Spitfire Audio Contemporary Drama Toolkit Review - Highly Emotional and Inspiring

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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 the difference between British Drama Toolkit and Contemporary Drama Toolkit?

While British Drama Toolkit was all about acoustic string and woodwind instruments, Contemporary Drama Toolkit goes into a different direction. 


As you might guess from the name, this time most of the sounds are more electronic in nature. Besides all kinds of inspiring synth sounds, some patches also feature a guitar, an electric cello, electric violin and even some vocals.

I had a lot of fun playing through all of the patches. There is a lot of variety and all of the sounds are instantly inspiring and help you to get into the right mood to compose emotional or dramatic music.

It's really easy to put something impressive together in a very short time. I was surprised by how good it sounded with just a few basic chords and a simple melodic line.

Of course you can also add your more traditional instruments. I think Contemporary Drama Toolkit mixes really well with other libraries. Combining it with the British Drama Toolkit seems to work great as well.

Is it the right choice for me?

Well, that pretty much depends on the kind of music you are making. One thing you should be aware of, is that this library has a very specific tone. Most of the sounds are very moody and melancholic in nature. So it's not really going to work well for happy, uplifting, or easygoing kind of stuff. 

After all it's called Contemporary Drama Toolkit and not Romantic Comedy Toolkit or something like that. It says drama in the title and it absolutely delivers in that aspect.

That being said, it can still work well in a lot of genres, if you combine some of the sounds in here with your usual instruments. This way you can add a lot of depth and character to your compositions without the need to be "only" dramatic.

One thing that I really liked about working with this library is that it kind of puts you into a certain space and lets you react to the sounds while you are playing. This gives you the opportunity to write something that you probably wouldn't have written with a simple piano, so I will definitely use this a lot, especially when I need some fresh ideas.

If you like to write emotional music or just want to add some weight to your tracks, I think the Contemporary Drama Toolkit will be a valuable addition to your palette.

Positive:
+ Instantly inspiring
+ Great for composing emotional and ambient music
+ Good variety of sounds
+ Delivers impressive results in no time
+ Incredibly beautiful and addictive

Negative:
- Sounds are not very tweakable
- Not suited for all genres

Library size: 28 GB
Current price: 199$

You can get Contemporary Drama Toolkit here:

Also check out Paul Thomson's walkthrough video, I always really enjoy watching these.


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