Renowned drum ’n’ bass producer Danny Byrd has installed a Solid State Logic Nucleus control surface in his project studio.

Having begun work on his third album for Hospital Records, he reckons that it is already lifting both the quality of his productions and his studio workflow. ‘Originally it was Matrix that piqued my interest,’ he explains. ‘I was very tempted but it was a little bit out of my price range in terms of what I could justify – mostly because I’ve always been an in-the-box producer. And then Nucleus comes along with all of the controller bits from Matrix but in a much smaller package that seemed ideally suited to my needs.

‘I’ve long been a big advocate of control surfaces, and Nucleus kills many birds with one stone,’ he continues. ‘You don’t have a problem quickly controlling the master volume, you’ve got it right there. And you’ve got your key commands right where you need them. Then you’ve got your SSL preamps with your mics plugged in the back. It’s funny but you don’t think that there’s much difference between, say, saving a project with your mouse through the file menu and simply pressing a button on Nucleus. Sure, you’re talking about a second’s difference, but when you’re working that makes all the difference. Already Nucleus has speeded up my workflow quite a bit.’

Having touches more commonly attributed to larger consoles has also helped put him in control: ‘Meter signals for all of the channels – on quite a lot of other control surfaces they just have a little light to show you that there’s a signal present, which is kind of useless. With Nucleus you get full metering so it feels like you’re working on a proper desk.

‘Another major plus is the preamps, the same SuperAnalogue preamps that are in Duality,’ adds. ‘Up to now I’ve been recording straight in through my soundcard, but with these preamps I can definitely tell the difference. It’s good to have that reassurance that you’ve got exactly the same quality that you get with SSL’s bigger desks. So far I’ve only recorded one set of vocals through them and I didn’t know what to expect, but the sound was brilliant, the clarity was excellent. In fact I mixed this track recently and then played it out at the Global Gathering festival and you could hear the clarity in the vocals… you could hear all of the words – and that’s quite rare for a drum ’n’ bass track.

‘Ultimately it just feels that much more professional to have Nucleus in the studio. Sometimes I walk past my room and I see it glowing there and it makes me want to work on some music, you know? A part of that is the great build quality, it’s just got that SSL… “feel”. I’ve got SSL gear lust now. So I’m quite interested in getting X-Desk with the X-Panda to use alongside Nucleus. Or maybe even an upgrade to a Matrix. But, to be honest, I’m quite happy with Nucleus at the moment.’

More: www.solidstatelogic.com