Recording - June 2018 - 44

Soundware Showcase

Spitfire Audio
Orchestral Swarm
By Darwin Grosse
UK sound design house Spitfire
Audio is hitting all the marks as it
creates great content for people
making music for videos, games,
and commercial work. One of their
more popular product lines revolves
around what Spitfire calls Swarms-
based upon instrumentalists who use
inventive playing technique to create clouds of sound.
The initial Swarm libraries-Mandolin Swarm, Marimba
Swarm, and Harp Swarm-were striking: warm and cloudy
soundscapes defying easy classification but downright beautiful.
Now, Spitfire has supercharged the Swarm concept, creating
Orchestral Swarm to bring the Swarm concept to cinematic
orchestral performance.

Origins

Bleeding Fingers Music, a composition/performance group
based out of Hans Zimmer's Santa Monica studio complex,
worked with Spitfire on the development of this library for the
Blue Planet II soundtrack. That program's unique look required
an equally unique sonic framework, so they developed the
Orchestral Swarm library to provide a new sonic fingerprint for it.
The idea behind the Swarm is the use of many instrumentalists
playing at somewhat random (but musically useful) times; the
combination of players creates a 'swarm' of sound, where no
single note needs to hold your attention for long-rather, it is
the whole sound that takes center stage. This lets the composer
use long tones that don't sound artificial (as can be the case
with looped samples); instead, the swarm gives the sense of a
constantly evolving expression.

Content

Like other Spitfire sample libraries, Orchestral Swarm requires
Native Instruments Kontakt for its playback engine (Kontakt Player
is included with purchase). It also requires a beefy computer
and plenty of disk space to hold the sample content, which
weighs in at nearly 30 Gigabytes for its 25,000-plus samples
and requires twice that space for a successful installation.
The library makes optimal use of all those samples. Not
only are many different notes and articulations recorded as
individual pitched samples, but each recording has several
individually-addressable microphone recordings. Those
become critical when you're tuning the sound to your specific
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RECORDING June 2018

needs; close mics have a
very different sound from
stereo room mics, and each will have its uses.
Spitfire's experience in interface design makes Orchestral
Swarm easy to use. An Overview panel gives you high-level
access to articulation selection, a microphone mix, dynamic, variation
and expression settings, and reverb amounts. Further details are
available in a Controls panel, which includes preset and memory
management, transposition and other sample manipulation.
Finally, an interesting addition-on a third panel called The
Ostinatum-is available on some of the short articulations.
It provides a pattern sequencer offering key-selected phrase
and chord playback... a different interface to generative playback. You determine a rhythmic pattern, assign it to the keys
that will be played, then start playing notes. Since the allocation
of notes to rhythmic elements is constantly varying as you add
and subtract notes, it morphs simple keyboard passages into
much more complex phrases.

Payoff

In use, I discovered that Orchestral Swarm's samples have a
unique sound-one that allows you to embrace long-form tones
without the unattractive sound of looped string and horn sounds.
With Orchestral Swarm, long tones have an organic quality similar
to having a generative 'composition assistant' for your process.
This meant that I could work with simple melodic lines and
depend on the performance provided by the Swarm (and
sometimes the Ostinatum) to maintain the listener's interest.
Normally I'd never hold a single note for eight bars, as it
would sound bland and unnatural. Now, I found myself drawn
to using verse-long string lines that set a completely new stage
for the other instrumentation. I can see why Bleeding Fingers
was involved in this project: it's perfect for the deep and beautiful
visuals in Blue Planet II, allowing simplicity of composition to
highlight the video rather than the music.
Each of the instrument groups has its own personality and
unique performance characteristics. The High and Low String
instruments each use articulations and provide mic setups that

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2018