GEAR REVIEW
SPITFIRE AUDIO ORIGINALS COLLECTION | Steve Sattler
KEY FEATURES
• Felt Piano, Solo Violin, Intimate Strings and the Expanding Spitfire Audio Originals Ecosystem
• Excellent sound quality with expressive performances captured from AIR Studios recordings.
• Lightweight libraries load quickly and run efficiently on modest computers.
• Felt Piano, Solo Violin, and Intimate Strings excel in modern worship, cinematic, and songwriting applications.
• Recent full-fidelity updates and Splice INSTRUMENT integration significantly expand the platform’ s value.
• Streamlined interfaces offer fewer articulations and editing options than Spitfire’ s flagship libraries.
• Advanced film and orchestral composers may require the greater depth of the BBC Symphony Orchestra or Abbey Road collections.
Spitfire Audio has established itself as one of the industry’ s premier developers of orchestral sample libraries. Its flagship collections, recorded at AIR Studios’ renowned Lyndhurst Hall, are widely used by composers working in film, television, games, and contemporary music production. Those premium libraries offer exceptional depth and realism but also demand significant storage, processing power, and programming experience. The Originals series takes a different approach, distilling each instrument into an affordable, lightweight package that prioritizes musicality, efficient workflows, and expressive performance over exhaustive editing.
The platform continues to evolve with four notable additions— Emotional Cello, Intimate Brass, Intimate Woodwinds, and Crystal Keys. Emotional Cello introduces eleven articulations and three microphone perspectives for expressive solo writing, while Intimate Brass and
Intimate Woodwinds deliver smaller ensembles recorded at AIR Studios for softer, more transparent orchestral textures. Crystal Keys expands the collection beyond conventional orchestral instruments by sampling a titanium euphone with chromatically tuned glass rods, producing shimmering, ethereal textures ideal for ambient, cinematic, and sound-design applications.
Spitfire has also updated 17 existing Originals libraries with full-fidelity versions featuring complete microphone mixes, redesigned interfaces, expanded preset collections, and new mixer controls for blending Close, Room, and Vintage microphone signals— all provided as free upgrades for current owners.
A key addition to the ecosystem is Splice INSTRUMENT, a software instrument plug-in that enables subscribers to browse, audition, and perform more than twenty Originals
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