With a rollout of brand new plugins already underway and set to continue well into Q1 2022, SSL (Solid State Logic) has been busier than ever on the new products front. Headliner recently caught up with the company’s director of new products, Niall Feldman, about what the market can expect over the coming months, how the home recording boom is shaping the pro audio market and what the future holds for the traditional studio sector.
As most studio product manufacturers will tell you, demand for smaller, home recording products has skyrocketed over the past 20 months or so. Plugins, interfaces, monitors, microphones and everything in between have been the order of the day for so many music creators. Through various lockdowns and the absence of live events, many decided the time was right to invest in some new studio gear, whether upgrading their existing setup or making their first steps into music production.
For a company like SSL, with a reputation built on high-end, aspirational products, this presented an opportunity to broaden their offering and bring a raft of new customers into the fold. Of course, this wasn’t merely a case of rushing a flurry of cheaper products to market, more a matter of re-evaluating its catalogue and determining where they could add value to the market.
Back in May, SSL unveiled its new UC1 plugin controller, a launch that would serve as a precursor to its current programme of plugin releases. In September, the company revealed its new Fusion Vintage Drive and Fusion Stereo Image plugins, followed last month by the release of the Native X-Echo.
But what’s next for SSL as we approach 2022? We caught up with director of new products, Niall Feldman, to find out…
What can you tell us about this rollout of new products?
We have a real focus on new plugin products at the moment. We’ve been pretty active with our studio products in the last few years, but the plugins are something we’ve put more of a focus on over the last nine months. We’ve actually been working on these in the background for a while but not spoken much about them. So, we have a rollout of plugins releases, which we hope to be releasing every month or so until the end of Q1 next year. We’ve had a number of plugin products before, but this is a real body of work; we put a specific product manager in place to look after our plugin activity.
We also have some hardware work in development, which we tend to keep a bit closer to our chest before we release details to the public. With the shipping challenges we face we don’t want to announce anything until we know people will be able to walk into a store and buy it.
How badly have you been affected by those shipping issues?
Not hugely, but it just makes things a little bit less predictable than you’d like them to be. Typically, you get visibility six months out as to when something will be available in reasonable volumes. We’re lucky to be part of the Audiotonix group, so we are able to lever the strength and scale of the group to help on that front. And there is a lot of experience across the group in dealing with these types of challenges.
What can you tell us about the philosophy behind this new range of plugins?
We’ve always sold plugins and we have a number of licensed partners we work with who do plugin developmen. We do an awful lot of software development for some of our digital products that are prevalent in the live space and broadcast space, and there are some very sophisticated processing tools in some of those products. Translating those into useful plugins was something we wanted to do as a result of that effort.
There is also the fact that a lot of people are restricted with regard to the hardware they can get access to. We looked at the plugins we’ve had for a little while and wanted to address some of the areas we were missing, like delays for example. We thought that would round out our plugin offering.
What other areas are you looking specifically to launch plugins into? How did you identify the markets you wanted to target?
We put ourselves in the position of an engineer working in a room using only SSL equipment and thought about any tools or solutions that may be missing. That’s when you realise there are effects we could bring to the party that aren’t available as plugins. In simple terms, that was the focus – to build a suite of plugins where if you wanted to use SSL for everything, you’d be able to do so.