Experiments in Scoring

I’ve been working for a while with the amazing BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover from Spitfire Audio in some of my tracks lately. For those of you who have not encountered this, Spitfire are a company who produce deep sampled libraries aimed predominatly at film scoring – though of course they are useful for many musical projects.

I always judge a company by the quality of its freebies, and Spitfire really hit the mark here. I discovered them via their LABS project, which is a series of sampled libraries (mosty a bit more experimental) which are free ane very, very good.  I’ve never quite got on with the orchestral sounds in Ableton Live Suite, and so when I heard that Spitfire were also offering a free cut down version of one of their core orchestral libraries I jumped at this.  The BBCSO Discover costs £49, but if you complete a short survey you can receive the library for free after a wait of 2 weeks. This has most of the instruments from the orchestra, albeit with limited articulations, but it’s a very good start.

When Spitfire had their “black weekend” sale this year the more complete versions were 40% off, and as an owner of discover the £49 cost of that (even though I had it free) was deducted first, so the next step up  – The Core version  – came in at £210 for me. This has the same instruments as the Discover, plus some additional percussion and more articulations, though it is missing some more obscure instruments (Cor Anglais, Contrabasson, Bass Tuba, Cimbasso), the Lead (solo) strings and the more extensive mic signals.

Excellent as their Corporate Responsibility is (paying royalties to the musicians as well as just session rates, for example) Spitfire are obviously also shrewd salesmen and of course had a rather nice freebie (Aperture – The Stack, which I’ll probably rant about later) if you spent £300.

What’s a man to do..?

Well, Spitfire also have some very nice low priced libraries, so I added Abbey Road Legendary Low Strings, and Originals Intimate Strings and Brass and Woodwinds (these latter from their basic £29 a set range which again I will wax lyrical about as they are very good).

I set about playing with these, and played out the main motif of this track on my keyboard after which the track kind of wrote itself.

I used all the libraries I had bought, along with the Christmas offering from LABS and I hope you will agree the quality is pretty damn good.

Of course the track was obviously a score – but to what?

I have been playing about with DaVinci resolve to make some videos for my Requiem Ensanglante material, so I thought I’d just build the clip to fit the score. The clips come from Pexels.

I hope you like it.