Hillier Favors Hay Bales and Fingers on Faders at Agricultural Audio

Sussex, England (July 19, 2024)—Ben Hillier, a 30-year studio veteran in the UK, isn’t above experimenting new things to get the results he wants, whether it means adopting new gear, or building a studio out of hay bales.

Hillier’s Agricultural Audio Studio is in the Brighton area, on England’s south coast. “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.” The pair have since added a live room.

Like many engineers and producers who came up in the record business using large-format mixing consoles, Hillier favors hardware faders. Years ago, he adopted a hybrid music production workflow, combining analog processing with recording software to track and mix, but it was only recently, when he adopted SSL’s UF8, that he finally found a DAW controller that suits his work style, he reports.

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​Hillier, whose credit list includes projects with Depeche Mode, Blur, Elbow, Doves, Nadine Shah and others, spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in studios with SSL 4000 E/G Series desks, he says. “If you’ve come from large-format mixing, as I have, you don’t realize how much you miss them. They were great; they were so fast and intuitive.” The eight-fader UF8 is proving to be a good substitute for those vintage mixing desks. “The more I use it, the more I learn about it and the less I have to think about it. It’s become part of the studio furniture, and that’s what you want—you switch it on, and it just works.”

Plus, he says, “It’s quite nice to turn one channel up while you’re turning another one down. And riding a balance on a few things is very handy, I find.”

He continues, ​“It’s also good for fundamental, simple things. You can program the buttons across the top [of the UF8] 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.”