Spitfire / British Drama Toolkit: Brass and Reeds

[Piet De Ridder]

Spitfire have released a new 'Drama Toolkit', this time focusing on rounded; mellow brass and reed tones, augmented with an ensemble of recorders.

"(...) The Brass and Reeds toolkit features an intimate selection of solo brass and woodwind instruments — from contrabassoon, saxophone and flugelhorn, to recorders, and more. Discover carefully curated Combi patches (curated combinations of instruments, split into various layers across the keyboard) — a great place to start sketching cues, Ensembles (full section ensembles) and solo instruments, meticulously crafted by Samuel Sim and the Spitfire Audio team. These less commonly found instruments offer a fresh alternative to strings, taking your scores to a new place — soft saxophones to create jazz-influenced, Noir scores, with the distinctive timbre of tenor and flugelhorns offering a subtle alternative to low strings.

Brass & Reeds features the UK’s finest players performing a range of uniquely workshopped techniques – including Shorts, Longs, Recorder flutters and chiffs, Tuba multiphonics, Saxophone growls and rich Cor Anglais swells. The fluidity and unpredictability of the breaths between the notes and re-articulations offers a genuine sense of reality, with notes firing off each other in different ways, to add nuance, depth and humanity to your scores."

Intro price: €149, regular price: €199.




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[Lawrence]

I haven't gotten a tremendous use out of the first Drama Toolkit but I've liked what I've done. This sounds pretty to me. Sonorous, organic and and full in the lows in particular.

[Piet De Ridder]

Yes, it sounds great. No doubt about it. All the more a pity, I find, that they’ve focused, yet again, almost exclusively on the slow and very slow side of things. With Andy Blaney increasingly out of the picture — I don’t know whether that is actually true, but that’s definitely how it looks — there seems to be nobody left at Spitfire who will remind the production and development teams that there is also such a thing as faster paced music, and now their penchant for noire, dark, nordic, barely mobile vistas of soporific sound for insomniacs appears to be very much defining the bulk of their output.

If you want or need to do something upbeat and jolly, or anything that requires nimble, agile instrumental parts, Spitfire’s output of recent years is not the one to turn to, is it? Especially disppointing with a library like this, as the chosen instruments are very capable and would, if only that capability had been exploited, be very-very useful for more snappy, zestful, up-tempo musical work.

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[wst3]

I have the existing drama toolkits, and I LOVE the sounds. This new installment sounds just as glorious, and I may well pick it up, not sure yet if I will wait for a big sale.

The workflow is fascinating, and I think pretty clever, except I have a difficult time controlling the libraries, my hands just aren't that accurate.

I did find a way to map velocity to the dust bin and then map a continuous controller to velocity - cumbersome, and it defeats one of the lauded features - the ability to use both hands. I should probably figure out a way to use a foot pedal?

Unless, of course, I am missing something obvious!

I think I shall spend some time with the first British Drama Toolkit this morning!

[stonzthro]

It sounds good for what it does, but I think Albion NEO covers probably 90% of this ground already.

[Lawrence]

Yes, it sounds great. No doubt about it. All the more a pity, I find, that they’ve focused, yet again, almost exclusively on the slow and very slow side of things. With Andy Blaney increasingly out of the picture — I don’t know whether that is actually true, but that’s definitely how it looks — there seems to be nobody left at Spitfire who will remind the production and development teams that there is also such a thing as faster paced music, and now their penchant for noire, dark, nordic, barely mobile vistas of soporific sound for insomniacs appears to be very much defining the bulk of their output.

If you want or need to do something upbeat and jolly, or anything that requires nimble, agile instrumental parts, Spitfire’s output of recent years is not the one to turn to, is it? Especially disppointing with a library like this, as the chosen instruments are very capable and would, if only that capability had been exploited, be very-very useful for more snappy, zestful, up-tempo musical work.

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Totally agree. It was my second thought-“oh, no way to play anything with even moderate movement.” Still, the one trick it does is awfully nice.