Spitfire Audio Contemporary Drama Toolkit £169

Spitfire invite you to enjoy a world of effortless, feel-based scoring. But are these simple routes to sonic success just smoke and mirrors?

With the majority of modern television, cinema and trailer scores, epic bombast and size has been supplanted by subtler arrangements. These more delicate undercurrents weave throughout the drama, enhancing tension, underscoring emotional upheaval and keeping our focus squarely on the screen. This amorphous sound that organically shifts in tandem with the visual action is increasingly in vogue.

Spitfire Audio have had their fingers on the pulse of the ebb and flow of the scoring world for 14 years, with founders Christian Henson and Paul Thomson both reeling in awards for their respective compositions. The company’s releases have provided deep access to the sonic universes of Hans Zimmer, Eric Whitacre, Ólafur Arnalds and a variety of other figureheads. With 2018’s British Drama Toolkit, however, Spitfire chose to provide a route that forewent the recommended grounding in musical theory, and built a pack that shifted focus on the velocity at which you played, triggering the performances of ensemble players, that had been crafted into pre-determined textures.

While an excellently effective, and refreshingly simple toolkit, BDT was merely the first of these forays, and Spitfire have refined the series further with Contemporary Drama Toolkit, again in collaboration with respected composer Samuel Sim. In lieu of the former’s leaning toward traditional instrumentation, CDT melds synths, vocal sounds and heavily processed electric instruments and conjures something quite uncommon.

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