Putting Spinn on drums

When we met up with touring drummer and dear friend Noa Svensson for a chat about music, creativity and the seemingly never-ending pandemic, Noa especially caught our interest when he said that he loves to use Spinn on drums. Of course we felt the need to swing by his rehearsal space in Nacka, Stockholm to see Noa+Spinn in action.

Spinn on the whole kit

Often Noa experiments with his drum sounds to suit different contexts and recording situations and now and then Spinn comes into the picture. A good use of Spinn that might not be the first one you think of, is to put Spinn on your full drum kit/drum bus. This both widens the drums and creates a unique modulated sound that can really help fit them in the mix.

Here Noa is playing a Spinn on whole drum kit setup to one of his own LOFI/ Soul productions. For this example we have put the four rotating bands at a slow/medium speed and set a wide stereo image.

Spinn on 1 microphone

After a much needed fika/coffee break, the desire to experiment further with this concept was strong. After a few tries with different mic setups we found a really cool sound that made our jaws drop. This was achieved by putting a Beta58 microphone slightly over the ride cymbal, putting Spinn on that mic track only and keeping the rest of the drum tracks dry. With this setup Spinn adds a weird room mic sound to the drums and gives them a lot of character. A technique Noa frequently uses, to trigger the kick mic to a synth-bass, turned out to be a great way to complement this more experimental sound further.

Noa plays with Spinn on one microphone and the kick mic triggered to Klevgrands monophonic synth Enkl.

These are just two creative ways you can use Spinn on your drums. Hopefully they have piqued your curiosity and inspired you to find out what other cool sounds and setups you can come up with. Please let us know, we’d love to hear about any wild results your experimentations might yield.