Your Score in an Instant

Immerse yourself in a new world of brass and reeds — a stunning sound palette of 99 patches, brought to life with our unique and intuitive Layers technology. Instantly sparking inspiration on the first play, it’s every composer’s dream — the ability to finish a whole cue within a single patch. Made in collaboration with award-winning composer Samuel Sim, intricately workshopped techniques from a range of solo brass and woodwind instruments (including saxophones, recorders, and flugelhorn) are presented in various combinations — each offering a full spectrum of emotion and expression.

For anyone looking to embrace a new approach to scoring — and a fresh alternative to string instruments — this sophisticated toolkit offers instant creative freedom. British Drama Toolkit: Brass & Reeds intuitively matches the intensity at which your fingers hit the keyboard by selecting from three different velocity layers – layering textural beds with characterful, emotive lead lines — unlocking a world of sound in every patch.

“This is a great library! It sounds very live and intuitive to work with.”

– Ruth Barrett

  A WORLD OF EMOTION IN EVERY PATCH

Recorded in Castlesound Studios in Edinburgh, Scotland, this comprehensive 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 offer a genuine sense of reality, with notes firing off each other in different ways, to add nuance, depth, and humanity to your scores.

In contrast to our epic orchestral libraries, the immediate and intimate sound of a smaller band more effectively reflects the introspective moods, character, and emotion found in TV and film drama — but these sounds can also be layered with bigger libraries to complement epic soundscapes, or processed and warped to create unique textures.

VELOCITY-LED LAYERS TECHNOLOGY

Our inbuilt Layers technology is unique to the British Drama Toolkit series, allowing you to compose, arrange and complete a cue in one pass. Since faders are not required (although Expression, Attack, and Release controls are available within the plugin, as well as velocity sensitivity control via the Dynamics slider), you have the flexibility to play with both hands to achieve a beautifully intricate, dynamic, and musical sound — improvising and sketching on the fly as you would on a piano.

The magic begins as soon as your fingers hit the keyboard. Depending on the intensity at which you hit the keys, the plugin selects from up to three velocity layers (Texture, Soft & Loud), with varying expressive performances within each layer. It’s a unique experience, offering ultimate creative control as well as the opportunity to listen and move intuitively, responding to the varying lengths of notes and subtle shifts present within each technique.

The velocity layer grid comprises three distinct layers:

• Texture – pads, textural beds, subtle movements, pulsing repetitions and re-blowing
• Soft – muted tones, suited to subtle moments or moments of dialogue
• Loud – characterful, expressive lead lines with a soloistic feel

“A really useful addition to the studio – as with so many of the Spitfire Libraries I can definitely see this providing inspiration and helping to get an idea off the ground in a hurry.”

 – Ben Foster

 SAMUEL SIM

Composer Samuel Sim has won multiple awards for his deep, gritty TV and film drama scores — with credits including the epic Netflix series The Dark Crystal, the BBC’s Showtrial, and The Spanish Princess.

Writing scores often requires a huge amount of music, and working to tight deadlines. Teaming up with Spitfire Audio, Sim’s unique vision was to create a toolkit that removes the barriers between musical ideas and their realization. Since velocity sensitivity can dramatically amplify the character and emotion of your music by creating nuanced and realistic-sounding performances, one patch is capable of a huge range of expression — allowing you to respond instinctively to the drama, rather than get sucked into what Sim calls “the vortex of the computer”.

The result is a living and breathing palette of sounds designed for those looking for that spark of inspiration, with the tools needed to get your ideas down quickly – ready for wherever your imagination may take you.

KEY FEATURES

• 99 Patches
• Dedicated Plugin
• In-built Velocity-led Layers technology, featuring three distinctive layers of recordings
• Signals (2):
  • Close – Close intimate mix capturing every detail of the instrument
  • Tree – Medium distance signal with added depth
• Sections (5):
  • Double Reeds:
    • Contrabassoon
    • Bassoon
    • Cor Anglais
    • Oboe
  • Recorders:
    • Recorder Ensemble
  • Saxophones:
    • Bass Sax
    • Bari Sax
    • Alto Sax
  • Brass:
    • Tuba
    • Bass Trombone
    • Tenor Trombone
    • Tenor Horn
    • Flugelhorn
  • Combis
• 23658 samples
• ~8GB download size

For more information visit Spitfire Audio: www.spitfireaudio.com/british-drama-toolkit-brass-and-reeds

  AVAILABILITY & PRICING

Link: www.spitfireaudio.com/british-drama-toolkit-brass-and-reeds

Drama Toolkit Collection page link: www.spitfireaudio.com/drama-toolkit-collection

RRP: £169 / $199 / 199€

Promo Period: £129 / $149 / 149€

Promo Crossgrade: £109 / $129 / 129€ *

* A discount for anyone who owns British Drama Toolkit or Contemporary Drama Toolkit

Promo period ends April 6th, 2023

 About Samuel Sim (https://www.samuelsim.com)

Samuel Sim is a British composer, producer, and songwriter. His scores for Film & Television have won numerous awards and accolades including BAFTA and Ivor Novello Award nominations.

Alongside his Film & TV scores, his work also spans concert works, songwriting, and production.

Recent works include the hit drama series Showtrial for BBC ONE, the Emmy Award Winning Netflix epic The Dark Crystal, and the highly critically acclaimed Anne for ITV1.

About Spitfire Audio (www.spitfireaudio.com)

Spitfire Audio is a British music technology company that specializes in sounds — sample libraries, virtual instruments, and other useful software devices. It collaborates with the best composers, artists, and engineers in the world to build musical tools that sound great and are exciting to use.

Spitfire Audio was founded by two award-winning composers: Christian Henson and Paul Thomson. Born out of their shared dissatisfaction with string sample libraries, they pooled their resources and decided to record their own string samples at the legendary Air Studios in London. Initially, they invited a limited number of friends and associates to own copies of their samples, but whispers of this private sample club soon started to echo across the Atlantic Ocean throughout the composer community. Within a year, some of the most renowned composers in film and television signed up, so Paul and Christian decided to take their samples public.

To date, Spitfire Audio has recorded and released over 100 sample libraries, collaborating with some of the biggest names in media composition, including Hans Zimmer, Eric Whitacre, Ólafur Arnalds & the London Contemporary Orchestra. Spitfire Audio’s sounds are heard in everything, from major Hollywood film scores to recordings by Radiohead and U2. Paul and Christian’s initial side project is now a thriving international music technology enterprise, with a uniquely experienced and diverse workforce, all focused on a shared mission: to inspire a generation of composers. The composer team remains at the center of the business, drawing on their own experience as obsessive music makers to explore the needs and wants of their fellow composers.