REVIEW: Spitfire Audio’s BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover
There honestly hasn’t been a better time to break into the world of music composition. With the advent of technology and the internet, there has been an abundance of music and a blurring of lines between styles, genres and the previous chasm that was the divide between professional and novice (Campbell, 2019; JMC Academy, 2016). As we head into the 3rd decade of the century, the availability and accessibility of quality compositional tools is only getting better, with so many options available to suit you from student to master.
Spitfire Audio’s latest edition, the BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover, is an insanely powerful library that offers quality sounds in a tiny digital footprint. At just under 200MBs (Gale, 2020), it still packs a realistic, quality library of orchestral sounds with a range of dynamics and articulations to use in your composition. The price is USD$49, but you don’t even have to break the bank if you don’t want to, with a FREE copy available after you complete a short survey with Spitfire Audio and wait the 14 day period for your copy to arrive (Zlatic, 2020). It is well worth the wait to access one of the best free orchestral libraries available (Zlatic, 2020), with a sample library that won’t leave you wanting for quality (Gale, 2020).
Check out Spitfire Audio’s page here!
What You Will Need
Spitfire Audio is a stand-alone app, but will need a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to access it (Stewart, 2019) and leverage its recording and compositional benefits. I recommend Logic Pro X, which is my DAW preference, the preference of Spitfire Audio’s Christian Henson when composing, and has recently received a major update that packs a huge number of new features.
What Is On Offer with BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover
Instrumentation and Articulations
This is not just a barebones version of the bigger and more expensive BBC Symphony Orchestra libraries (Gale, 2020), this is a library in its own right that can stand up with the quality of its larger equivalents. There are 35 orchestral instruments in this library (“First look: BBC Symphony Orchestra – Discover by Spitfire Audio”, 2020) that span the most widely used and recognisable instruments in a symphonic orchestra (Gale, 2020), spread across the strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion. The mainstays are there, such as violins, clarinets, trombones and timpani, but also instruments that will expand your typical palette, including the celeste, harp, bass trombone and piccolo.
Where the BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover version slims down it’s sound library to achieve its size and price point, is its included articulations, dynamic layers and round robin settings. The orchestra can sound quite thin and non-dynamic at times, as it uses a single sample when transitioning between dynamics from soft to loud, and can sound monotonous when playing repetitive notes (Evans, 2020) due to only having a single sample used in the round robin (a mechanism that normally alternates between varying samples of the same note to offer a more realist sound when repeating notes). It offers some great starting point articulations though, with legato, spiccato, pizzicato and tremolo in the strings, and legato and staccatissimo for most others (Zlatic, 2020). While the subtleties, like legato slurs between notes or the ornamental techniques like trills and turns, are not present, it does offer a balanced selection of initial techniques to experiment with. The inclusion of spiccato and staccatissimo articulations is a unique and pleasing compromise too, as they offer a more pronounced and accented sound than a traditional staccato articulation, making them more useful in wider scenarios with a more natural sounding quality to them.
Control of Dynamics and Articulations
The inclusion of Spitfire Audio’s previously used dynamic control methods helps to add the musicality to the streamlined library (Gale, 2020). The two controls in the UI control MIDI CC#1 – Dynamics and MIDI CC#11 – Expression. When used together, it triggers the dynamic crossfades between samples and adjusts the overall volume through expression to give you a realistic sound, especially in legato passages. With the sound libraries limited dynamic samples, though, it can at times seem a little soft (Evans, 2020), but when heard together it is clear that the instruments were balanced in the stereo field as a whole, rather than as an individual.
This attention to the orchestra as a whole benefits the composer, both professional and novice, as all instruments are already balanced and panned for you as the conductor would hear them (Gale, 2020), allowing you to simply compose instead of mix. While it lacks the mic placement controls of the larger versions of the library that allow you to further tailor the sound (“First look: BBC Symphony Orchestra – Discover by Spitfire Audio”, 2020), it provides a working palette of tonality for you to experiment and write with that surpasses the sound libraries used by notation software.
Collaboration Through Interchangeable Versions
Where Spitfire Audio really outshines any competition is its interconnectivity with the other BBC Symphonic Orchestra libraries. If you are just starting out as a composer and would prefer someone else polish and mix your work, or you are working with a company or other composers on the same work, the ability to load up the DAW session and play the composition seamlessly with any of the BBC Symphonic Orchestra libraries is a gamechanger. This saves so much time, avoiding compatibility issues and reprogramming instruments to suit varying libraries. The session can simply be opened and the articulations, dynamics and expression will continue to function and sound the same (Gale, 2020).
What this means for accessibility is a clear opportunity for new composers to get into the world of orchestral MIDI programming. The library features a clean UI that is intuitive to pick up and based on Spitfire Audio’s other free LABS sound libraries (Zlatic, 2020). This combined with its affordability and it’s quality democratises orchestrating and composing, allowing anyone with a laptop and a DAW to start working with orchestral libraries (“First look: BBC Symphony Orchestra – Discover by Spitfire Audio, 2020”). It could become the gateway for a new composer into the field, or a composition sketching palette for the experienced composer (Evans, 2020).
My Review
What Excels
There is a lot to love about this library, but here are a few of my thoughts.
The clean, intuitive UI is deceptively powerful and focusing your attention where it needs to be, on the music. It isn’t distracting, as some libraries can be, with hundreds of texture, articulation and patch combinations. It simply allows you to compose with quality samples and the most essential expression, dynamic and articulation options necessary. The stereo placement and balance of the orchestra also goes a long way to helping compose without distraction as well, cutting down on time setting up templates or premixing your DAW workspace without even having a single note played in yet.
I have personally always admired Spitfire Audio’s dynamic controls, which rely less on velocity to define a dynamic sample and more on a dynamic control that feels closer to the real performer feeling of bowing harder or blowing more air through the instrument. Of course, on percussive instruments and percussive articulations (like spiccato), the velocity affects the dynamics in a more traditional and familiar way, but when those legato passages arrive in your composition, no longer do you have to surgically correct your low-skilled piano performance to make your instrument sound natural, a real plus to any compose like me who doesn’t play piano as their first instrument.
A bonus little love of this library is the short load time. As a library with a weight below 200MB, it doesn’t require a lot of RAM or Storage to have this library on hand, ready to composer or record with. It also, doesn’t take very much time at all to load the samples when needed. I’ve worked with many sound libraries, some that take an age to load that really kills the creative mood when you are trying to capture that fleeting idea. On my setup, it is faster for me to open my BBCSO Discover Logic Pro X template than it would be to scrabble around for pen and paper, a real plus from a compositional workflow point of view.
What To Be Aware Of
While I’m personally sold on this library as a tool I will undoubtably use long into the future, there are a few limitations to be aware of that will affect your compositional journey. Namely, the limited articulations and dynamics. While what is available is amazing for a cheap or free library, the limited palette of options can entrap you into one of compositions most disheartening rookie mistakes, composing to the sounds. If you have ever written a piece of music using a notation software and then been disappointed when it sounds a little empty at the performance, you know what I’m talking about. When you compose using only what is available, you can limit your imagination and creativity, create inaccuracies in terminology (spiccato vs staccato, for example), and potentially compose a piece that will only every truly sound right when played by that digital orchestra. While this isn’t something that will be too concerning if you are just starting out, it is a trap worth remembering as you progress through your portfolio of works.
Final Thoughts
The overall quality and natural sound of this library is really what wins me over. Combined with its simple UI design and natural sounding dynamics, this is the perfect compositional tool to go from fist sketched idea to a full orchestral mock up. Will my compositions all exist inside BBC Symphonic Orchestra Discover’s sound library? Probably not, as I seek more in depth articulations, techniques and dynamic changes, but with the interchangeable versions option, it makes it really easy to use Discover as my sketch pad or manuscript and then upgrade those ideas into the “performance”, the final mixed work to show to clients. However you choose to use this incredible library, I have no doubt you will find it a pleasure to work with and be incredibly thankful to the team at Spitfire Audio for making this kind of experience possible.
List of Cited Works
Campbell, R. (2019). How technology is making music production more accessible. Retrieved from https://bitrebels.com/technology/how-technology-making-music-production-accessible.
First look: BBC Symphony Orchestra – Discover by Spitfire Audio. (2020). Retrieved from https://www.samplelibraryreview.com/the-reviews/first-look-bbc-symphony-orchestra-discover-by-spitfire-audio.
Gale, D. (2020). Review: Spitfire Audio BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover and Core. Retrieved from https://www.musictech.net/reviews/software-instruments/spitfire-audio-bbc-symphony-orchestra-discover-and-core.
JMC Academy. (2016). How technology has changed music production. Retrieved from https://www.jmcacademy.edu.au/news/how-technology-has-changed-music-production.
Stewart, D. (2019). Spitfire Audio BBC symphony orchestra. Retrieved from https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/spitfire-audio-bbc-symphony-orchestra.
Zlatic, T. (2020). Get Spitfire Audio’s BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover For Free. Retrieved from https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2020/05/07/bbc-symphony-orchestra-discover.