Booted from UA discussion on purple site...lol

There's a huge shift in how a lot of these pro audio companies see themselves and market to their ideal consumer. I've started doing a lot more video reviews for companies this year, so I got a "little too big for my britches" and started reaching out to a lot of larger companies in the guitar/amp world. I'm an average guitar player at best, but had a really cool way to include a friend of mine on the reviews that's an amazing player. I wanted to do really thorough and in depth reviews of amps and pedals, it had worked well for me with the pro audio companies and they appreciated how much time and effort I put into the videos.

It was a wake up call after every single company I reached out to gave me a firm "no". A guy from one of the larger pedal companies gave me a call after I voiced some frustration, because he was a studio owner as well and had seen some of my videos. I asked him to be blunt with me as far as feedback (which he was, and I was really appreciative), but the analogy he gave me about the marketing mindset of pro audio vs guitar pedals/amps was "We've become a lifestyle brand. We're basically trying to sell sunglasses to teenagers". I'm an almost 40 year old, slightly overweight balding white guy trying to do nerdy videos. That's not helpful, they would rather have a hipster looking 19 year old doing a video on a cellphone with clipping audio. It's going to sell more stuff for them.

His ultimate point was that the whole producer/engineer/beatmaker thing is quickly becoming the new rocks star, and to expect more and more companies to start treating everything that way. I'm a dinosaur, which quite honestly doesn't bother me. I've got plenty of pro audio companies that like me doing a good job and will pay me/respect my time to do really good videos. I'll keep on doing that when I have the time and the opportunity arises. But all these companies like UA are going to have to shift their priorities from being tech companies to lifestyle/clothing companies to stay relevant and continue to grow at the rate they want. It is what it is, the writing is on the wall.

I'm not saying UA puts out shit by any means. I still love my Apollo and use their stuff every day. I've seen a massive shift in how companies like that have interacted with guys like me the last few years. I've tried really hard to build relationships with companies I love and work hard for them when we can help each other out. Again though, the writing is on the wall. I can't help UA sell sunglasses, they're not really interested in feedback from me because I'm not relevant to their direction anymore. That sucks, but I'm sure a lot of this is just part of getting older and not being a hip kid anymore.

Mid life crisis rant over, I don't even know what I'm saying anymore at this point. I should go buy some sunglasses...

So what you're saying is that you need tattoos? 

andersmv Thank you for sharing that, it was really instructive. Once you spoke that quiet part out loud it became obvious that's the case in retrospect. In some ways it made me feel old but also, oddly glad that I'm older and not subject to the hamster wheel of social status and stigma.

Many of my interactions with guitar pedal and amp manufacturers have become clear in light of your description. When I made some technical inquiries at several companies from who I bought my first round of petals I got responses similar to what you describe. Companies that are flabbergasted that somebody actually would want to know technical details about what's going on inside, and getting directed to their Instagram page.

In contrast, my interactions with boutique pedal manufacturers and pro audio companies have been fantastic in large part. But I imagine neither of those two types of companies are targeting lifestyle teenagers gazing at their shoes while making TikTok vids and they don't care if they are the next big thing featured on an influencer's pedalboard or rack.

I'm 61 in October.

I still consider myself a beautiful person .... it's just an internal thing now  

UA presence on forums is just awful. Arrogantly aiming for mediocrity.

Going for quantity over quality and vomiting the usual "oh boy, we're winning by so much".

And yeah, they are controlling what's posted in forums. Administrators will give a special treatment.

You got to admit. He's the gaslight king.

The king of semantics.

Here’s my take.

I love Crane Song, RME, ATC, AMS Neve, BAE, DMG, Fabfilter (and a few more) as companies they offer great value and fantastic customer service.

I hate UA, Sennhesier, Apple, Waves and a few more as companies because I feel like I’m being treated as a cash cow and Sennhesier has given me truly awful customer service.

But I buy products from all of them because they all produce great products.

UA plug-ins are still after 15 years my go to plug-ins.

Their recent Hitsville plug-ins are bloody excellent as is their 176 compressor.

So I hold my nose and buy their products!

they want to sell you clones and emulations that simply do not work and they have some sort of hookup. Then they have to trash the manufacturers and developers of high quality workhorse equipment and processors to sell you dysfunctional, distorted garbage.

UA has always been about selling the dream instead of workhorse equipment to make music on. When they were first reconstituted, instead of making anything new, they just made clones of 1960s equipment instead of bothering to do anything new or fix the designs to be more functional. Then UAD1 plugins were bog standard dysfunctional digital stuff and UAD2 oversampled to 192 kHz and added an often cartoony amount of distortion to give a semblance of the original sound when the processes were mostly still totally dysfunctional. It’s not possible for an 1176 to work itb. It just isn’t. Especially at 192 kHz where they want it to attack and release very fast and the circuit model has insane distortion and aliasing internally. They used to publish white papers and have the ask the doctors and it was all very interesting, more interesting than the plugins they made, but they never improved the plugins, never wrote more utilitarian plugins like the precision series, and eventually sold out to China. Even the Apollo was billed as the sound of analog itb when the primary use I’ve seen of it was for monitoring mixes and to play an amp sim on the interface back in the day. And now most of those amp sims are hopelessly outdated.

Waves did something similar much sooner. Waves SSL and CLA when they have the renaissance series. Sonnox never sold out like that. The most brutal utilitarian interfaces possible. And now we have Softube doing the same thing as old UAD but better included porting antiquated but still cool digital hardware but their whole thing has always been amp sims and stuff for them without even pretending to be anything else but the whole Flow thing is ridiculous. They cannot even outright say that their branded metal amps are better than the old UAD Marshall models because they hold the Marshall license and most of the Neural stuff is weird and cannot be as flexible. How do you sell some blues dad or Hendrix wannabe something with a Motörhead (super bass) or Slayer (modded jcm 800) or Engl (the super flexible 4 channel savage mk II) branding even if they can use a different IR to not sound as crazy? You cannot because you have to sell the earlier amps too as just as good and sell the dream, the image. Same as they have to sell their random channel strips and say they’re just as good as the Weiss to the point they offer the mouse driven version of the Weiss and the cheesy, phasey on real recordings made with mics modeled channel strips controlled by a hardware controller in case anyone wants to mix a whole track down with them but thus still slower than a track ball with the Weiss EQ MP which is even faster than fabfilter, or just having real gear to turn the knobs on with both hands on gain and q.

The guitar companies want to sell a rockstar dream when rockstars don’t exist anymore. The young musicians are all influencers or divas and many of the best can barely make a living. Even the dudes are influencers. Fender and Gibson got surpassed by Asian copies with better or equivalent QC. Most of the amp companies are major electronics companies. Marshall branded prosumer hifi stuff sells the amps now which do not have the tube quality of the past. Most of the classic “boutique” amps are built by Boutique Amp Distribution. Sure Orange and Engl are still going and the tiny terror and Blackmore branded Engls had periods of popularity but how do you sell that to someone who has never played one or thinks having a Marshall stack will make him a good musician? I mean the amps are overblown. Half the point of the fuzzes and insane distortion pedals was to be able to plug into any amp and get the same sound.

Look at the pedal recreations and boutique metal market. They sell you magic boxes. The boutique pedal market selling you pedals that cost hundreds of dollars. You can buy boutique HM-2 recreations that cost more than probably what Entombed paid for their entire stack of an HM-2 into a Peavey Bandit. And buying them still won’t make you sound like them, make that silly pedal easily work in a mix, or write you god songs.

Absolutely, that has been my biggest take away and is how I've moved forward. I'm not saying every company is like that, but I just know from experience after talking to quite a few out there, that there's definitely a big push to "lifestyle" approaches to branding and marketing clearly happening a lot out there. Regardless, at the end of the day, it's like any other new "money making" venture. I'm new to this, I've had a lot of companies paying me fairly to do reviews and stuff (I don't really do "reviews", I try to do really good demos more than sit there and inject my opinion), I enjoy doing it and it's a great way to fill up time when I don't have people here working. Like everything, it's about finding the right fit.

Agreed. I don't like how UA has seemingly abandoned, to a not insignificant degree, the pro market, though I get that the world is changing, and they are following the market. I REALLY don't like how their customer service has gone to shit, but even with that I at least can sort of follow the bread crumbs to see how they got to a point where they felt the need to get rid of the phones, even if I strongly disagree with that decision.

But... Why does UA have to have an asshole representing them as the public face of the company? I will never understand that.