Having latterly taken a hybrid approach to music production, Ben Hillier prefers to have his hands on faders when he works – as he did in the late 1990s and early 2000s in studios with large-format SSL 4000 E/G Series desks. ‘If you’ve come from large-format mixing as I have, you don’t realise how much you miss them,’ he says. ‘They were so fast and intuitive.’

Hillier’s 30-year career includes projects with Depeche Mode, Blur, Elbow, Doves, Nadine Shah among many others. He had tried various controllers in the past, but found them lacking. ‘It’s a fundamental thing – it’s quite nice to turn one channel up while you’re turning another one down,’ he says. ‘And riding a balance on a few things is very handy, I find.’

He used to be based at The Pool, a studio that he opened in southeast London in 2006 that became so successful commercially that he had to move out and find another mix room for himself. He moved to the Brighton area, on England’s south coast, where he established Agricultural Audio Studio. ‘It’s on a working farm, literally in the middle of a field, two miles from the nearest cappuccino. It started off as my mix room, then a friend – producer Ben Hanson – and I built two control rooms out of straw bales, which is the best material to build studios out of. I’ve never worked in a room that’s got such a true sound. When another unit became available, we also built a live room.’

Recently, an eight-fader Solid State Logic UF8 DAW controller has helped Hillier return to the style of working he enjoyed with large-format mixing desks. ‘The more I use it, the more I learn about it and the less I have to think about it,’ he says. ‘It’s become part of the studio furniture, and that’s what you want – you switch it on, and it works.

‘It’s also good for fundamental, simple things,’ he continues. ‘You can program the buttons across the top to be control keys – play, stop and so on. That sounds like a really basic thing, but if you’ve got a plug-in window open and you want to just stop, start and go back to where you were, then you can do that without having to shut the plug-in window. You think that’s not going to make that much difference, but it really does.’

Hillier – a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and an artist in his own right – was a very early adopter of Pro Tools but has been using Reaper for about 15 years. ‘It’s a fantastic piece of software,’ he says. ‘I started using it because I was getting more and more fed up with latency issues on Pro Tools. If I’m writing, I also use Ableton, because it’s fast and it’s more fun. It almost feels like it’s got some sort of input, like working with someone. The UF8 works fine with that as well. We sometimes use Reaper and Ableton together and the control surface will follow between the two different DAWs. It’s especially handy if you’re working on one DAW and you want to have the faders controlling the other DAW.’

Agricultural Audio is also the name of Hillier’s independent record label, which launched in early 2023 in partnership with music distributor The Orchard.

‘I’ve got my own project on the label, which is called Storm Franklin, with Juanita Stein – I bought the UF8 to help me mix that,’ he says. ‘We’ve just released the new Nadine Shah album, Filthy Underneath, and I used it on all of that as well. I’ve also been mixing a guy called Sam Akpro, a new artist who is doing quite well in Britain. I thought people wouldn’t want to trek down to the middle of nowhere and work in the middle of a field, but they absolutely love it. Loads of bands come down and work with us, so it’s a busy studio.’

Now that he has been using the UF8 for a while, he says: ‘It would be great to have the space to have a bunch of them, but the way that many studios are now, you don’t tend to have that much room. But I think I may get another one, because I’m going to need to set up my home studio again. I think it would work even better with my laptop. It basically gives you more real estate and can see more and access more. It slots into the middle of the digital/analogue setup nicely and works really well.

‘I’ve had contact with SSL throughout my whole career, so I’m quite happy to be using it again,’ he adds. ‘It’s always nice to have a bit of SSL gear around.’

More: www.solidstatelogic.com