BAFTA, Emmy and Ivor Novello-Nominated Team of Toydrum Talk Composition, Writing, and Recording with SSL BiG SiX

Electronic music duo add BiG SiX and SSL Plug-ins to set-up as they prepare to score another season of Apple TV spy thriller series ‘Slow Horses’

06/02/2026

Brighton, U.K., June 2, 2026 — BAFTA, Emmy and Ivor Novello-nominated musical artists and composers Pablo Clements and James Griffith have upgraded their respective production setups as they prepare to score another season of Apple TV spy thriller series Slow Horses. The electronic music duo, who have been working together for 15 years as Toydrum, have each recently adopted a Solid State Logic BiG SiX analogue mixing console for use at home and in their recording studio, Toy Rooms, near Brighton on the south coast of England.

Toydrum often combine electronic instruments with manipulated acoustic sound sources to create their distinctive sonic ambiences and atmospheres. “If we ever go too synthy, we always pull it back to the organic world,” Clements comments. The reverse is also true, he says: “If it becomes too traditional, we try and mess it up, or lo-fi it up, and make it a bit wonky. That's kind of our thing.”

Building on the vintage at Toy Rooms
Clements put together their studio in 2011, building out a 3,000-square-foot space with a control room and a couple of live rooms housing a huge collection of analogue recording equipment, synths, keyboards and vintage instruments that he has been gathering for decades. He and Griffith began working as Toydrum in 2012, having previously collaborated in Unkle, a group founded by Mo’ Wax label founder and musician James Lavelle and featured an ever-evolving lineup that also included the likes of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, DJ Shadow, Mike D of the Beastie Boys and Richard Ashcroft of The Verve.

“We've got a studio full of old, broken gear and broken instruments, which is great for shows like Slow Horses, because that’s a big part of the soundtrack. But with broken gear you constantly have noise and hiss,” and tracing a problem to the console, interface or sound card could be time consuming, Clements continues. “The BiG SiX is a godsend and has eradicated all of that. It’s much better quality than the desk we were using and sounds a million times better. It sounds big and fat and is a very clean desk.”

Defining a creative workflow
The pair’s workflow on any soundtrack project begins with playing around and creating loops and software instruments, working in Logic and Ableton, then defining a palette of sounds unique to the show while working through the SSL BiG SiX. “We always try to write music before we see anything,” Clements elaborates. “You read the scripts, talk to the director and get a feeling for it before you write anything. If you write music that way, you become a lot more melodic. We have a lot of equipment, but we’ve learned to restrict ourselves to a certain number of instruments, then those three or four elements become the basis of the score. You get a tone, and you push that one little thing as far as you can — and that's the sound of that show.”

Toydrum have been co-composing the Slow Horses soundtrack with Daniel Pemberton, who wrote and produced the opening theme featuring Mick Jagger, since the series launched in April 2022. They are currently working on season seven of Slow Horses as well as Apple TV’s Lazarus, starring Stephen Graham and Liev Schreiber. Pemberton and Toydrum were nominated for an Emmy and an Ivor Novello Award for their work on season three of Slow Horses, which aired in 2023. They were nominated for a BAFTA Award in 2025 for season four.

Sonic palettes with BiG SiX
Griffith is already building the sonic palette for the next season of Slow Horses, which the music team will begin writing in earnest in March or April, as well as for another upcoming Apple TV series yet to be titled. “We’ve been using the BiG SiX to make loads of sounds and instruments for Slow Horses,” he reports. “I have my desk set up in the live room with an effects loop with a load of pedals, including a few delays and an original Boomerang loop pedal. I have a mic for the piano, pipe organ, bells or other acoustic instruments that goes into the BiG SiX then around the effects loop. Before, I had a noisy desk and a separate sound card, but now everything is built into the BiG SiX” — which incorporates a USB interface and 16 channels of conversion — “so now everything is much easier to work with and sounds fantastic. Our stuff sounds dirty enough; we don't need extra dirt!”

Toydrum are so busy that, because of the volume of music they produce, they typically hand off their stems to a Brighton-based mixer, Andrew Britton. “The last show we did, a superhero-esque series for Amazon, probably had four hours of continuous music over eight episodes,” Clements shares. “I just don't think it would be possible mix that as well as write it. If you've got a mix engineer that can help finish that process, then you can get on with writing more.”

Leveraging the SSL plug-in bundle
To ensure a seamless workflow, the pair made sure that Britton also has the same SSL plug-in bundle. “Our mix engineer is always using the SSL De-Esser,” Clements reports. “He says it's the best de-esser out there. I also like the Fusion Vintage Drive. That has a great character to it. It sounds amazing on the synths and gives everything a real roundness. The Fusion Transformer plug-in seems to do something pretty amazing on the bottom end, which is also great. And, obviously, SSL’s Bus Compressor plug-in sounds fantastic, when we don’t use the one within BiG SiX.”

He adds, “There are a lot of plug-ins in the bundle to get into, so it takes time to learn them all! But sometimes Andy will do something, and he'll send tracks back and the plug-ins will be on there, and you start to learn from each other’s sessions.”

As for the BiG SiX’s onboard G-Bus Compressor, “It's more of a writing tool,” Clements says, to control the dynamics of the sounds he’s recording. “I use it especially when I'm making instruments of a synthesiser, because when you've got effects going, certain frequencies will push into the effects and cause the level to jump. It has been great for controlling that.”

In addition to producing album releases under their own name, Clements and Griffith have worked with artists such as Nick Cave, Warren Ellis and Trentemoller at the Toy Rooms. Their film soundtrack credits includes Prevenge, London Fields, Detour and Sweetheart, among many others. Their television work has included AMC’s Soulmates, Sky1’s Two Weeks to Live, ITV’s Deep Water and Tell Me Everything, and Amazon’s Three Pines.

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