How It Was Made: Holo – Spirits (Deep House / Dub House)

Holo’s (@holomusic.wav/) “Spirits” sits right at the center of what makes Astro feel so dialed in. The Berlin-based producer, originally from Melbourne, has been building a very specific lane in deep house, one that feels melodic, patient, and focused without losing its club function. His early momentum through Houseum and Lost Palms put him on a lot of people’s radar, and this new release through Last Year At Marienbad’s Oath imprint feels like a natural next step. “Spirits” has that Holo fingerprint all over it: layered drums, filtered synth work, subtle strings, and a melodic idea that keeps opening up without turning the arrangement into something overloaded. It is danceable, but the details are what keep it interesting. The track has a lot of movement tucked into the edges, especially in how the drums, guitar-like textures, and mix processing work together without calling too much attention to themselves. For this How It Was Made feature, Holo breaks down the exact tools behind “Spirits,” including Spitfire Audio LABS, Ableton’s Velocity MIDI effect, Trackspacer, and the UAD Studer A800. What I like about this one is how practical the advice is. It is less about chasing huge plugin chains and more about using small, specific decisions to make a house track feel human, warm, and ready for the floor. Spitfire Audio LABS LABS is an incredible collection of free sampled instruments. You can find almost any instrument – strings, pianos, guitars, drums, brass, drum machines – sampled in high quality, and often interesting and unusual ways. Once you find a sound, you download the pack and away you go. The UI is simple with only a couple of controls, which is great to not get stuck tweaking things. In Spirits I used the “Moon Guitar 01” preset for the arpeggiating melody in the breakdown and second half of the track. I chose it because it’s a unique texture for a house track, and because it contrasted nicely with the other parts. The guitar’s acoustic quality stands out amongst the synth pads and bassline, and the harmonics help it cut through the mix. I’m processing the sound with subtle flanging, EQ, compression, chorus, limiting, delay, reverb, auto pan, side chain compression and parallel saturation. I’d recommend other producers give LABS a try if they want to experiment with unique textures. Try a LABS choir instead of a synth pad. A flute instead of a synth lead. It’s been a great source of fun and inspiration to browse LABS packs and presets, and I only have a handful installed. I should really grab some more! Ableton Velocity MIDI Effect This is a small but super useful stock plugin included in Ableton Live that helps you shape the velocity of midi notes. Here I used it on the Moon Guitar sound to randomise the velocity of each note. Doing so created a really interesting effect where even though the notes are perfectly quantised on the grid, their expression is random and more human – perhaps too random to be human – which I thought was unique. I picked this tip up from Four Tet in his Tape Notes podcast. While I’ve used the velocity effect for a creative effect, it’s also very useful on hi hats and snare drums. If you dial in a lower random amount, you’ll get subtle variation in dynamics, which on a subconscious level will make your track sound more interesting and less robotic. Trackspacer Trackspacer is plugin I discovered recently that I’m using all the time to fix a common problem in mixing: frequency masking. Masking is when you have 2 parts with overlapping frequencies, and it’s overwhelming and/or you can’t hear one part properly. With Trackspacer, you drop it on one part, set the sidechain input to the other part, and it will automatically and dynamically remove those overlapping frequencies on the initial part. The problem I solved in Spirits was that the piano melody in the A section wasn’t consistently audible in the mix. The high notes were, but the lower notes weren’t, so it wasn’t as simple as just turning up the volume. Therefore I used Trackspacer on a group of parts playing chords to cut away the specific frequencies the piano was playing only at the time the piano is playing. If you have Fabfilter ProQ3 you can do the same thing, but it’s a hassle. Trackspacer is one of those one knob plugins which saves me heaps of time. In Spirits I used Trackspacer to make space for the piano lead, but you could also use it to: Sidechain the bass to the kick Make space for vocals on the mix bus, or a vocal fx return channel Reduce muddiness in the low mids dynamically, instead of a single high-pass EQ setting on individual channels I find it works best when used subtly … 7 -15% usually does the job. You can also shape the attack and release settings, and tell it to ignore frequencies below or above a value. UAD Studer A800 Universal Audio’s Studer is a tape saturation plugin with different tape modes, tape speeds and signal paths. It’s the best plugin I’ve found that adds that ‘analog warmth’ so