A legend in the music world, Fanshawe (1942-2010) was an English composer, sound explorer and ethnomusicologist who travelled the globe to gather an archive of approximately 2,000 hours of music. The huge David Fanshawe World Music Archive, recorded between 1967-1994, is his legacy to the world – 3200 stereo master tapes, comprising 3000 analogue audio tapes and 200 digital audio tapes, 70 hand-written journals and 40,000 colour images, documented for posterity at a time of great change.

His passion for travel, adventure and music started at an early age, and he first worked as a sound editor for the film industry. Although his dyslexia slowed his reading of musical scores, in 1965 he won a Foundation scholarship in composition to the Royal College of Music. He travelled widely in Europe and the Middle East, and while hitchhiking in Jerusalem he heard Islamic music for the first time and was immediately attracted to its beauty.

On his next journey to Bahrain, he took a professional stereo tape recorder and recorded the renowned pearl divers. From 1969-74, he travelled up the Nile from the Mediterranean Sea to Lake Victoria, visiting Egypt, Sudan, Uganda Kenya and Tanzania, inviting many local musicians to be recorded, honouring their music in perpetuity. During a ten-year odyssey across the islands of the Pacific Ocean from 1978, Fanshawe collected hours of indigenous music, documenting the music and oral traditions of remote parts of Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia.

Returning to the United Kingdom with several hundreds of hours of recordings, Fanshawe was inspired to use some of these in what would become his best-known choral work, African Sanctus, which has received hundreds of highly-acclaimed performances worldwide. He composed a number of choral and orchestral works, as well as over 50 scores for films and television and many album compilations. His organic field recordings have featured in countless TV documentaries and international feature films, and his work has also been the subject of a number of award-winning biographical documentaries.

Professionally and meticulously recorded on his Nagra, Uher, and Stellavox tape machines with expertly placed mics, these recordings were captured at a time when technology’s inexorable development was making the world a smaller place, and rare cultures and traditions were becoming more homogenised. Fanshawe’s pioneering spirit led him to the most remote corners of the earth to capture the traditions and spirit of rare communities by recording instruments, voices, music, and languages. Building on Fanshawe’s archive, a collection of immense cultural and historical significance, Orbis makes these sounds accessible to future generations of composers for the very first time, while taking them to an entirely new place, providing you with the DNA of countless cultures from across the globe.

Go beyond orchestral with this expansive, inspiring, one-of-a-kind collection of sounds, born out of rare recordings, treated, distorted and taken to new dimensions by our team of engineers, and presented in Spitfire's highly sophisticated eDNA Engine.

Orbis was conceived in January 2015, when Jane Fanshawe introduced Spitfire founder and composer Paul Thomson to Fanshawe’s incredible archive containing over 2000 hours of recordings. Handpicked by the Spitfire team, delve deeper into some of the most rare and distinctive sounds and loops you will ever hear, rich in history, character and emotion, from a range of cultures and communities, many of which no longer exist. Fanshawe’s recordings have been used in massive film scores, from Seven Years in Tibet to Gangs of New York, and are now ready to empower and enhance your next score.

Orbis gives you much more than organic field recordings —
90% of the library is made up of treated content, created from the clean recordings by our expert team of engineers in our own journey of sonic discovery. Our eDNA engine provides you with endless parameters and possibilities to enhance every sound even further. Discover hundreds of sounds, treated in various different ways using our expertise and technology, with every sound run through 3000 lines of code. Some have been subtly manipulated, while others heavily processed, unrecognisable from their original source material. From playable one shots and short phrases to tuned and untuned rhythmic loops and recordings up to a minute long, discover sounds with subtle movement, complexity and evolution. Throbbing basses and pulsing loops, ideal for dance music; thunderous drones, subsonic low-end and visceral, tortured drum hits, for adding movement and depth; Blade Runner-style synths, made from antelope horns, and ethereal pads and breathtakingly beautiful evolving textures, for three dimensional cinematic soundscapes. Designed to take you to new levels of sonic exploration and adventure, this library offers you a lifetime of inspiration, and is an essential resource for any producer, composer or sound designer looking for that new sound or texture.