Spitfire Audio has announced the availability of ABBEY ROAD ONE: WONDROUS FLUTES—following the similarly smaller ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS and ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS sample libraries captured in that same studio as another customizable classic film-inspired addition to sound palettes the world over, offering a flute and piccolo pairing popularised by the likes of American musical maestro John Williams’ Star Wars themes, themselves clearly counting amongst the most widely-known contributions to modern film music.
As Abbey Road Studios’ Studio One is one of the world’s premier destinations for film scoring, adding the emotion, mood, and magic to the greatest cinematic storytelling of the last 40 years as the world’s largest purpose-built recording studio, it is hardly surprising that it recently found favour with Thomas Newman and Alan Silvestri, to name but two notable American composers who walked through its iconic doors to respectively record their pre-pandemic scores to the Oscar-winning 1917 and box office-busting Avengers: Endgame during 2019, as well as playing host to dynamic duo Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab’s score to the multi-million- selling Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order action-adventure game that same year. Yet arguably less surprising is the fact that ABBEY ROAD ONE: WONDROUS FLUTES found Spitfire Audio at Abbey Road Studios’ Studio One, after which this latest addition to the sound-specialising British music technology company’s classic film-inspired ABBEY ROAD ONE: FILM SCORING SELECTIONS series owes (part of) its notable name.
Working with Abbey Road Studios in a continued creative partnership putting the top-tier, sought-after sound of Studio One itself into the hands of modern-day media composers the world over, ABBEY ROAD ONE: WONDROUS FLUTES facilitates a wondrous — and wonderfully-recorded — pairing of woodwind, with a piccolo sounding an octave higher than the flutes to double the same part, producing a common, classic sound suited to all genres. Its influences clearly come from the likes of John Williams’ widely-known Star Wars themes... think second theme statement by the trumpets in bars 12-17 in the opening of 1977’s game-changing Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, where a piccolo plays sounding an octave above two flutes. Fast-forwarding for another acclaimed example, ‘This Is Berk’ from the Oscar-nominated score to 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon by British film composer John Powell features flutes with a piccolo playing the melody an octave above, accompanying the stirring strings between bars 46-49.
It is, indeed, a commonly-used musical device, yet one that can quickly and easily be created with ABBEY ROAD ONE: WONDROUS FLUTES. Fortunately time spent otherwise layering and mixing can be saved since this has been achieved naturally in the spacious surroundings of Studio One’s renowned recording room — measuring impressively in excess of 90ft/28m by 50ft/16m — while also capturing that sought-after studio sound with a stunning-sounding selection of onboard mics and mixes options that are consistent across the whole of the ABBEY ROAD ONE: FILM SCORING SELECTIONS series, with flutes singing so beautifully in the wondrous reverberant acoustics of Studio One.
Perfectly positioned to put ABBEY ROAD ONE: WONDROUS FLUTES into its rightful place in the ABBEY ROAD ONE: FILM SCORING SELECTIONS series, Spitfire Audio co- founder and composer Paul Thomson begins by saying, “Each of these selections is designed to do a particular job incredibly well, and we’ve come up with new techniques for sampling, and for recording the different types of elements that we need to get the performance to be absolutely brilliant,” before diving deeper: “What you’re hearing here is two flutes and a piccolo an octave above them — a common pairing in the orchestral repertoire. It pretty much matches up the range of the piccolo with the range of the flute, so you’re getting a very close-matched timbre between the two instruments. You’ve got the body and fatness of the two flutes, and then you've got the kind of extra sparkly, slightly more piercing sound of the piccolo playing the same note but an octave up, which is very useful.”
ABBEY ROAD ONE: WONDROUS FLUTES is available as an AAX-, AU-, VST2-, and VST3-compatible, NKS (Native Kontrol Standard)-ready plug-in that loads directly into a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) at an attractive MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) of only £49.00 GBP (inc. VAT)/$49.00 USD/€49.00 EUR (inc. VAT) from here: https://www.spitfireaudio.com/
The ABBEY ROAD ONE: FILM SCORING SELECTIONS series-inaugurating ABBEY ROAD ONE: ORCHESTRAL FOUNDATIONS is itself available as an AAX-, AU-, VST2-, and VST3-compatible, NKS-ready plug-in that loads directly into a DAW for an MSRP of £399.00 GBP (inc. VAT)/ $449.00 USD/€449.00 EUR (inc. VAT) — from here: spitfireaudio.com/
Spitfire Audio’s namesake Spitfire Audio application allows anyone to buy now and download anytime, and is available for free from here: spitfireaudio.com/
For more in-depth info, including some superb-sounding audio demos, please visit the dedicated ABBEY ROAD ONE: WONDROUS FLUTES webpage here: spitfireaudio.com/
Watch Paul Thomson’s ‘traditional’ walkthrough of ABBEY ROAD ONE: WONDROUS FLUTES here: youtu.be/eo1u_yC01Gk
