Inside The DAW

London Contemporary Orchestra Strings is a collaboration project between Spitfire Audio and the London Contemporary Orchestra. One thing is certain, this is not your typical string library. While you will find some more straightforward long and short articulations here, the main purpose of this library is to give you access to very unusual playing techniques and sounds.  It includes 4 different instruments: Violins, Violas, Celli and Celli + Basses in octaves with over 100 unique articulations. The sections are very small with 6 Violins, 4 Violas, 3 Celli and 2 Basses. About the London Contemporary Orchestra The London Contemporary Orchestra was formed in 2008 and is an extremely innovative ensemble that has earned a lot of respect through their various collaborations and incredible live performances. They have worked together with Radiohead, Frank Ocean, Steve Reich, Foals, Beck, Arcade Fire, and many more.  The LCO is also featured on many soundtracks for world class film an...

Arkhis is a new collaboration project between Orchestral Tools and Native Instruments. The main theme of this library is modern cinematic scoring. The engine of Arkhis makes it incredibly easy to create complex cinematic atmospheres with orchestral samples. Some of the samples have been taken from various Orchestral Tools libraries and some have been curated specifically for Arkhis. Layers of sound The secret to the powerful sounds that can be achieved with this library lies in the clever layer engine. In the main interface of Arkhis you are presented with three different layers that can be individually filled with sounds. There are 90 source sounds to choose from that are organized into the following categories: String Orchestra, String Ensemble, Brass Orchestra, Brass Ensemble, Chamber Strings, Solo Strings, Woodwinds, Vox, Harps, Waterphone, Dulcimer, Orchestrations, Guitar Ensemble, Hang Drum, Mandolin Ensemble, Tonal Wood Ensemble Some of these do have more sounds than others. As ...

Albion Solstice from Spitfire Audio is a library I was particularly excited about. I've always loved this more experimental side of Spitfire. Some of my favorite libraries include Albion Tundra, London Contemporary Orchestra Textures, the British and Contemporary Drama Toolkits and all of the collaborations with Olafur Arnalds. Not to mention the huge selection of unique free instruments in Labs. It's clear that Albion Solstice is a real passion project for Christian Henson and it's contagious to see his excitement in the very entertaining walkthrough videos. I couldn't wait to dive into the world of Solstice myself and see what it's all about. Modern sounds inspired by the past The main theme of Albion Solstice is modern cinematic folk noir. So this is not really a library with all kinds of traditional solo instruments to recreate the music of the past. Instead you are getting carefully curated ensembles with all kinds of interesting textures and sounds that are in...

Contemporary Drama Toolkit is the next collaboration between Spitfire Audio and Samuel Sim after their very successful British Drama Toolkit. The main idea behind both of these projects is to give you the tools to sketch out emotional scores very quickly. Instead of having to combine all kinds of separate instruments and articulations you can play with both hands here and focus entirely on your composition. Layers upon Layers What's really interesting here is that each patch has several different velocity layers. Most of them are divided into Loud, Soft and Texture. So by playing softly you are only triggering the texture layers, which work like really amazing pads. If you play a bit louder you will trigger the soft layer, which gives you more delicate sounds and performances to sit on top of the texture bedding. To put some nice melodic line or main motif above everything, all you need to do is press harder on your keyboard to get into the louder and very emotional layer. What is ...

Spitfire Labs is my favorite source of free VST instruments. Even though I'm using a lot of the bigger paid libraries now, there are a lot of sounds in Labs that I still regularly come back to because they're just that good and add a nice unique flavor to my compositions. Today I would like to share with you my personal top 5 Spitfire Labs instruments. These are the ones that I tend to use the most, but there are much more awesome sounds in this collection and new ones are added all the time.  The main reason I love Labs so much is because of all of the interesting sounds you can't really get from standard orchestral libraries. But there are a lot of great more straight forward instruments as well. For example, I'm not going to include the Labs Ensemble Strings here because I already use Chamber Strings as my main string library. It is a fantastic free set of strings though and might be really useful to you, so make sure to check out the full Labs collection too and see...

Orchestral Tools just released a new instrument in their awesome Sine Factory series of free VST instruments. This time it's a free acoustic guitar called Strand. As you would expect with Orchestral Tools, the quality is great as always. Playing around with the guitar is really fun and it is easy to combine single plucks and strummed chords. The sound is very clear and close and makes you feel like someone is really playing a guitar right in front of you. Steel and Nylon  One nice surprise is that there are actually two Guitars. A steel string guitar and a nylon string guitar. The nylon guitar comes in very handy when you need something a bit softer and sounds very lovely as well.  Both of these come with 4 different articulations and 3 variations for playing with both hands. These are in detail: 1. Single Notes 2. Strummed Chords Combined 3. Strummed Chords Longs 4. Strummed Chords Shorts 5. Strummed Chords Combined Two-Handed 6. Strummed Chords Longs Two-Handed 7. Strummed C...

Spitfire Chamber Strings is hands down my favorite string library, it's really beautiful and sounds very organic with a lot of detail. While it works fantastic for medium to smaller and all the way down to very intimate compositions (if you focus on the close mics), sometimes you might want to get a bit bigger sound. One thing to remember is that it is always easier to add something then to take something away. It's actually pretty easy to make Chamber Strings bigger, but you can't really make a symphonic sized string section much smaller because it was simply recorded with this big sound. One advantage of Chamber Strings is that it was recorded at Lyndhurst Hall. The natural room sound of this big hall adds a lot of character to the sound and makes the strings already sound bigger than they actually are. You can enhance this by dialing in more of the tree and ambient microphones. But what if you are looking for a huge sound and want to write some epic soaring string lines?...

Let's take a look at the three newest Spitfire Labs Instruments called Synth Strings, Organic Textures and Bass Guitar. I can't express how much I love Labs and it has always been a fantastic collection of high quality sounds and a great source of inspiration. As expected the three newest entries don't disappoint.  Synth Strings Labs has a really nice real string ensemble patch, but this time we get some cool synth sounds made from a popular 70s string synthesizer called Solina String Ensemble.  Synth Strings is split up into 6 different patches: Classic Strings, Classic Brass, Classic Strings & Brass, Strings Pad, Brass Pad and finally Strings & Brass Pad. I think it sounds really lush and lively and is going to be very useful for all kinds of genres. Like it states on the website, it's going to fit equally well in pop songs as well as Blade Runner style soundtracks. Organic Textures One more set of awesome pads in the Labs collection! These ones are very usefu...

Music Production can be really expensive and the prices for many of the big sample libraries out there can be really discouraging for passionate musicians on a tight budget. Luckily these days there are a lot of really awesome plugins you can get completely for free and with all of the companies competing with each other in the market today, we as customers are enjoying more high quality free products than ever before. So without further ado here are the best free VST instruments in 2021 in no particular order. I only included the best ones that are actually useful. 1. Spitfire Audio Labs This one is my absolute favorite free plugin ever, hands down! Basically it is a big collection of all kinds of sampled and synth based instruments. Getting so many free instruments by itself is already fantastic, but the reason I love this library so much is the quality and diversity of the instruments you can find here. Besides more common instruments like a bass guitar, a drum set and a string ense...