Hertfordshire, UK (July 12, 2022)—When UK-based award-winning composer Michael Price and his family moved out of London in 2021, he set up a studio in a study centered around a Solid State Logic UC1 plug-in controller and UF8 advanced DAW controller.
Price, who won an Emmy award in 2014 plus a BAFTA nomination and two further Emmy nominations for the BBC’s Sherlock series, had tried any number of physical and touch screen controllers over the years, he says. “I have found these two control surfaces to be the most tactile and the most encouraging of a flow state of anything that I’ve used,” he reports.
According to Price, a graduate of the Tonmeister course at the University of Surrey, the key is the integration between the UC1 and SSL’s 360 software. “Those two things are the big difference,” he says, providing functionality beyond his DAW that has more in common with the mixing consoles on which he has worked for decades.
Game Sound and Music Producer Talks Tools of the Trade
“I instantiate a Channel Strip 2 plug-in across everything; that’s built into my DAW templates,” he elaborates. “I’m using the 360 software then as a mode switch, moving from composing to mixing by tabbing onto the 360 screen. I’m not looking at the waveforms anymore. I’ve got the UC1 to hand, where it’s a very tactile, immediate, ‘golden strip’ approach to having the things that I’m focusing on on-screen. I haven’t seen anything that elegantly contains as much information on the screen as the 360 plug-in mixer. And you have that overview and a sense of implicit geography that connects you back to that flow state that I’m always looking for.”
Price hadn’t planned on setting up a music and recording room at the new location, he admits, having long preferred keeping work and family separate, as he had in London, where he still maintains a 600-square-foot production facility. But his planned sabbatical was interrupted when the deadlines for a couple of TV scoring projects, including the fifth season of ITV’s BAFTA-winning crime drama Unforgotten, began to approach.
“The net result was that I’ve set up in the study at home,” he says. He adds, “My template is built for Unforgotten, which is filming now, so the SSL controllers are in place to do that.”
