SPITFIRE AUDIO Spitfire Studio Brass Professional

Your creativity, your control

Spitfire Studio Brass is the second release in our vital all-new Spitfire Studio Orchestra range. Two years in the making, our ambition was to create an incredibly versatile pro-end, dry-stage sample library. By choosing the crisp and vibrant setting of AIR Studio One, a smaller, more controllable space than the opulent Lyndhurst Hall, we offer our fellow composers a brass library with depth, detail, and awesome punch. This is a full gathering of the brass family, including less frequently heard relatives such as bass trumpet, contrabass tuba, and cimbasso. Epic power is on tap, but it comes with the grace and pinpoint detail of the dry stage.

Spitfire Studio Brass Professional captures the widest emotional range of performance, with abundant articulations. Choose solo, duet, or section performances; realise the detail of your music with swells, flutter tongues, and staccatissimo stabs as well as traditional articulations; choose from microphones placed super-close to the player, through to outriggers and ambients at the edges of AIR Studio One – or mix and match for absolute tonal control.

The next chapter

Studio Brass is the second section of our new Studio orchestral libraries, two years in the making. It has all the treasured Spitfire hallmarks: A-list London session players, the best instruments and an unparalleled signal path recorded to tape by Grammy award-winning engineer Simon Rhodes – in a room perfectly suited to capturing the punchy dynamic range of brass. As with our existing symphonic and chamber libraries, we have applied a “no stone unturned” approach: an encyclopaedia of articulations, dynamic layers and round-robins for seamless, nuanced realism.

Studio Brass is available in two versions: Spitfire Studio Brass and the more extensive Spitfire Studio Brass Professional.

Spitfire Studio Brass Professional

Spitfire Studio Brass offers you 8 instruments, including 4 soloists, plus two player sections – all recorded through a Schoeps Decca Tree.

Studio Brass Professional offers you all of this, but lets you delve further, with 17 instruments – from a soaring piccolo trumpet, down to the volcanic contrabass tuba. There are 13 solo instruments, including two separate solo trumpet players and two horn players. Extensive control of the sound is available, with the inclusion of two ready-to-go mixes, two close-mic arrangements, two Decca tree setups, ambients and outriggers. You can access and personalise your own mix of Simon’s microphone armoury — from pin-sharp to super-wide, picked up by the best from Neumann, Schoeps, Sennheiser and SE Electronics.

Spitfire users now have a comprehensive range of orchestral manoeuvres. We believe Studio Brass suits users of our existing Lyndhurst Hall ranges as an essential sonic alternative. It is also perfect for those looking to buy a brass library that will give them the most bang for their buck – being usable in the widest range of musical settings, ready for your own favourite reverbs and FX. With the versatility we have engineered into this library, we have no doubt that Spitfire Studio Brass will be a cherished part of your music-making over the next decade.

Recorded by Simon Rhodes

Simon Rhodes was an obvious choice for our entirely new Studio Orchestra range — a microphone magician with multiple Grammy awards to his name, and a senior engineer at Abbey Road Studios. Simon has worked at the highest level in film score recording, having been James Horner’s go-to engineer for 18 years and having worked with legendary composers such as John Williams and Thomas Newman. Blockbuster movies such as Avatar, Skyfall and Spectre have all had the Rhodes treatment.

“For the Spitfire Studio Brass sessions, the general approach was similar to the Studio Strings, so there’s consistency between the libraries. The main Schoeps room mics were the same and I captured two flavours of spots: a section mic plus a close ribbon – typically the Voodoo VD2.”

You can choose Simon’s mix, or, with the Professional edition of the library, customise from the various mic options, from Close to Ambient, as well as two ‘Tree’ setups, both using Schoeps microphones. “The second uses Schoeps MK 21 wide cardioids (or sub-cardioids), which are great for keeping the room sound at bay while allowing you to get a sense of distance and perspective.”

The overview panel

This is the main interface for melodic instruments. Its default view displays all available playing techniques, has a simple microphone mixer and includes the main feature controllers.

The Ostinatum

In this view you can add notes to a pattern sequencer, select which key it triggers on and then play for instant ostinato creation. It’s like an arpeggiator on a synthesiser.

General controls panel

This view allows further in-depth control of the instrument, showing all available signals and feature controllers, as well as the ability to purge techniques from memory to reduce system usage.