How We Made ALBION (and how it changed our lives)

time to put on the glasses for story time so that's 5 4 3 2 1 in the last vlog entry we celebrated the two-year anniversary of this channel and it made me at the pub that night reflect on you know the number of different kind of weird events that conspire to me being in Scotland 47 years old with a youtube channel with 30,000 subscribers and there are many things that I could cite from going back to having piano lessons to flunking out of school to being kicked out of a sample forum but if there was one single thing that you could remove from that chain of events which would mean the outcome was different that would be albion the whole of this Spitfire Odyssey success hinges on albion it's the thing that made paul and i pivot our lives our families our careers entirely into a different direction and talking of paul well one of the greatest pleasures of spitfire audio this odyssey has been its centering around this successful collaborative relationship and i think one of the things that makes it successful is that we don't come to each other with finished products or ideas for finished products we come to each other with a notion at the very beginning the notion the whole thing that if our audio is based on is why do people record samples differently from music what would it be like if we would approach it instead of making samples of making music one note at a time and another more recent notion was why is it that our favourite samples are always the quietest layers why don't we make a library that's just the quiet stuff became tundra and Albion well I have to be candid with you Paul and I had had this bespoke sampling project about 30 customers for about two years and we'd made that age-old mistake of going here are our earnings coming in and we spend it on stuff going out and when the taxman comes and says can I have some of that money that's come in we go note because we've spent it all on our IP works like that doesn't it no it doesn't so we had just the mother of all tax bills it was like being on the Titanic but moving really really slowly it was two years over the horizon simply no way of being able to pay this off so we had to come up with a successful concept that was more mainstream that wasn't just for 30 rich triple-a composers but was more for all composers more for composers that like Paul and art and this is where the notion was born Paul and I as jobbing musicians you know I was about 10 15 projects deep at any given time so time was not on my side and what I found with orchestral samples even the ones that we were making is the complexity of use and the sheer scale of the libraries slowed me down the fact that we had hundreds of different articulations meant that I was kind of wading through the weeds when I was trying to absolutely smash these cues out also I was pinned here to my work not here to but to a studio that was similar pinned to the spot there was no way that I could make any orchestral music other than here the concept of being able to write on a plane or be able to repair a cue in a mix or indeed work from a hotel room was simply absurd I remember I was feeling really hungover and I was on a double-decker bus in London and I was just having this horrific kind of paranoid anxiety attack about this tax bill and this notion arrived and I immediately got off the bus in Trafalgar Square and I ran up Paul and said Paul I had a notion he said what is it I said of all the terabytes of samples that you have what percentage do you use ninety-five percent at the time and he said at best five percent maybe even two percent and therein lies the question what if we were to make a library that just contained that 5% and I remember Paul's initial response was so kind of an orchestral library I said yet what an orchestral library but not based on sections on ensembles but also you know those cinematic drums use all the time those amazing kind of Brian Eno he since use time for drama and kind of drama loops that are not full bandwidth but really simple what if we were to make a single package that contained all of those elements all of those elements required to make modern film schools and so blitzkrieg was born I remember pitching it to our accountant and actually the success of album one it's the first time he's witnessed it has exceeded the business plan we made by 20,000 percent anyway he said to me Christian taught of this kind of War II stuff it's a bit kind of depressing isn't it a bit negative so I took that observation to an amazing mix engineer called Gertz Bart Bernhardt he's from Germany and I said Kurt's bit scream good bad word he went Christian bad word bad word so it then became Albion based on a the name of it I believer pete doherty tall or not it might have even been an album but basic my wife was on tour with Pete Doherty and we had this poster and it wasn't because of the name album that my I used to be drawn to or Pete Doherty or indeed my wife's name it was the guy who was heard on the bill he used to draw my attention often just thinking about when our kids were growing up at what point we were gonna have to remove this poster so we went into this servicing that initial idea for the marketplace that it was really quick and easy to use you could slam out queues in seconds and that you could do it on the red-eye between LA and New York what we didn't realize was Albion would also be the perfect entry point for people starting out in orchestral in film TV games music who hadn't experienced in creating orchestral music who hadn't been to music college just like myself who were confused by the massive array of orchestral sampling and how you use them the steep learning curve so naturally the orchestral element became the focus and this really wasn't my department of excellence so Paul set about studying a whole bunch of scores to establish a consensus of what is that 5% and with thanks in advance to Paul for giving up some of his weekends this weekend to make a little film for us about that when working at what to record for the original Albion we looked at a lot of film scores and a lot of orchestral scores and there were some things that kind of came back with some consistency and a couple of them were things like the celli and basses always played in octaves or at least 95% of the time they were playing in octaves it's a sound that's very difficult to reproduce when you don't record it like that so that was one easy call when the horns and trumpets are playing together they are almost always playing in octaves as well and that's because the ranges just don't overlap we when we looked at the way that we would want to use the low brass again a lot of the time too given the power and the kind of sonority we would go for octaves again it was completely different with the woodwinds the key things for the selections that we made with the woodwinds were that we wanted the option of using the piccolo but we didn't want to have to use the pick line so we recorded two sets we recorded one with piccolo flute clarinet and oboe just throughout the range and then we did another set where as just two flutes at the top when we recorded the violins and the celli one of the things we wanted to be able to reproduce was the sound of ostinatos especially Blake's incredible Austin anthem machine so we looked at the way that that would work best and what we decided was we would reduce the section size and we would record two different styles one that was designed for very very fast very very because his emot-- basically and then one which was slightly more leisurely but still have that kind of feel of just a little brush on the strings we decided to include piano but we didn't want to sample the whole piano so we took inspiration from Jerry Goldsmith scores and we looked at making what we called an attack piano which basically I think sound on sound said it sounded like it was played by a black belt karate master so the key thing the key driver throughout the design of the orchestral section of Albion was what do you hear most in volume recalls back then epic film scores but let's say film schools with breath and a real kind of big dynamic to them what is the way that the orchestra plays in those types of scores and then we went back and kind of reverse engineered and recorded stuff that when you played it back we would just instantly give you that sound out of the box and another key thing final piece of the jigsaw in a way was the inclusion of for mic positions the close mics which are really ugly there to give you extra point and detail the Decca tree with its outriggers to the sides which gives you the full kind of width and the position of the orchestra and then the ambient mics further up which gives you the increased spaciousness and and if you like a kind of slightly extra bit of epic into the recordings and of those original sessions I have to say there's still two patches that very difficult to beat which are the spicata austin often you just hear these still to this day on everything there's an inaccuracy about them and an unevenness that makes them both difficult to work with but also incredibly realistic [Music] there's a romance to sampling you know you think things are going to turn out a certain way and you get these surprises you get these disappointments and this for me is my most favorite patch that we've ever made and we've tried to replicate it and for some reason there was just magic there on the day the way it was balanced the way that it was orchestrated and it's the short flutes patch so it has this kind of Jerry Goldsmith quality what it's also great for kind of John Adams stuff so back then I think there are only five of us and none of us were full-time for spit fast it was Paul who was kind of editing and building and producing the orchestral samples there was me doing kind of artwork and design the GUI for the original Albion and have a look at this you'll see that whilst none of our GUI ever really looks like that it's definitely got the beginning kind of seeds of ideas for all of the contact GUIs we've made since we had Blake Robinson who was doing all of the scripting and lots of amazing tools that we use in the background and lots of QA Andy Blaney who largely was doing the legato programming but also QA and some amazing demos and finally James Bellamy who created our site and the basically the distribution systems and that was it the design fell to me because I was marginally better at Photoshop than Paul and here are the kind of initial design concepts and my brother Ketan Henson is a successful singer-songwriter it's also a really good artist and he is a real kind of as my father a first one was a Victorian wonk and I took that inspiration to create some Victoriana I thought that was a kind of slightly grand time in Britain's history so thought that the kind of combining Albion and the fact there was this horrific sprawling Empire around the world would give this sense of oneness initially the logo was made out of a font called bleeding cowboys and I didn't realize that Keaton said that basically it's against the law to use bleeding Cowboys and they're a site dedicated to P or spotting and taking the piss out of people who did use breeding Cowboys so he gave me the Albion font which is actually something that he built up and designed and you can see from this first version here that neither Paul or I knew how to actually fit it into the contact pane so the keys weren't cut off but we thought that was good enough there was also a kind of roughness to the way we approached Albion which meant that it wasn't as pristine as most other sample libraries so when finding some photography I just I think are googled Victorian photographers and found this guy Roger Fenton is famous for his images of the Crimean War I was of the view that just the way that samples were being made in those days we should just observe it and try to go the opposite way so the look and feel very different but even the way we named stuff I wanted it to be evocative so we named many of the elements after different kind of Victorian characters and people like Brunel Darwin Paul concentrated largely on the orchestra we both collaborated on the percussion ensemble which were what we done over the years was we done a series of free libraries called bang for our consortium of 30 uses just as little freebies that we used to give them at Christmas and stuff and we've learnt that really big percussion instruments actually don't sound that big for kind of repetitive passages so actually Darwin is a series of orchestral percussion sessions there's some Tycho's stuff like that in there but it's largely processed and manipulated into the kind of hyped epic drums that you hear today that I set about working on the loops as I mentioned before the problem with loops they tend to be a bit showy off it you get these full bandwidth things it's like well one it feels like someone else's work just kind of insert it into your own and two there's nowhere else for you to go there was a thing by spectrasonics called meta loops which was massively popular but again it it really had a specific kind of characteristic so I suggested to Paul that I actually create some really organic sounding very plain loops that operated in single band widths and I recorded this with a single km 184 I tracked everything so played everything twice in my flat in Rupert streets so home for anyone who's visited London Rupert Street is a kind of den of iniquity very noisy place so I did it very early mornings after the milkman had been in my corridor so it was kind of quite claustrophobic affair just really tiny corridor with this cam on it for really close miking stuff that I was recording very quietly I remember I did a metal stool I think we still got some of that original material in there to this day a real highlight something that I think is very popular and a much misunderstood instrument is the trumpet fiddle which isn't someone fiddling with the trumpet so I was unpacking some musical instruments that were moved up here three years ago and totally coincidentally I found the original trumpet fiddle this is an instrument from the early kind of 1910s I believe and it's basically it's it's a single string down here this machine head is MCed which is resonated through this gramophone horn here and what's extraordinary is I can see that it's been slightly damaged in the move but what I can see here is I think this may have been actually the needle did that work that it sit on like that and then the horn came out like that yeah because this is definitely falling to bits so that was played tapping using a pencil but also the horn itself but I hear that thing on absolutely everything and I always kind of smile and just remember that day that I went to Hobgoblin and got flogged this piece of trash there's actually been quite successful as a consequence drums Dan loops done and then finally I set about creating sampled synth content Paul and I agreed kind of inexplicably certainly for me that synth stuff that was made out of organic material tended to mix better with organic specifically orchestral material I think that's why you tend to use spring reverb on since because it creates that organic mnestheus ins was made from a lot of the Albion orchestral material but warped and I remember Paul literally got a hot of the presses from air studios and just sent me a bunch of kind of tidbits that I then turned into this library and my favorite was actually created from the celeste that we had recorded for orchestral percussion which actually came out before Albion to see if I can find a Celestion and put this into all sorts of crazy reverbs and it's a real favorite both appalled of mine [Music] then I came up with the idea that we were going to provide his ostinatos you know kind of that kind of stuff really popular at that point it was the height of their popularity so I thought we should provide people with some ostinatos and basically I went about actually physically recording sequences based on the Albion sounds that were hard-baked and I remember Paul and I were working so hard to get this done we're also working on masses of projects as composers that I went to the studio really late at night to try and record these these are sonatas and I remember just being hit by pure like physical exhaustion so much so when I got home I had these symptoms that were like hypothermia and was kind of shivering like an absolute lunatic I remember ringing Paul and saying this and I hate I'd hate to disappoint you but that graveyard shift last night I just wasn't able to do it I basically found my kind of outer envelope and he said Christian don't worry Blake we'll come up with something and Blake basically invented I didn't know the best way of describing is like an orchestral arpeggiator but specifically designed to create ostinatos which I comically called Austin art um and it's really weird whenever I hear people kind of quote this neologism and they go yeah using the Austin awesome like it's like like it's actually a thing it's just a silly thing that I came up with Austin Oh orchestra drums since loops all done packaged together I wrote the user manual I always maintained my eternal penance for never having read a user manual was having to write them for the first I think eight years of spitfires existence indeed the original user manual I've put a little link to it down below if you to have a look at it my ridiculous grammar and poor photoshop chops and it's been extraordinary to look back at these old relics and they all sit in a Dropbox folder that Paul and I share with the codename sandwiches yeah blitzkrieg stroke Albion was originally codenamed sandwiches and the final piece of the puzzle was the walkthroughs now we were real YouTube rookies in those it's basically used YouTube as our kind of cloud server for video tutorials Paul was developing his you know amazing style of walkthrough and I went well let me do the non orchestral once and I don't think I've ever even admitted this to Paul Paul sorry about this but I again because was so massively busy had finished a job hadn't managed to get my walkthrough for the normal Kestrel stuff done and went to a mates birthday party I thought I'll just go back after the birthday party and do a screencast and I am absolutely roasting drunk on that walkthrough and in fact if you have a look at that walkthrough I've time-stamped it below there's a point where I moved the GUI off off off screen time I didn't access something Google something and I just leave for half of the walkthrough you can't actually see the GUI and I was too hammered to notice and so you'll see the kind of rough-and-ready care by nature of what we were doing back there for spitfyre it was released and it was our first series of really amazing awards that we got but still in those days we were talking about one or two units a day so much so that as this kind of Spitfire kind of furnace started building Paul and I used to refer to Albion as a currency so I remember going to visit him in the States and Spitfire had to pay for my flight and I said you know sorry Paul that's that's for Albie ins it's the kind of currency we used to deal with but slowly and gradually and I guess this reminds me of my I have a successful career making library and production music and every once in a while you'll just switch on the telly and something really unexpected will be using your music well it's like that but with knobs on without being it you could just hear it on absolutely everything and what's interesting about it's not only kind of an entry level kind of way of way into orchestral you hear really kind of big composers and you go oh they were clear really up against it because albion comes out when you're stuck what dawns on me is how home made Albion was you know we we thought we were being massive pros back in the day with thinking back to it we would just I mean there are no courses to you know that you can go on to be a sample developer so we are literally making it up as we went along it was a kind of I always describe it it's like you know rubber bands around jam jars in the potting shed at the end of the garden something so whimsical you know a an ocean followed by a bad German word followed by a name inspired by an even worse English word you know something so whimsical has changed our lives forever and without sounding immodest you know I think that that Albion has been an entry point for many people wanting to make kind of big cinematic music working with orchestral sounds for the first time so this kind of whimsical springboard now means that there's a 75 people who work as a bit of farm Paul and myself included and we have royalty department that distributes royalties to I think near on 400 musicians now so we've created another revenue stream for musicians something Paul and I are incredibly proud of and it all started with a notion about four years ago Paul and I we moved on to different products and less than phonic range and all of this kind of stuff now I had to pull up an old queue that had our being in and I started playing it and I rang up Paul I said mate have you checked our Albion recently I think it's just starting to creak a bit we'd learnt so much from making a beam itself and then the subsequent libraries that we'd kind of moved on as Sam place and here a me back me you're not wrong mate it's bit kind of a bit knackered like an old kind of car that's not starting in the morning anymore I said well I think we should go back in create it all over again but take all of the lessons we've learned also a lot of the feedback you know people were loving their unreliable nature of stuff like the Austen Artem the Austen Artem strings but also wanted something a little bit more responsive and bitey so we went back in and recorded what is now referred to as album one when we retired Alby and legacy that was this kind of outcry and I know a lot of our friends went there you sure and I have to say probably the most nerve-wracking experience of port in my life was relieving ourselves of our most popular product because we didn't think it was good enough it was acquired to scratch and replacing it without being one however as I mentioned before to this day there are things that we just can't beat and I think it's poignant that about three weeks ago finished my latest TV series production that I've been working on it's this franchise called inside number nine I think it's ironic that the last queue that I wrote for that was on a coffee table sitting in the lobby of a busy hotel and why was I sitting in that hotel well we were recording maybe I don't know I would call it the next chapter in the Spitfire journey so it's kind of ironic that I was using Albion as it had originally been conceived and the reason why I was having to use Albion was because of Albion thanks as always for watching hope you've enjoyed this story it's been nice to kind of reminisce about the creation of something kind of just so random but so profoundly kind of impactful for Paul and I if you haven't subscribed yet Lots coming up in fact I'm working on a really good piano book with some new free pianos in it in that belt have been notified the next time I put a video up and one of those always much appreciated see you next time

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 29,040

Rating: 4.9601226 out of 5

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques, albion, albion ONE

Id: YBcioPmpYxg

Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2019