Spitfire Audio has announced a partnership with world-famous Abbey Road Studios, showcasing the foundational film scoring sound of Studio One on Abbey Road One: Orchestral Foundations. They have carefully captured a full, symphony-sized (90-plus-piece) orchestra inside the world’s largest purpose-built recording studio, with world-class musicians recorded by four-time Grammy Award-winning engineer Simon Rhodes using Abbey Road Studios’ selection of microphones, creating the sampled core of an easy-to-use virtual instrument library. Split into strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion, pre-orchestrated as a perfect fit for established music-makers (wanting to quickly sketch an idea at high quality) and newcomers (learning how to write for an orchestra) alike.
Abbey Road Studios is among the most famous recording studio in the world and a global music icon. As the world’s first purpose-built recording studio, opening on November 12, 1931, almost anyone who’s musically anyone has walked up the entrance steps to 3 Abbey Road in London’s St John’s Wood. While embracing classical recordings and big bands to the first British rock ’n’ roll records, and defining the sound of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and beyond, Abbey Road Studios has been home to the artists who have shaped music history and popular culture — from The Beatles, Pink Floyd, U2, and Oasis to Florence + The Machine, Kanye West, Adele, and Frank Ocean.
Kickstarted by John Williams’ scintillating score to director Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning Raiders of the Lost Ark, Abbey Road Studios has become 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. It has played host to numerous notable film scores, spanning Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (John Williams), Hollow Man (Jerry Goldsmith), Iris (James Horner), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Howard Shore), several Harry Potter scores, King Arthur (Hans Zimmer), and Gravity (Steven Price) through to more recent releases such as the multi-award-winning The Shape of Water (Alexandre Desplat), Black Panther (Ludwig Göransson), 1917 (Thomas Newman), and Avengers: Endgame (Alan Silvestri) — all attracted to the acoustics of Studio One, the world’s largest purpose-built recording studio that can comfortably accommodate a large symphony orchestra or chorus.
Since Spitfire Audio has been writing its own chapter into recording history as a British music technology company that specializes in sounds — sample libraries, virtual instruments, and other useful software devices, collaborating with composers, artists, and engineers to build musical tools that are exciting to use.
“Abbey Road, for most people, is synonymous with The Beatles, but for us film composers it is synonymous with the sound of cinema,” says Spitfire Audio Co-Founder Christian Henson, concurring: “The whole idea behind Spitfire Audio was to approach recording samples exactly the same way you would film scores — same place, same microphones, same people, so it’s only natural that we would end up in this iconic location: Abbey Road Studio One. You can get 200 players in here, which gives you a lot of scope for that kind of big Hollywood sound, but also it probably has the best microphone cupboard in the world.” Such sentiments are echoed by fellow Spitfire Audio Co-Founder Paul Thomson: “There’s a magic in the air, and it’s the essence of composers who’ve recorded here — incredible composers, like John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Alan Silvestri, Thomas Newman... Edward Elgar, of course. Almost everybody on the planet will have heard a piece of music that has been recorded in this room.”
ABBEY ROAD ONE: FILM SCORING SELECTIONS is made up of essential sounds from a symphonic ensembles-based library, courtesy of a 90-plus-piece orchestra — comprising strings; brass (four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two bass trombones, one contrabass trombone, one tuba); and woodwinds (one piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, one cor anglais, two clarinets, one bass clarinet, two bassoons, and one contrabass bassoon); plus percussion (performed by three players on a huge selection of instruments) — carefully captured inside the world’s largest purpose-built recording studio, with world-class first-call musicians recorded by four-time Grammy Award-winning engineer Simon Rhodes using Abbey Road Studios’ stunning selection of microphones, magically creating the supremely sampled core of an easy-to-use expandable library like no other as a perfect fit for established music-makers and newcomers alike. And all pre-orchestrated, so no need, necessarily, to understand how the individual instruments lock together.
ABBEY ROAD ONE: ORCHESTRAL FOUNDATIONS is available to pre-order as an AAX-, AU-, VST2-, and VST3-compatible, NKS-ready plug-in that loads directly into a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) for an introductory price of £299.00 GBP/$349.00 USD until December 1. It is available to download Nov. 5.
For more info, including audio demos, visit the ABBEY ROAD ONE: ORCHESTRAL FOUNDATIONS webpage here: spitfireaudio.com/
