Long-standing FUSE mainstay Rich NxT makes a long-awaited return to Hot Creations this October with the Vibewise EP. The three-tracker marks his debut solo release on the label, having featured as remixer on the imprint previously.

“Like a lot of artists, I naturally focused my time in the studio during our lockdowns, so I’m really happy to deliver this EP for Hot Creations now. Those in the know will know the reference to one of the excellent party venues in London, back when a lot of our journey’s started.” – Rich NxT

As one of FUSE’s original residents, Rich NxT played a major part in the brand’s evolution, helping take it from a free afterparty to one of the most respected event brands and labels on the planet. Elsewhere, the DJ / producer draws on his strongly identifiable sound to run two vinyl imprints, NxT Records and What NxT.

For the occasion,  we catch up with Rich for some insight into his studio workflow.

1. I like to switch regularly between monitors and headphones when starting to mix tracks down. That way you get the benefit of making sure that you have the right dynamic range on the monitors while keeping the subtle details in the headphones. For the headphones I make use of a really good plug in called Sonarworks which flattens the frequency response of any pair of headphones to give a really true uncoloured picture of your mix, which makes anything that is out of place really stick out.

2. I make use of step sequencers with both my in the box VSTs and out of the box hardware. Two of my favourites are the max for live Step Sequencer and Thesys. By using these to automate things such as pitch and cutoff you can bring real movement and unpredictability into your bass and synth lines. This technique can also be really useful for percussion if used in a subtle way.

3. When making baselines, I like to double up, sometimes even triple up on the sounds used to make an intricate layer system of various sounds, all playing the same pattern in unison. Once you have a few different sounds then it’s all about experimenting with the mix and eq between the different sounds, as well as dropping out or lengthening/shortening the odd note in the different midi parts.

4.When writing I like to spend time in creating lots of ideas and loops, as many as 10-15 at once, flicking between the two and being quite open and experimental with the sounds. Then over the course of a few months, I’ll start to distill those ideas into tracks and go round and round this process till a bunch of tracks take shape. After this it’s all about finishing them off to make a new body of work. Only after finishing everything will I go back and start experimenting with new loops again, where the whole process starts again.

5. I make a lot of use of samples in my drums and percussion. I find they tend to pack more of a punch than VSTs and other plug ins. I tend to turn to these for more icing on the cake type stuff, once I have programmed the core elements such as kicks, claps and hats with the sample based MIDI programming

Buy/Stream his new EP out on Hot Creations HERE