Back in June, London’s Coe released his Spin Cycle EP, the follow-up to his acclaimed Radial release on Woozy Records. Chopped snappy vox and snips of laughter sit over a volley of bouncy kick and sludgy bass tremors – this is futuristic, cheeky, tripped-out electro, prime for a full club meltdown.
Spin Cylce is an incredibly produced bass-heavy wonder – a showcase of Coe’s affinity for mutant bass explorations, kinetic club sounds, and intricate percussion, informed by his first love, Dubstep.
Words and photos by Coe
I consider my methods of producing to be quite rough, I’m definitely not the most technical producer, so I like to keep my setup really simple. I am a big believer in working with a limited amount of tools, but also knowing them inside out to get the absolute most out of them.
I’m going to break down the tools I used and the methods that I use.
Cable Guys – Shaperbox 2
This plugin is an absolute game changer for getting out of the loop. With the time warping element especially, you can chop up audio on the fly.
I tend to mix as I go along, and then group percussion into track stacks on logic and add Shaperbox to the whole stack. I then bounce the stack as one, cut it up, and resample it again multiple times through different presets I have created. I’ll use the bounces as fills for the end of phrases, or I will filter & pan the audio with a lot of automation, and layer it up with the main percussion group to give it more movement.
Can’t recommend this plug-on enough!
Serum
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A staple in my setup, and the same for many other people. It’s so popular because it sounds so good, if you want to make dark & bassy music this is a must.
I use this for basses, pads, leads, FX, and even percussion. It is so versatile, the modulation matrix is really good and really simple to use.
The preset library is really good also, being able to flick through a bunch of presets which are actually quite similar to what you want is really handy and really helpful when you are stuck for ideas.
A good example of this is the bass sound in Spin Cycle. I started with the ‘BA Inertia wobbler’ preset, which was probably about 80% there in terms of what I wanted to make. I then made some changes to the FX chain within Serum, the LFOs, and the envelope shapes. There is no shame in using presets!
Saturation
Softube – One Nob Saturation Plugin
I pretty much use this on everything across the ep, and I mean literally everything.
It’s how I get everything to sound so rough, not much science to it, just whack it on and turn it up, add some compression to get it really noisy if needed.
It’s free also!
Portal – Granular FX plug
I use this similarly to Shaper box, sending either single instruments or groups of sounds through the plug-in, bouncing it out, and resampling over and over.
I think one obvious example of where I have used this is in the main breakdown on the spin cycle, where the percussion sounds like it’s winding upwards before the drop. Portal is really good for stuff like this. It’s really easy to mangle audio and create weird textures and atmospheres that can help add so much more depth and drama to your productions.
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