“I’m not an expert in synthesis by any stretch of the imagination; I just know what I like,” says Jordan Fish with a modest shrug. Lucky for us, he likes apocalyptic levels of distortion, sizzling synth leads, and pads deep enough to swim in.

As a member of British metalcore giants Bring Me The Horizon, Fish helped expand the band’s sound after joining the outfit in 2012. Across a five-album run, his songwriting, production, and rough-edged approach to synthesis played a key role in the act’s rise to become one of the most popular heavy bands in the world.

• READ MORE: Cradle State Machine Alt Textures relies heavily on its epic sounds

Since departing the band in 2023, Fish has been far from idle. He’s now among the most in-demand producers in metal, working on high-profile singles for acts like Babymetal and Evanescence’s Amy Lee, and helping craft career-best albums from more experimental artists like Poppy.

Now, he’s partnered with plugin maker Cradle to release State Machine: Alt Textures, a punchy collection of sounds tailored to the heavier side of music production.

With a number of well-regarded plugins under its belt, Cradle’s State Machine sample player has grown into a sprawling series covering everything from early 2000’s digital nostalgia to the sound of retro 8-bit video game soundtracks. Naturally, it was the perfect place for Fish to prove, once again, that synths can hit every bit as hard as the loudest guitar riff.

The seeds for this collaboration were actually planted long ago, with Fish emphasising that both parties have been determined to work together for years. However, it was only in the last 12 months that stars, and schedules, finally aligned.

“The brief for me was to make something that had the type of sounds that I tend to use in heavy music,” Fish says of the plugin’s guiding vision. “They’re probably on the darker side: a little warble, a little grit. But, at the same time, if you take these sounds out of that heavy context, they can work in all styles of music.”

Having spent well over a decade immersed in rock and metal, Fish had plenty of existing material to draw from – however, for Alt Textures he decided to go back to first principles. “We started from scratch,” Fish says of the sample library that powers the instrument. “Obviously I have go-to sounds and synths that I’ve collected over the years, but we wanted to make everything new.”

Working alongside Misha Mansoor, of the progressive metal band Periphery, and a few other friends, Fish put together an ensemble of synths and effects pedals and started making noise.

“It was an interesting process for me because it took me a minute to realise how much of the sound shaping can be done within the architecture of the plugin itself,” he reflects. “You don’t want to sample a defined sound with too much cooked into it; you need to leave some room for people to be able to tweak and manipulate the sounds. I had to wrap my head around that and sample things a little cleaner than maybe I would normally like.”

Fish compares the process to curating – making sure the end result was sonically cohesive, without simply repeating the same timbres ad nauseam. “We made a lot of presets, a lot more than ended up in the plugin,” he recalls. “There was a lot of trimming, and then I’d think ‘OK, we’re missing this, we’re missing that’, and we’d go and do it again. We went through that process quite a few times over to refine the presets and make sure they were really strong.”

The amassed samples of guitars, bells, synth leads, and vocals all slot into the easy-to-use architecture of Cradle’s State Machine player – which features the ability to morph between two sample layers, separate sections for audio processing and modulation, and playback control via MIDI chord triggers, arpeggiation, and scale quantise. It’s a plugin paradigm that fits Fish’s rapid-fire writing style, and he says the finished instrument is something he now “uses a lot” in his own productions.

“I work quite fast when I’m creating,” he says. “It’s very song-focused, and speed is of the essence in the way I work. I don’t want to be fussing over details and sounds for too long; I want to keep moving while the song is being formed, I want to be riding the excitement to get that ‘lightning in a bottle’ type of music. I care about that more than I do a very detailed, specific synth sound.

“So this type of plugin suits my process – but it won’t suit everyone,” he allows. “It’s a great tool to have alongside Serum or Omnisphere or a Kontakt library. Obviously you’re still going to need to have those options where you can craft a specific sound or really dig into the preset.”

State Machine’s fast and intuitive engine is also relevant to another group of users: beginners. Fish says that throughout the process one of his priorities was to release something that would feel relevant to producers still learning their craft.

“I had it in my mind that this would be a launchpad for people who are starting out,” he says. “It’s definitely something that I would have found helpful when I was 15 or 16. When you’ve been experimenting and working in music for years and years, you know what to use if you want a certain kind of sound – but, for people at the beginning of their journey creating music, especially in heavier music, they might not yet know what to do.”

To be clear, this is far from a training-wheels instrument, and Fish says he was conscious of the need to balance the needs of both newbies and veterans alike. “It’s about trying to make something that’s appropriate and useful for a starter producer, but that’s still going to be high quality, well sampled, and interesting enough to be usable by someone who’s further down the line.”

An avowed Pro Tools user, Fish eschews the mantle of ‘electronic music producer’ and says his approach still draws on early experiences recording local bands. “From the age of about 16 until 24, I was just working with whoever wanted to come into my studio,” he recalls. “That was my life and I loved it. Really, my process is the same now – it’s just that I was involved with [Bring Me The Horizon] and that has helped me to become a bit more well known.”

To say Fish is ‘well known’ in heavy music circles would be an understatement – the term ‘super-producer’ has been thrown around on more than one occasion. However, in his view, the sound that he’s become known for is less to do with sonics and more to do with songwriting.

“I don’t think my sound is particularly distinguishable because a lot of people do all the things I do,” Fish says plainly. “I think it is probably more about the fundamentals of how a song moves, how it hits for the chorus, how the melody flows – those are the things that are more identifiably me.”

However you define it, Fish’s influence on the bands he works with is easy to spot. In his view, part of that can be explained by how hands-on he is as a producer. “It’s very rare that I come in as a producer for pre-existing songs,” he explains. “More often than not, if I’m working with someone, the songs are created from zero. I work in heavy music a lot and there are things I naturally do. So, if I’ve helped write and create something, it’s hard to take my sound entirely out of that equation.

“But the stronger the vision of the artist, the stronger their identity, the easier it is for me to help nurture it,” Fish continues. “What I really like is when there’s an artist who will say, ‘I want the album to be about this, I want to use these kinds of instruments.’ I love that kind of challenge.”

It would also be a mistake to assume that his style will forever stay rooted in rock and metal. In conversation, he references a number of as-yet-undisclosed projects that push beyond what he’s done in the past. Moreover, Fish is adamant that, even with all his accomplishments as a songwriter and producer, he still sees room to grow and habits to break.

“There’s still this barrier of ‘stuff I’ve learned you shouldn’t or can’t do,’” he muses. “You can’t have a chorus without cymbals on it, or the guitar needs to be this loud. I’m still learning that, really, none of it applies, ever. You’ve got to try and stay in touch as a listener and not resort to defaults because you’ll miss out on so much potential good stuff. If you want to have a thousand synths doing one part, then do it, and if you want to just have one synth alone for three minutes, then just do that too. There are no rules and nothing you can’t do.”

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