Spitfire Audio is kick starting 20121 with the availability of its first CONTEMPORARY DRAMA TOOLKIT. Teaming up again with British composer, producer, and songwriter Samuel Sim, whose scores for film and television have won numerous awards and accolades including BAFTA and Ivor Novello Award nominations, to bring more electronic dynamism and texture that is perfectly suited to today’s modern drama score stylings.

CONTEMPORARY DRAMA TOOLKIT takes a different approach by including 44 different combination patches and 72 individual instrument patches that bring together classic and contemporary broadcast ready sounds originating from a masterfully mellow combination of the classic, chorus-enhanced tones of an Eighties-vintage, distinctive-sounding Roland Juno-6 analogue polysynth and textures from the iconic Seventies-vintage Korg MS-20 analogue semi-modular monosynth; alongside lead lines performed on guitar, electric cello, and electric violin, all processed via a collection of analogue effects and Eurorack modules. CONTEMPORARY DRAMA TOOLKIT users can forget about the computer and quickly write music with little effort by responding instinctively to the drama at hand — just like the BRITISH DRAMA TOOLKIT trailblazer.

Spitfire Audio co-founder and composer Paul Thomson said “Samuel has curated a set of sounds which allow you to articulate emotion incredibly easily, and are hugely inspirational, allowing you to react to picture in real-time as you play.” He added “Playing with a different kind of velocity triggers the different levels of sound and this is represented on the UI with three sections: the bottom section is for beds or textures; the top section is that very expressive lead type of sound; the middle section bridges the gap between the two and allows you to smoothly move between them. Either you play it in live, and you get a kind of manual dexterity of being able to play certain notes louder, or it’s very straightforward to play a part and them go in afterwards in your DAW and adjust the velocities to trigger the specific layer that you want each note to sound.”

The beauty of CONTEMPORARY DRAMA TOOLKIT is it works well. The curation of the sound itself where Samuel Sim and Spitfire Audio have collaboratively spent time, treating the recordings and instruments to offer a wide array of useful sounds with modern music-making in mind. Minimal (MIC, MIX, LP filter, Expression, Reverb, and ADSR ENVELOPE) controls and (ROUND ROBIN & LEGATO) settings are equally endearing in their ease of use.

Paul Thomson clearly concurs when ending on a high note: “It’s incredibly simple, it’s very expressive, easy to articulate emotion in these patches, with lots of inspiration from a huge palette of sounds to give you this contemporary scoring style; you can either use it to create whole cues, just with individual patches, or you can use it to layer in with other sounds to give that kind of contemporary feel to your scoring.”

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