About a year into the global Covid-19 pandemic, mix engineer Josh West moved into his van, parking it outside Mansion Studios in Missouri’s Ozark Mountains while he helped build out the new facility’s Solid State Logic Duality Fuse and System Trooms.
Five years on, West is combining his love of van life and the great outdoors with his passion for music mixing and mentorship, hitting the road with his SSL UF8 and UC1 controllers to provide remote mixing services to clients worldwide between rock climbing and hikes with his partner and their dogs.
Remote Mixer Josh West Embraces the Great Outdoors with Solid State Logic UF8 and UC1 Controllers With a worldwide client base and love of the van life, West combines mixing and mentorship with travel and adventure in the outdoors Branson, Missouri, July 24, 2026 — About a year into the global Covid-19 pandemic, mix engineer Josh West moved into his van, parking it outside Mansion Studios in Missouri’s Ozark Mountains while he helped build out the new facility’s Solid State Logic Duality Fuse and System Trooms.
Five years on, West is combining his love of van life and the great outdoors with his passion for music mixing and mentorship, hitting the road with his SSL UF8 and UC1 controllers to provide remote mixing services to clients worldwide between rock climbing and hikes with his partner and their dogs. The couple planned to drive to Alaska for their first big adventure but soon changed their plans when they arrived in Montana and got to experience Big Sky Country for themselves.
“I had never been to Montana before, and we just fell in love with it. It was so beautiful in the mountains. And a big part of why we stopped there was because that was my first opportunity to try traveling and mixing on the road,” says West, who has mix clients worldwide.
Setting up shop in the great outdoors An average working day for West involves setting up his laptop, monitor speakers and SSL UF8 DAW controller and UC1 hardware plug-in controller on a folding table at an inspiring outdoor location. Everything is powered from a heavy-duty 600Ah lithium battery that can be charged from the van’s solar panels, an alternator charger or, for those occasions when they can hook up to mains electricity, a DC charger.
“I just run an extension cord from the van out to wherever I’m working,” he explains. “I don’t like to mix more than three or four hours in a day, and I’ll usually split my time between producing YouTube content and mixing for clients.” West had spent several years working almost daily on the Duality Fuse at Mansion — where he also started his educational YouTube channel focusing on music production and technology — so he initially missed having 96 faders in front of him.
“It took me a while to get where I wanted to be on those controllers,” he admits. But the transition was made easier by the UF8’s functionality. “What made it work was, 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, enabling him to quickly bring a specific group of sources in front of him and under fader control.
Ready to go with the UC1 and SSL plug-ins On a typical project, West initially sets up the best static fader mix he can before instantiating any plug-ins. “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 Gor 4K Bplug-in if I need drive or grit.” He replicates his master bus processing from Mansion’s Duality with plug-ins.
“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. I cannot live without those, so they are on every template I use.” Once he has a solid mix, he continues, he taps the last of his quick keys to bring eight VCA groups to the UF8’s faders.
“I do the automation of the whole track just with those. That’s 90% of the automation that I do. I’m not really touching anything else, just feeling those group faders and trying to make the song come a little bit more alive.” Precision tools and big studio workflow Having come to rely on the metering on Mansion’s Duality, West makes full use of the mechanical meter on the UC1 to monitor the master bus compression.
“Coming from that room and being able to see all the meters, and knowing where all your gain staging is, I just love that gain reduction on the Bus Comp on the UC1. I use that all the time. 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.” Working at Mansion Sound had a significant impact on his workflow and approach to mixing, he comments. “I spent so much time in that room.
It taught me a lot about not listening to the song too many times in a row and not getting stuck in the weeds. My whole workflow is trying to be as minimal in the track as possible, just trying to get in there and make the right moves as quick as I possibly can — which I wouldn’t be able to do, obviously, without those SSL controllers.” Pushing the frontiers of community building West started his YouTube channel in the months before he decided to leave Mansion to travel.
It started out mostly to market the studio, he says, but once he was on the road he wanted to continue. “I love creating content. It’s a real creative thing for me to come up with videos, shoot them, edit them and do the audio.” While in Montana, he noticed that a lot of younger engineers were reaching out for advice. “I got on the phone with a few of them and remembered how it was when I first started.
The idea popped into my head: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a place where young engineers can come and learn?’” He has now set up a community on the Skool online platform called Mix & Momentum, which already has over 100 members, from teenagers to a Grammy-winner. Ultimately, West would like to combine that community with his love of Montana. “Once we’re done with the traveling we’re planning on moving there and getting some land.
I thought it would be so cool to have a small studio where we could invite members out. We could have a band come in, record and mix it, and give that all to the community, and do that over and over again. So that’s our long-term goal.”
For more information, visit solidstatelogic.com.
