Five years after moving into his van, the remote mix engineer has built a mobile rig around two SSL controllers.
Mixing a record usually means working in a studio with four treated walls, a roof and a decent-sized setup. For Josh West, it often means a laptop and two SSL controllers on a folding table, powered from a lithium battery in his van, somewhere in the mountains. The remote mix engineer works with clients worldwide, and for the past few years he’s combined van life with the day job, taking his SSL UF8 DAW controller and UC1 plug-in controller on the road between rock climbs and hikes with his partner and their dogs.
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West moved into his van about a year into the pandemic, parking outside Mansion Studios in Missouri, while he helped build out its SSL Duality Fuse and System T rooms. A planned drive to Alaska changed course when he and his partner reached Montana. “I had never been to Montana before, and we just fell in love with it,” he says. Stopping there was the opportune time to try mixing on the road.
Coming from that 96-fader Duality Fuse, West missed having everything in front of him, so he relied on the SSL UF8’s quick keys to bring groups of tracks under the faders on demand. “I have a bunch of quick keys at the top of the UF8 that show/hide markers for drums, bass, guitars, keys, vocals, background vocals and effects,” he says, which lets him pull up a specific set of sources in a moment.
The UC1 keeps his SSL plugins ready without touching the screen. “If I’m doing a normal EQ, I use SSL’s Channel Strip 2. That’s always set up and ready to go with the UC1. I’ll use SSL’s 4K G or 4K B plug-in if I need drive or grit.” His master bus mirrors the one he built at Mansion. “The Bus Compressor 2 is always on my master bus, then the Violet EQ – I just add a little bit of 90 Hz and a little bit of 12 kHz, about a dB and a half – and then the last step is the Vintage Drive from the Fusion.”
Rather than watch the screen, West reads the UC1’s mechanical meter to gauge his master bus compression. “I’m not even looking at my master fader; I’m looking at that meter to make sure I’m not pushing too hard or not enough.”
With the static mix done, the last of his quick keys bring eight VCA groups to the UF8’s faders, and that’s where most of the moves happen. “I do the automation of the whole track just with those. That’s 90% of the automation that I do … just feeling those group faders and trying to make the song come a little bit more alive.”
Off the desk, West runs a YouTube channel and a mentoring community called Mix & Momentum. The long-term plan is a small studio where he can invite members out to record and mix.
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