Essential Dubstep for Spire Vol. 2 competes most directly with Laniakea’s dubstep offerings and the Spire factory content, and here’s where we land: it beats the factory library on dubstep bass sounds by a wide margin, but it doesn’t beat a dedicated sound designer with six hours and Spire open. That’s a fair trade if you need speed. It’s a bad trade if you want originality.
This is a 64-preset pack built by Derrek for Resonance Sound, designed around artist remakes of Zomboy, Skrillex, Eh!de, and Must Die! It requires Spire version 1.1.2 or higher. The bass sounds are the reason to buy it. The pad and FX sounds are not.
How It Compares Out of the Box
Load it next to a generic dubstep Spire pack and the difference is immediately in the low-mids. The growls here bite differently. Where most budget packs reach for simple supersaw stacks and call it a lead, Derrek has gone heavy on FM synthesis routing inside Spire’s oscillator section. You feel it below 200Hz where the formant movement is happening.
Against Laniakea’s Spire content, Vol. 2 wins on bass character and loses on preset variety. Laniakea ships wider category coverage. Vol. 2 ships 29 of its 64 presets as bass sounds. That’s 45% of the pack doing one job. If that job is your job, great. If you need a full toolkit, this pack is half a toolkit.
The mod-wheel response is also notably better than most competing packs we’ve loaded. Every preset has it assigned to something useful.
Performance Deep Dive
The 64 presets break down like this: 29 Bass, 14 Lead, 5 Pluck, 4 Synth, 4 FX, 4 Bass Sequences, 2 Arp, and 2 Pad. Write that out and you see the problem fast. Two pads. Two arps. Four FX sounds. That’s 8 presets doing the atmospheric and textural work that dubstep arrangements need constantly.
We loaded the bass presets into a 140 BPM session and cycled through all 29. The FM growls held up under sidechain compression with an attack of 5ms and a release of 80ms. The low-end didn’t disappear. That matters. A lot of preset basses sound huge solo and collapse in a real mix when the compressor kicks. These don’t.
The macro assignments are genuinely clever. Macro 1 typically handles filter cutoff or formant position. Macro 2 handles distortion drive. Macros 3 and 4 vary by preset but usually control envelope times or unison detune. Having that mapped on every preset instead of just some presets saves real time during a session.
We did find that a few of the lead presets sit frustratingly high in the mix frequency-wise without filtering. You’re reaching for your EQ at 3.5kHz to pull back some of the Spire oscillator brightness. Annoying, but fixable in 30 seconds.
Where It Wins
The bass presets are the honest answer. Twenty-nine sounds built specifically for dubstep bass movement, with FM routing that gives you real formant character and not just a filtered sawtooth.
We loaded the Zomboy-inspired bass preset into a drop section and drove the distortion macro to about 70%. The growl opened up across 150-400Hz in a way that sat behind a kick without fighting it. That’s harder to dial in from scratch than it sounds. Having it pre-mapped saved us easily 45 minutes of synthesis work.
The bass sequences are also underrated. Four of them, yes, which is thin in number. But they’re rhythmically interesting and not just straight 16th-note patterns. One of them has a triplet-offset movement that immediately inspired a different arrangement direction. That’s the preset pack doing its job.
Where the Competition Wins
Variety. Full stop. If you need a complete dubstep toolkit from one pack, Vol. 2 isn’t it.
Two pad presets is not a pad section. It’s an afterthought. Dubstep arrangements need atmospheric beds, tension builds, risers with harmonic content. Four FX presets won’t cover that. You’ll be pulling from a second pack or building from scratch anyway, which partially defeats the convenience argument for buying presets at all.
We also wish the arp presets were stronger. Two arps in a 64-preset pack targeting producers who make Skrillex-adjacent music feels like a miss. Skrillex’s arp work is a signature sound element. Derrek built 29 bass presets and 2 arps. We’d have flipped some of the synth category presets into arp territory.
The price-to-preset ratio is also a real conversation. Check the manufacturer’s site for current pricing, but competing packs at the same price point regularly ship 100 or 128 presets.
Who Should Buy Which
✅ Buy if you produce heavy dubstep regularly and burn through bass sounds faster than you build them from scratch.
✅ Buy if you’re remaking or studying Zomboy, Skrillex, Eh!de, or Must Die! tracks and want a pre-researched so
nic starting point.
✅ Buy if you already own another broader Spire pack for pads and FX, and just need to fill the bass gap.
❌ Skip if you want one pack to cover a full dubstep session from drop to breakdown to riser.
❌ Skip if you’re new to Spire and don’t yet understand macro assignment, because you’ll underuse what’s actually clever about this pack.
❌ Skip if you build sounds from scratch and only buy presets for inspiration. The FM routing here is Spire-specific enough that reverse-engineering it is half the work of just learning FM synthesis directly. Learn synthesis fundamentals before spending on preset packs
Score Breakdown
| Category | Score | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sound Quality | 4.0/5 | The bass presets are legitimately good; leads and FX are average |
| Value for Money | 3.0/5 | 64 presets is thin; competing packs ship more for similar pricing |
| Ease of Use | 4.0/5 | Full macro mapping on every preset makes session use fast |
| Features | 3.0/5 | Category imbalance hurts; 2 pads and 2 arps is not enough coverage |
| CPU Efficiency | 3.5/5 | Pack itself is weightless; Spire's CPU cost applies regardless |
| Overall | 3.9/5 | Strong bass specialist pack let down by thin category coverage overall |
Alternatives to Consider
If the category imbalance is a dealbreaker, here are three options worth loading up alongside or instead.
Laniakea Sounds Dubstep for Spire ships a wider preset spread across categories. It’s less bass-obsessed and more useful as a complete session toolkit. Worth it if you need pads and FX covered from the same source.
Reveal Sound’s own factory content comes free with Spire and covers more sonic ground than most producers realise. Before buying any third-party preset pack, load the factory library and search “bass”. You might already have what you need.
Building from scratch using Spire’s FM routing is always the honest third option. Understanding how synth bass presets are built covers the fundamentals of bass sound design that make preset packs like this one more useful once you understand what you’re looking at.
If you’re after groove and rhythm inspiration rather than pure bass sounds, Vocal Perc Essentials for sterile groove problems is a different tool solving a different problem, but it’s worth knowing about for the arrangement stage after your Spire bass work is done.
For the post-synthesis stage, bass processing with the right tools covers the metering and monitoring side of getting low-end to translate.
Vol. 2 is a bass preset pack that didn’t have the courage to call itself a bass preset pack. The 29-preset bass section is worth your money. The rest is filler you’ll quietly stop loading after week one. If you go in knowing that, you won’t be disappointed. If you go in expecting a full production toolkit, you will be.
Buy it for the bass sounds. Skip it if you need everything else too.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Essential Dubstep for Spire Vol. 2 work with the latest version of Spire?
You need Spire version 1.1.2 or higher. If your Spire is up to date, the presets will load without any compatibility issues. Reveal Sound updates Spire regularly, so check your current version number in the plugin header before purchasing if you're on an older install.
How many bass presets are in the pack?
Twenty-nine of the 64 total presets are bass sounds. That's 45% of the pack dedicated to bass. There are also 4 Bass Sequences included, which give you rhythmic bass patterns rather than just static timbres. It's bass-heavy by design, not by accident.
Are the macros pre-assigned on every preset?
Yes. All 64 presets come with full mod-wheel, velocity, and 4-macro assignments. You're not getting a mix of mapped and unmapped presets like you find in some cheaper packs. Macro 1 and 2 typically handle filter and distortion; Macros 3 and 4 vary by preset but are always assigned to something useful.
Is Essential Dubstep for Spire Vol. 2 worth it if I already own Vol. 1?
Vol. 2 was built after Vol. 1 found an audience, so the sounds are designed to complement rather than duplicate. The FM-heavy bass character in Vol. 2 goes harder than Vol. 1's approach. If Vol. 1 is already in your sessions regularly, Vol. 2 adds range rather than repetition. If you haven't tried Vol. 1, start there first to see if Derrek's sound design approach matches your productions.