LONDON, UK: Spitfire Audio, purveyors of the finest virtual instruments from the finest musical samples in the world, is proud to complete its trio of six-piece brass-boosting additions to its groundbreaking BML (British Modular Library) of ultra-detailed, next-generation recordings of the world’s finest musicians at London’s legendary AIR Studios with the release of BML210 BONE PHALANX, producing detailed and dynamic results with another hyper-sampled standalone virtual instrument library module for Native Instruments’ industry-standard KONTAKT platform, this time showcasing the unmistakable (and unmissable) sound of three tenor trombones, two bass trombones, and one contrabass trombone belting it out in unison, as of June 20…
For the benefit of the uninitiated, a phalanx is a group of something similar forming a compact body — in this case, a body of brass or, more simply said, a brass section. So it stands to reason that — following in the fanciful footsteps of its successful, similarly self-explanatory brass brethren, BML211 HORN PHALANX and the recently-released BML209 TRUMPET PHALANX — BML210 BONE PHALANX provides confident composers with everything needed to create bold, broad, and thundering ‘bones parts. Perfect for giving more bombastic brass-led cues (or compositions) the widescreen treatment that music-to-picture scoring so richly deserves whenever deemed musically appropriate. Any musical application, of course, can just as easily benefit, but in the right hands and placed in the right musical setting BML210 BONE PHALANX sounds stunning and stunningly accurate!
As a self-contained library that faithfully captures the spirit and sound — and (some) spittle! — created by an array of brass, slides, and bells belting it out in unison at AIR Studios’ spacious and amazing-sounding Lyndhurst Hall recording room that features in so many world-famous film scores, BML210 BONE PHALANX features a carefully curated set of articulations for this size of brass section specifically designed by Spitfire Audio’s award-winning team of composers in collaboration with the performers themselves. These include: Longs, Longs Legato, Longs Cuivre (brassy), Shorts Staccatissimo, Shorts Tenuto, Shorts Marcato, Double Tongue, Triple Tongue, Quad Tongue, Rips, and Falls. All are available with standard and extended arrays of microphone mixes — Close, Tree, Ambient, Outrigger, Stereo Pair, Close Ribbon, Gallery, and Mid Range, together with three Jake Jackson Mixes from namesake producer and recording/mix engineer extraordinaire Jake Jackson (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire), who just so happens to be Chief Engineer and Associate Producer for Spitfire Audio, having recorded, mixed, and produced all British Modular Library-related releases to date and much more besides — so users can quickly and uniquely tweak the perspective of the performance space as well as more musical performance parameters.
Placed in situ around the seating of the original BML BONES volume #1 released last year to critical acclaim and featuring essential articulations for trombone, those three tenor trombones, two bass trombones, and one contrabass trombone at the core of the BML210 BONE PHALANX brass ensemble enable anyone wishing to step things up to truly Wagnerian proportions to do just that by simultaneously working with both sample-based virtual instrument libraries. Lovers of the truly big-bottomed ‘bone experience could consider adding the contrabass trombone from BML203 LOW BRASS into the musical mix for an even more memorably ribcage-rattling affair!
All three …PHALANX releases see Spitfire Audio advancing to the technological cutting edge by including ingenious under-the-bonnet scripting to provide intuitive performance patches out of the box. Dexterous keyboardists can play at any speed with the added bonus of being able to pull off runs without the need for key-switching or MIDI CC (Continuous Controllers) messages. Meanwhile, an experimental fanfare patch makes for an arresting musical alternative. All might well be far from commonplace, yet it would be perfectly possible to have a good stab at authentically orchestrating American composer Aaron Copland’s classical concert-friendly ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ (if not necessarily British progressive rock supergroup Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s pomp and stomp Seventies smash hit adaptation)!
As active film composers themselves, Spitfire Audio’s founders favour virtual instruments that can be opened and played with little or no fuss, freeing the user to focus on the job at hand: making music. Taking that criteria at face value, the company’s trademark simple-to-use and uniform GUI (Graphical User Interface) is evident across all three …PHALANX sample-based virtual instruments and beyond. Basically, those taking time to learn one have effectively learned them all. And although that learning curve is not especially steep, even novice users can quickly tweak general settings to suit, such as how many round robins they want and how they want them to behave, how they want memory to be organised, and assigning velocity, for example. Either way, musicality is the key to such sampling success, as always.
According to company co-founder and Director Paul Thomson, “These are all six-piece sections, just to give that extra welly that you can get from having all of those players playing together.” Touching upon Spitfire Audio’s BML211 HORN PHALANX opening salvo before coming full circle with BML210 BONE PHALANX, he can surely be forgiven for tooting his horn, loud and proud: “It’s a great addition to the existing horns, which are already pretty heavy stuff at full tilt, but you’ll hear that there is a kind of timbral difference here that enables you to get a kind of giant horn section going when you add in these. The BONE PHALANX with our BML BONES library itself and LOW BRASS library provides a massive collection of trombones — really great for that kind of epic feel.” For when it comes to brass, bigger is sometimes better. And it doesn’t get any bigger or better than Spitfire Audio’s BML brass range in full flow. To partly paraphrase a certain London born and bred actor, as immortalised on the big screen, they’ll blow the bloody doors off!
BML210 BONE PHALANX can be purchased and downloaded directly from Spitfire Audio for an attractive introductory promotional price of £112.00 GBP (subject to VAT within the EU) rising to an RRP of £149.00 GBP (subject to VAT within the EU) — matching its BML209 TRUMPET PHALANX and BML211 HORN PHALANX brethren — on August 1, 2015 from here: http://www.spitfireaudio.com/products-page
For more in-depth information, including several superb audio demos — one by Spitfire Audio co-founder and Director Paul Thomson, please visit the BML209 TRUMPET PHALANX webpage here: http://www.spitfireaudio.com/trumpet-phalanx