RECORDING January 2023 - 38

-by John Czerwinski
folk instruments were sampled with up to 7 different
beater options (including brushes!) per drum.
Multiple striking positions and techniques were
employed to provide a high level of detail.
Download and Install
Spitfire Audio
Abbey Road Orchestra:
Low Percussion
An incredibly detailed and
expressive low percussion library
Spitfire has partnered once again with the venerable Abbey Road
Studios for an exciting new library geared toward the professional film
scorer, orchestral composer and sound designer. Abbey Road Orchestra
looks to be a premier offering for those who need complete control over
each orchestral section in 'breathtaking detail.' The first installment, Low
Percussion, is an incredibly detailed, dynamic and responsive instrument
library and certainly a harbinger of some amazing things to come!
Welcome Back to Studio One
The Spitfire/Abbey Road collaboration began in 2020 with the Abbey
Road One: Orchestral Foundations library (reviewed April 2020), designed
to help composers work quickly and efficiently to produce great-sounding
tracks with minimal effort. Other Abbey Road offerings included various
instrument-focused entries, including a pair of famous pianos-Mrs. Mills
(Reviewed June 2021) and Jangle Box (Reviewed October 2021).
Low Percussion
To faithfully capture the diverse timbres and expressiveness of the low
percussion section of the orchestra, Spitfire employed one of Britain's
most accomplished percussionists, Joby Burgess (Ad Astra, Black Panther
and Mission: Impossible), and Grammy-award winning engineer Simon
Rhodes (Skyfall, Spectre and Avatar). In total, 20 traditional orchestral and
38 RECORDING January 2023
Like many Spitfire offerings, Low Percussion employs
a dedicated plugin (VST, AU and AAX) instead
of just being a collection of samples hosted
in a 3rd party VSTi. Once the 95.3 GB library
is downloaded and installed with the handy Spitfire
App, call up the instrument in your DAW and
you're ready to compose!
The Low Percussion Player
The player's main page opens to the preset selector,
complete with volume and dynamics sliders
and the familiar, configurable Spitfire big knob.
You can scroll horizontally through the instruments
one at a time, but by selecting the drop-down
menu, the instruments are presented in list form.
To make instrument selection easier, Spitfire has
provided a handy Playback button that triggers a
short example of the preset without having to actually
load the instrument-a great time saver.
The lower half of the main page contains the
technique selector, which selects the all-important
striking implement. Depending on the instrument,
users have up to seven options, including sticks,
mallets with various felt hardness, poly-beaters,
brushes, rutes or even hands. You can select just
one or shift-click to select multiple tools. An All-InOne
switch conveniently provides all the different
implements used in the patch.
Zoning Out
The lower half of the screen shows the layout of
the instrument zones spread across the keyboard.
Instruments are set with Right/Left Mapping as the
default. This duplicates the sample set an octave
apart on two sides of the keys and can be disabled
for single-handed playing.
RECORDING January 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of RECORDING January 2023
