Checking Out: Abbey Road Orchestra: High Percussion by Spitfire Audio
Looking to craft orchestral percussion lines with unparalleled realism? Spitfire continues to deliver pure excellence, this time with high percussion captured in renowned Abbey Road Studio One.
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Checking Out: Abbey Road Orchestra: High Percussion by Spitfire Audio
High Percussion offers us 62 percussive instruments, sampled with immaculate quality and attention to detail. It is pricy for “just high percussion”, but it’s truly the stuff many composers dream of and well worth the price.
Abbey Road Orchestra: High Percussion normally sells for $449.00 from Spitfire Audio
Thoughts
Spitfire has been teasing the “modular” Abbey Road Orchestra for quite a while now. It was a bit surprising that they started with the instruments that are very often overlooked in the sample world: percussion. And not all the percussion… they released low percussion and high percussion separately, neither of them including tuned percussion.
Whatever initial doubts you may harbor (“do I really need another percussion library?”) are quickly quelled when you open up the first instrument and hammer away at the keys. This is as close as you can get to sitting there as the players perform these instruments directly in front of you in one of the finest and most coveted acoustic spaces on the planet, Abbey Road Studios. Abbey Road is the stuff of legends for all musicians, from rock and roll fans who love the classic Beatles Album, to modern film composers who crave that beautiful clarity and depth heard on scores like Lord of The Rings, Star Wars, Avengers, and many more. Yeah, it’s a big deal, and it absolutely delivers.
The amount of articulations is exhaustive, as is the pure selection of instruments they’ve chosen to sample. Again, any doubts about paying this much for just high percussion melted away when I looked at the pure variety of instruments and articulations.
That brings us to mic positions, which can’t be understated, as they change the overall sound of these drums drastically. Overall Abbey Road Studio One sounds very large, but it’s got incredible clarity and openness to the sound, it is punchy yet reverberant at the same time. The mic positions allow you to get anything from close to distant, even offering “vintage” mixes and “pop close”, each delivering exactly what they promise: a more warm, vintage sound and a more tight, punchy sound, respectively.
Most of the drums are available and played with multiple materials (sticks, hands, fingers, brushes, hard and soft mallets, etc), and the snares offer many drag, ruff, edge, and rim hits as well to allow you to craft percussive lines with unparalleled realism. The rolls all sound great too. This is a world-class collection in every sense of the word.
Facts
Retails for $449.
Runs in a dedicated plugin, requires the Spitfire Audio App to download and install.
98.05 GB of samples installed. 16 mic signals
62 instruments,
391 articulations
Up to 11 dynamic layers and 16 round robins.
Abbey Road Orchestra: High Percussion normally sells for $449.00 from Spitfire Audio
Demos of Abbey Road Orchestra: High Percussion by Spitfire Audio
Videos of Abbey Road Orchestra: High Percussion by Spitfire Audio
Contributor Brian Freeland reviews Abbey Road Orchestra: High Percussion by Spitfire Audio
“Looking to craft orchestral percussion lines with unparalleled realism? Spitfire continues to deliver pure excellence, this time with high percussion captured in renowned Abbey Road Studio One..”
