Banging the Drum for the BiG SiX

Brighton, U.K. (June 2, 2026)—Toydrum, the nom de plume of musical artists and composers Pablo Clements and James Griffith, are currently scoring Apple TV’s Slow Horses and Lazarus after adding a pair of SSL consoles to their arsenal.

The BAFTA, Emmy and Ivor Novello Award-nominated electronic music duo each recently adopted an SSL BiG SiX analog mixing console for use at home and in their recording studio, Toy Rooms, near Brighton on the south coast of England. ​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 analog 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.

Toydrum often combine electronic instruments with manipulated acoustic sound sources to create their distinctive sonic ambiences and atmospheres. “If we e

ver 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.”

“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.”

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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. “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.”