SPITFIRE AUDIO Abbey Road One: Orchestral Foundations £400

Those who have followed the Spitfire story will know that this UK sample developer’s sound was born and largely raised within AIR Studios. Though last year’s impressive flagship BBC Symphony Orchestra libraries were rightly recorded at Maida Vale, AIR Studios has formed the backbone of its Albion collections and, for pro users, the Symphonic Series libraries. But if you were approached to develop a new collection of libraries in partnership with one of the world’s most famous recording studios, alongside Grammy-winning engineer Simon Rhodes – who created unique mixes for the subject of this review – we suspect you’d find the offer too tempting to resist. So it proved for Spitfire.

The library in question is Abbey Road One: Orchestral Foundations, and it represents the first step in a new endeavour that will see Spitfire Audio and Abbey Road Studios partnering on a modular series of tools. This inaugural library promises to cover a number of bases in a single significant step.

TUNING UP

Having been reliant on Kontakt for software hosting for many years, flagship Spitfire libraries are now hosted inside the company’s proprietary software instrument, Abbey Road One included. If you’re familiar with any of the Labs instruments (or a library like BBC Symphony Orchestra), its look and feel should prove familiar right away, with the upper section of the interface panel dominated by two sliders, for dynamics and expression/volume control of the samples (mapped to MIDI controllers one and #11 respectively), and a rotary