Abbey Road One, BBCSO and Albion ONE — What's the Difference?

hi there christian henson from spitfire audio here it's a real honor to be talking to you directly for the first time about this exciting new chapter for spitfire audio our new collaboration with abbey road now what often happens is i'll hang around and watch and look on various uh different social media platforms and on various different forums to see the questions that are being asked after we release a new major kind of blue chip line the reason i do that is then so i can make a film like this to cover maybe some of the questions that being asked and the overriding question introducing this new collaboration to the spitfire canon is that of well choice and the confusion that that can bring choice is something that paul and i have always believed in we really don't like the idea of everyone using the same tools making the same kind of music we believe choice is important for us as composers as is nuanced as is treating these virtual instruments the samples of real instruments like real instruments the fact that these will inform the way that we write the way that we kind of craft our art i think is something that's very important and therefore just like you would get with a fender telecaster jaguar or stratocaster it's important that we have nuanced differences we have choices composers and it seems that many of you isolated similarities between our bbc library albion one library and this new orchestral foundations library with abbey road so i thought i'd just basically do some instant comparisons between the three and take you through what i think are the differences and why i think it's important to have this choice i'm going to break this up into three sections possibly the most important component is sound they're three very different rooms and two very different styles of orchestra secondly use including ease of use and thirdly journey these are massive investments for all of us so it's important to know where we're headed and where we'd like to go and finally i'll end up on answering the question of can you mix and match use these different libraries together so you can jump straight to any of those sections in the contents down below but first let's look at or listen to the sound so what i thought we'd do is listen to strings on the tree mics on all three of the libraries now these two libraries load up with beautiful mixes all pre-loaded but then you have all of these fantastic microphones to go through so what i'm going to go for is the tree which is just the array of microphones that sit above the conductor's head albion recorded in our birthplace air studios which is a grand beautiful hall in north london the actual floor space is relatively small which basically means the walls are quite close the instruments providing this fantastic early reflection which duplicates the sound and then sends it up into the ceiling where there's all of this wonderful reverberation it's the most ambient of the rooms that we work in secondly bbc also not a purpose-built studio recorded in a former roller skating rink made of ale studios now this is a bigger room than air studios you can fit more people in there you can fit an orchestra and a choir in there but it does have a very compact feel with low ceilings so again the walls are quite close to the instruments they have that duplicating early reflection kind of sonic to them but it doesn't have the ceiling space of air studios so it is the least ambient of the rooms that we work in and finally abbey road which is possibly the largest purpose-built studio on the planet absolutely enormous you can easily fit 300 players and singers into there i liken it to an acoustic guitar body with a bass acoustic guitar you need a really big body to kind of resonate the sound and that is the effect of abbey road one it just has this hugeness to it particularly in the low end without all of the reverberation so starting with some pizzicatos let's have a listen to albion one at air studios you hear there's that beautiful bloom and then compare that to made of ale [Music] this is a much much shorter decay and then abby road [Music] so do you see what i mean about the kind of hugeness of abbey road one it is if you compare it to air studios it is less reverberant much shorter reverberation but you feel that it's a kind of a bigger space that you're working within let's have a listen to some short notes spiccatos [Music] air studios abby one so back to made a veil it's great it's got so much definition about it made of ale and then abby one [Music] you'll hear it has a kind of looser fatter sound to it and let's try some long notes classic hollywood low some octaves between the cellos and basses all three libraries use dynamic layers so we've recorded the different timbral differences between loud and soft now for long notes you switch between or mix between these using your modulation wheel i'm using a combination of expression and modulation and then for the short notes it's just velocity how loud you're playing it so again with albion one air studios [Music] [Music] bbcso and abby one i think it's important to mention that i'm using the expensive pro version of bbcso to really compare them i should switch down to core and you can see once i do that that you don't have that selection of microphones it's simply a single mix now going back to those dynamic layers that you change both with velocity for the shorts and with your modulation wheel for the longs i think it's really important to mention that of all three of these libraries abbey road one has the most detail in that respect this is because abbey road one is us laying out our stall so what does that mean well in the case of albion one and bbcso in order to create complete all-in-one packages they don't quite have the number of dynamic layers that abbey road one does so if you listen to these amazing brass you get a real uh kind of panoply of tone colors there in fact five dynamic layers where bbcso and albion one just have three so let's count them one two three four five as for the bands themselves abby and albion are basically a fixed band so the kind of band you'll hear on most soundtracks bbc so is an actual symphony orchestra they sit next to each other in the same positions day in day out for me the fixed bands have a more homogeneous blended sound so the differences between the sections are not as pronounced whereas the symphony orchestra the bbc symphony orchestra is something that is more hand-picked and evolved over many years so you will hear slightly more pronounced characteristics certainly between the different string sections right onto use now i think it's really important to go back to the origination of each of these concepts what we thought they were going to be used for and how people were going to use them and what type of users would use them albion one's orchestral elements are organized into ensembles which are designed pre-orchestrated to play two-handed a compositional tool great for us keyboard players producers but also composers who want to hear roughly what it's going to sound like before digging deep and getting into the orchestration album one is just basically designed for very epic modern sounding scores akin to han zimmer and has cinematic percussion synth loops everything that you need to get going creating modern hybrid orchestral scores there's a similarity between albion one and the bbc symphony orchestra in so much as the bbc symphony orchestra is everything a whole symphony orchestra in a single box everything you would need from that symphony orchestra all the different styles soloists percussion things organized not in ensembles but by sections so you've got your flute section and then a solo flute you've got your first violin second violins violas cellos bases all separated out it is as much an orchestration tool as it is a compositional one it's not designed really for two-handed use it's all about thinking about each harmonic line as if it is a voice and building up harmonies in a linear fashion not in a chordal fashion now the other really important thing we bore people to tears time and time again at spitfire audio is is part of our absolute core belief is that you shouldn't record samples differently from real music so we've always approached in the last 13 years now sampling just the same as we would film scores and when you record film scores you use mics lots of them and we want to give people that mixing power within our plugins and naturally with abbey road the best microphone cupboard in the world we weren't going to skimp on microphones there so there are similarities between abby one and albion one in the sense that orchestral foundations is like albion one everything you need to kind of get going with the amazing cinematic sound that you can create in abbey road but it also has an enormous array of microphones not only because it was recorded in abbey road because this is just the foundations the beginning of a massive train set that we're going to be building with you over the next few years i'm going to come back to that let's just talk about users for me albion one suits me as a user i'm a pop keyboard player drum and bass producer and come very much out of the programming and playing point of view albion one plays into that aesthetic that i can jam in a synth line that it just happens to be an orchestra it's a great fear-free introduction into orchestral music without having to think like an orchestrator bbc symphony orchestra however is all of the different threads required to build up your canvas all of the different colors and brushes for your painting if you will and this doesn't mean that you need to be massively theoretically knowledgeable or have studied orchestration you just need to think more along orchestral lines this is less of a synth made out of an orchestra and more all of the orchestral ingredients you need to build up true orchestral symphonic arrangements abbey road one orchestral foundations is basically a starting point for everyone so if you're like me drum and bass producer who likes to play two-handed then it's a great entry point into the world of abbey road one and it gives you a wonderfully varied foundation of brass woodwinds strings and percussion it also has this massive microphone set because of where we're taking it we're going to be expanding these packs that are based on two-handed pre-orchestrated ideas but also in the next months and years to come a whole new modular system and this is when we need to start talking about journeys journeys again this ties in with choice and the various different journeys we should all embark on the single most important thing to develop as a composer as a professional is your own voice and by offering choice there's a whole different bunch of trajectories that you can go on i think what's very common with the next step from albion one is people wanting to find greater definition in what they do album one's great for these kind of block chords but what will naturally start happening the more you use it is you'll get these little intricate inner parts that you really want to eke out [Music] so a lot of people naturally move on from albion to our symphonic range also recorded in the hall at air studios the journey for bbc symphony users is a much more obvious one starting with bbc discover which is free if you're unable to pay for it and you can then switch up to core which will be your first leap into professional grade sampling everything you need to make broadcast quality master recordings and then finally into pro which is as it suggests a real pro-end encyclopedia of the symphony orchestra with no less encyclopedic attention to mic signals finally settling on abbey road one and what i find really exciting about this is the way that we've started we've started as a compositional aid regardless of which direction you're then going to take it in we're going to be creating packs along the lines of orchestral foundations which are going to be easy to use general use for everyone whether you're a drummond baser or a experienced orchestrator they will be instant gratification easy to use spring out of the box but also because we've got all of these mic positions they will integrate into this much more detailed modular system coming soon so regardless of your skills whether you go for all of these different modules that we're going to be building of the separate strings in their separate sections and different soloists you'll still probably use orchestral foundations as your writing kit the thing that you can take wherever you go to mock up sketchup stuff before you start expanding into the various different nuanced areas of detail that we're going to be exploring with you over the next few years and what's different about the approach to abbey road one this new chapter a new opportunity is not only are we going to be collaborating with them on this we're going to be collaborating with you but what about the albions and bbc are we turning our back on them of course not well with albion which are organized kind of by genre we added one to the range only just this year albion neo and indeed to the symphonic range so if you're moving on into that we expanded that with symphonic motions and as we've been saying for quite a while now it's been difficult to get into the studio we're working on improving these libraries all the time air as i mentioned earlier is our birthplace and we're not gonna abandon it and as for bbcso well there's something that's quite complete about the symphonic orchestra it's a symphony orchestra and we've recorded pretty much everything that we want to but there are other opportunities coming with bbc for example we're hoping to get in there to record a piano before the studio shuts we're having difficulties at the moment because of covid but where bbc is concerned we're also really committed to making more and more content to take advantage of the collaborative nature of bbc so and whatever tier that you own you can look under the hood and see what we've done with our various different arrangements and tutorials as i mentioned before it's all about choice and choice is a good thing for us composers but the question that always is asked whenever we go into a different room whether that be air one or british grove or abbey road is can you use these libraries together and the good news is of course you can most film schools you listen to are recorded in a multitude of locations say a bamboo flute in a in a writing room like this with a string section recorded at air and percussion recorded at abbey road one even the hall itself has booths around the side so you can shove a harp in so they can be heard and close miked our ears are incredibly sensitive to to nuance but not necessarily detail i did a film recently that talked about the fact that our brains are not able to compute all of the different frequencies that you would find say listening to some waves crashing on a beach they're all in there but we're very very susceptible to the character of sound if i speak like this as opposed to if i speak like this the tone is the same the words are the same but the character is different and one will sponsor a different emotional response from you so fortunately we have evolved over the many millennia to develop an understanding of nuance proximity scale but not necessarily whether something's been recorded in the same room or not once we mix them all together our ears have no need to perform that [Music] separation [Music] and what all engineers do when they're mixing orchestral material together the aforementioned bamboo flute in a composer's writing room the strings in air studios the brass and abby is to apply a bit of splosh this adds to the epic widescreen cinematic sound that we're used to i'm going to use my current favorite which is the fab filter and this is the one that sounds like the medium warm haul that uh most engineers use on the tc6000 an incredibly expensive reverb unit right and that should glue it all together and you tell me whether this tiny excerpt sounds like it's been recorded in loads of different [Music] rooms as i mentioned before these are like instruments when we use instruments to compose they influence the outcome of that composition if you write something on an acoustic guitar compared to say an electric guitar it's likely that you're going to play into the characteristic of that instrument and that's no different with different orchestras in different rooms the orchestra itself will be responding to the space and your compositions will bloom and naturally lean into the aspects of those orchestral recordings and those rooms in a manner that will affect the outcome of your composition which is again why choice is important abbey road one orchestral foundations is the beginning of a really interesting journey one where we encourage you to find your own voice whether that is through detailed orchestration and really getting into the physics of voicing your orchestras or indeed by simply picking up some interesting packs that combine with what you already have to create something that is wholly yours i hope this has answered some of the questions if i haven't place some more in the questions down below and i will keep an eye on them and try and get back to you personally i'm just about to start a new film project and something i'm really looking forward to is having the pick of three of the greatest rooms for recording orchestras in the uk is it going to be an abbey score is it going to be an air score or is it going to be the bbc symphony orchestra recorded in a roller skating rink thanks as always for watching do subscribe if you haven't done plenty more information about abbey road coming it is as i say the beginning of a massive journey so ding that bell if you want to be notified the next time we put a video up and one of those always much appreciated see you next time

Channel: Spitfire Audio

Views: 50,457

Rating: 4.9034481 out of 5

Keywords: spitfire audio, bbcso, bbc symphony orchestra, abbey road one, orchestral foundations, comparison, albion one

Id: x4tb4BH1tM4

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020