Yeah I think that’s a really good point. For those of us who started out on analog consoles controls are intuitive and useful… up to a point. Certainly a lot of knobs and buttons go unused for a lot of mix engineers, I’m sure. I for one use mainly faders, mute and solo on my s1. Banking as well at times. Plugin control? No. Too slow.
It also comes back to how we work our DAWs, which is your point I guess. One thing that I’ve definitely found makes a difference is watching some people automate parameters while stopped, or rather they draw things in. I too do that at times, but I think it seems far more common in music, particularly EDM. The alternative way of going about it is a more “musical” way of automating by playing back a song or movie and riding faders as you go. It leads to a different feel and obviously a different workflow. In some cases that also works better with knob control for some plugins.
One way of testing your thinking before you put a lot of money down - create a mix with just the features of an older analog console. Do the mix with just a channel strip and bus compressor, maybe allow yourself 2-3 critical ‘outboard’ processors and route them that way, and 4 aux buses. No other toys. I think you quickly find that this rather basic in terms what we’re used to. But not a bad exercise.
You could use the SSL 360 plugin mixer for the experiment. If you have a decent size monitor, you can literally setup a 48 track traditional console, and after you configure the busing, keep your DAW window closed, just use this to screen to mix.
The two features they’re still missing in the plugin mixer is automation and sends.
You’ll have a high quality channel strip, bus compressor, meters. Setup your ‘outboard’ gear on separate aux buses you can route to.
Of course you could also that in Nuendo in the mixer window. Make use of the channel strip there, but don’t open any plugins, don’t use the edit window, don’t do anything that didn’t used to exist in the old hardware.
You’ll walk away from the exercise not missing the hardware version that much, and just get back to some smaller controller for tactile input on automation and maybe a StreamDeck XL for some shortcuts.
Can anyone who’s already using the SSL UF-1 please confirm that the controller does not follow Nuendo’s track selection on the screen? SSL FAQ states this explicitly, but I heard rumours that this got solved recently …?
Thanks, I do understand that. But without the SSL plug-in on each track, it’s like the FAQ says: The selection on the screen is not reflected by the track displayed on the controller, right?
If I click in the UI on a track that has CS2 on it, then UC1 will switch to track and it displays the new track name on the UC1 controller. Of course if you click on a track that doesn’t have CS2 I suspect (I didn’t test specifically) that UC1 will remain on the most recently selected track. Thus as such the UC1 display cannot be relied upon knowing which track is selected. But given that Nuendo allows multiple tracks to be selected, such logic is limited anyway.
The UF8 does follow screen selection in that clicking on a track in Nuendo will illuminate the ‘sel’ button on the appropriate UF8 track. What it does not do is scroll the UF8 channels to bring that track into view if it’s not already visible on the surface, if that makes sense.
