softube themselves who decide what it can and can’t work with.
SSL have taken a radically different and more ambitious approach with the 360 Link and 360 Bus Compressor Link plug‑ins. These are designed to act as bridges that can integrate third‑party plug‑ins into the Plug‑in Mixer and thus place them under UC1 control. Both are available in all major native formats, meaning that they can be instantiated in any DAW, but the plug‑ins they integrate must be in VST3 format.
When you first open one of the Link plug‑ins, you’ll be greeted by a greyed‑out graphical representation of the relevant UC1 control layout, and a bold blue drop‑down labelled Click To Load. Initially, however, clicking this does nothing. In order to make it all work, you’ll need to click the Configure Link button, which opens up a side panel with two tabs labelled Mapping and Plug‑ins. At the bottom of the latter you’ll find a button labelled Scan Plug‑ins. Selecting this will trigger the Link plug‑in to start a survey of all the plug‑ins within all of the folders designated in the VST3 Folders list. Most DAWs operate a similar scanning process on start‑up, but I have to say that the SSL Link one is painfully slow. If, as many of us do, you have hundreds of plug‑ins in your VST3 folder, it can literally take hours. Given that you’re only likely to use the UC1 with equaliser and dynamics plug‑ins, it might make sense to hive the rest off into a different VST3 folder, assuming your DAW permits this.
Forging Links
Once the scanning process is complete, you’ll see all the available plug‑ins listed by manufacturer. You can then select one and switch to the Mapping tab. The plug‑in GUI will appear in a separate window, and the Mapping tab will display all of the assignable parameters that the plug‑in presents to hosts. You can then create a custom mapping simply by selecting each parameter in the list and clicking on the control you want to assign it to. Where a plug‑in exposes metering data, you can also assign that in a similar way, although relatively few plug‑ins seem to do this.
Needless to say, the success of this operation is dependent on the third‑party plug‑in that you’re working with. With many simple EQs and compressors, it’s pretty obvious what should be assigned to what, and if you run out of hardware controls or plug‑in parameters to assign, that doesn’t usually impact the usefulness of it too much. However, many compressor plug‑ins don’t seem to expose their gain‑reduction meter data in a way that’s accessible to the UC1, so that lovely VU doesn’t always do anything. And in some cases, you may need to create or adjust a preset within the plug‑in in order for the control scheme to make sense. For example, the default preset in FabFilter’s Pro‑Q contains no EQ bands, so in order to get it to work with 360 Link, you’ll need to create some bands and save that setting as a new default. You can occasionally run into unexpected issues, too; for instance, UA’s API Vision Channel Strip has on/off buttons for the various different modules, but passes the wrong labels for these to 360 Link. In such cases a right‑click menu lets you re‑label things. I did occasionally wish I could assign a single hardware control to more than one plug‑in parameter, but this is not possible. Conversely, there’s nothing to prevent you assigning hardware buttons to continuous plug‑in parameters, and vice versa, although they understandably don’t work.
The SSL Plug‑in Mixer, with a mixture of SSL channel strip plug‑ins and 360 Link‑hosted ones. Note how the visible control set changes depending on which EQ parameters are mapped. Note also that although the UAD dbx 160 plug‑in works perfectly well in one of the bus compressor slots via 360 Link Bus Compressor, it does not drive the VU meter.
I can’t claim to have tried 360 Link with every plug‑in in my folder, but a representative sample would suggest that it can nearly always be made to work effectively, and there are lots of nice touches to SSL’s implementation. For example, on a simple EQ plug‑in such as UA’s Mäag EQ4 with many fewer controls than are available on the UC1, the plug‑in interface will only show the controls that are actually used, and they will inherit the correct names from the Mapping list. Better still, this is carried through into the SSL Plug‑in Mixer as well, although sadly not to the parameters presented to the DAW for automation. The plug‑ins ship with mappings for SSL‑style plug‑ins from the likes of Waves and UA, and mappings can be shared online, so I’m sure it won’t be long before you can use most of your equalisers and compressors without having to map them manually — but if you do, it really is a very painless process.
What SSL’s engineers have achieved here is truly impressive, both on a conceptual level and in terms of implementation.
A Picture Emerges
Observing the development of the SSL 360 system over the years has been like watching a tall building go up. You can watch as the major elements click into place and the lights go on, but nothing really prepares you for that moment when the scaffolding comes down and the architect’s full vision is revealed in all its glory. That moment has arrived with the availability of 360 Link, and mighty powerful it is too. What SSL’s engineers have achieved here is truly impressive, both on a conceptual level and in terms of implementation.
I really only have one query about SSL’s general vision, which is to wonder whether the binary division between channel strips and bus compressors is necessary. Although I love the fact that the UC1 allows me to adjust multiple channel strip parameters at once, in a way that’s not possible with the mouse, I’m less sure that I need an entirely separate set of controls dedicated to twiddling with bus compression parameters on another channel. I get that it’s not unusual to have bus compressors on subgroups as well as on the master output, and also that the bus compressor plug‑ins are perfectly valid choices on individual tracks. But, for me, compression is typically a set‑and‑forget thing. It’s lovely to have a genuine VU meter to let you keep an eye on gain reduction (at least in plug‑ins that support it), but the bus compressor dimension of the system adds complexity and takes up controller real estate, and some might prefer a simpler solution that just focuses on the channel strip.
This is very much a matter of personal taste, though, and I assume SSL wouldn’t have designed it the way they have without being pretty confident that it chimes with other people’s preferences. Elsewhere, there are minor ways in which things could be improved further, most notably by speeding up the plug‑in scanning process, but all in all, this is a highly successful implementation of a daringly ambitious vision. I have always been sceptical about whether a universal plug‑in controller could ever be made to work well enough to be useful, but provided you restrict the scope of ‘universal’ to EQ and dynamics, the UC1/360 Link combination absolutely does that.
Pros
- With the new 360 Link plug‑ins, the UC1 becomes a highly effective universal plug‑in controller.
- Control over third‑party plug‑ins is straightforward to set up.
- Tight integration with SSL’s own plug‑ins and their 360 Plug‑in Mixer.
- Genuine VU meter to monitor bus compressor gain reduction.
Cons
- Scanning the VST3 plug‑in folder can take a long time.
- The limited integration offered by Pro Tools and Logic means the user experience suffers in those DAWs.
- Not everyone will feel they need hands‑on control over their bus compressor.
Summary
The UC1 and 360 Link represent the culmination of a hugely ambitious project from SSL’s designers, delivering a controller that is both superbly integrated with their own plug‑ins and capable of handling almost any third‑party EQ, compressor or channel strip.
Information
£658.80 including VAT.
Headline Audio +44 (0)1908 477142.
When you purchase via links on our site, SOS may earn an affiliate commission. More info...
When you purchase via links on our site, SOS may earn an affiliate commission. More info...
