Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5 Stars
Mindful of the fact that many media composers lack specialist orchestration skills, Spitfire Audio have created Tutti, an all‑in‑one library that brings together a broad range of orchestral textures in one easy‑to‑use package. The original source recordings are taken from Spitfire Symphony Orchestra and were recorded from three mic positions at AIR Studios’ Lyndhurst Hall (for details, see my SOS August 2024 review).
The man entrusted with distilling SSO’s multifarious contents into usable blended sections is composer Andy Blaney. A longtime orchestral sample user and Spitfire associate, Mr Blaney programmed new performance legato patches for the 2024 SSO relaunch and composed a brilliant online demo for Tutti. Here follows a rundown of what you’ll find in the library, a collection of classic orchestral sound combinations which can be woven into compositions of great power and subtlety.
A combo liable to fire composers’ imaginations is strings and woodwinds, a blend of SSO’s 60 string players with the library’s 11 solo and four ‘a2’ duo woodwinds. Silvery traces of flute and piccolo add a nice breathy timbre to the violins in the high register, while below Middle C bassoons and bass clarinet can be heard amidst the cellos, culminating in a rousing contrabassoon and double basses blast on bottom C1.
Mapped over a C1‑E6 range, the strings and brass ensemble is a great sonority for soaring melodies and grand orchestral themes. Trumpets and violins are evenly matched in the high and middle register, but the brass becomes more dominant when the French horns kick in around Middle C. Adding to the pomp and majesty, bass trombones and tubas provide a massive foundation at the low end.
The big symphonic tutti (Italian for ‘all’ or ‘together’) effect reaches maximum intensity in the ‘orchestra’ patch: this blends strings, brass and woodwinds with a charming quiet percussive layer of xylophone and piano played in octaves. While the latter adds colour, I wish there was an option to turn it off — there is a standalone woodwinds, brass and strings patch, but the blend of those three sections sounds somehow less powerful than in the full tutti patch.
Articulations are restricted to high and low legato, long, short, and long with short attack, the latter a very welcome layering that gives the strong attack needed for rhythmic work. There are no separate strings, woodwinds or brass ensembles (I guess the moral is ‘buy SSO’), but you can load the delicate xylo/piano, tuned percussion (marimba and celeste, methinks), snares/congas and low drum/cymbals as four separate instruments.
Tutti is a great‑sounding, inspirational sketching tool with the potential to end up in your master mixes. Hopefully it won’t break the bank, and its modest 3.92GB size shouldn’t overburden your hard drive either. The library runs on the free Kontakt Player and also on the full Kontakt version 7.5.2 and up.