Recorded in Castlesound Studios in Edinburgh, Scotland, this comprehensive toolkit features an intimate selection of solo brass and woodwind instruments — from contrabassoon, saxophone and flugelhorn, to recorders, and more. Discover carefully curated Combi patches (curated combinations of instruments, split into various layers across the keyboard) — a great place to start sketching cues, Ensembles (full section ensembles) and solo instruments, meticulously crafted by Samuel Sim and the Spitfire Audio team. These less commonly found instruments offer a fresh alternative to strings, taking your scores to a new place — soft saxophones to create jazz-influenced, Noir scores, with the distinctive timbre of tenor and flugelhorns offering a subtle alternative to low strings.
Brass & Reeds features the UK’s finest players performing a range of uniquely workshopped techniques – including Shorts, Longs, Recorder flutters and chiffs, Tuba multiphonics, Saxophone growls and rich Cor Anglais swells. The fluidity and unpredictability of the breaths between the notes and re-articulations offers a genuine sense of reality, with notes firing off each other in different ways, to add nuance, depth and humanity to your scores.
In contrast to our epic orchestral libraries, the immediate and intimate sound of a smaller band more effectively reflects the introspective moods, character and emotion found in TV and film drama — but these sounds can also be layered with bigger libraries to complement epic soundscapes, or processed and warped to create unique textures.
Unique Layers technology
Our inbuilt Layers technology is unique to the British Drama Toolkit series, allowing you to compose, arrange and complete a cue in one pass. Since faders are not required (although Expression, Attack and Release controls are available within the plugin, as well as velocity sensitivity control via the Dynamics slider), you have the flexibility to play with both hands to achieve a beautifully intricate, dynamic and musical sound — improvising and sketching on the fly as you would on a piano.
The magic begins as soon as your fingers hit the keyboard. Depending on the intensity at which you hit the keys, the plugin selects from up to three velocity layers (Texture, Soft & Loud), with varying expressive performances within each layer. It’s a unique experience, offering ultimate creative control as well as the opportunity to listen and move intuitively, responding to the varying lengths of notes and subtle shifts present within each technique.
The velocity layer grid comprises three distinct layers:
- Texture - pads, textural beds, subtle movements, pulsing repetitions and re-blowing
- Soft - muted tones, suited to subtle moments or moments of dialogue
- Loud - characterful, expressive lead lines with a soloistic feel
