 This is Albion Colossus from Spitfire Audio. As you can hear, it can be gentle and refined for those times when all is at one with the world. But unfortunately, those times cannot last forever, which is why this wonderful new plug-in can do this. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I want to start off with an apology. I'm moving my studio from one location to another at the moment, so I'm just temporarily in the corner of this room. It's not properly sound-treated, so my voice may sound a little bit strange at times. But thankfully, we don't need to be in a treated room to get the most out of the amazing library that we're looking at today. This is from Spitfire Audio and it's Albion Colossus, an incredibly dynamic library, really great for soundtracks, game music, that kind of thing. Now, don't forget, if you're looking at releasing your music anytime soon, do check out the link in the description down below for the sponsor of this video, DistroKid. Let's get started off by taking a look at the range of sounds we get in this library. So I'm a little torn because I know that when we're looking at a library like this, the range and quality of the sounds is really super-duper important, okay? And we should spend some time on that. On the other hand, I actually think with this particular product, it's the way that those sounds are used, which is more important, okay? So I sort of want to focus a little bit more on that. However, we will just take a quick look at the range of the sounds. We'll listen to a couple of them just so you get an idea of the quality. I mean, this is Spitfire Audio we're talking about here. So you can pretty much expect really high-quality recordings, but nonetheless, we'll take a look. Now, when we first load this plugin up, we have a combination loaded up called Anthology. That's got eight different instruments in there. And this sort of indicates to us a bit the range of sounds we're going to get. There's some horns and brass in there. There's some strings. There's some percussion. There's a drum kit in there. And then we have this one you can see here, which is pad. So this gives us an indication of what we can expect here, because these are synth sounds, okay? As well as that, we also have some guitar sounds here. These are long electric guitar sounds. Just have a quick listen to these. Yeah, big, powerful things that we can use to enhance our orchestral sounds, which we're obviously going to hear in a moment. Now, we can switch between all of these using a key switch, which is okay. You can see at the bottom here, we've got some keys highlighted in green there. So that shows us how we can change between different sounds when we're using this combination. We'll get back to key switches later. But I want to go up to the top and then have a look at the full range of actual individual patches that we can load up. We've got a preview button here, so we can have a quick listen to some of these without having to load them up. But starting off, we've got some low strings, okay? These are really lush. I enjoy these a lot. Just have a quick demo. Yeah, you can do a lot with that. Hairpins, for example. There's a lot of different hairpin sounds within this library. These have a sort of a crescendo to them, yeah. They're really, really sort of a motive, I reckon. Have a listen. Yeah, I love those. So it's a few different, you know, long and short sounds there for the low strings. We've got high strings, same again, you know, longs and shorts and some variations in there. By the way, I just want to tell you, I'll load up one of these, the high string hairpins, okay? It's not just those basic sounds with each of these patches. We have some key switches which change the articulations as well. So for example, with this one, this is the hairpins for the high strings. We've got this sort of sound. Got a medium one here. Long one. Yeah, another crescendo one here, okay? So it's not just those sort of basic patches which we have with each of these sounds. So moving on further, we've got some brass sounds in here. Some horns. They're lovely. Also some awesome woodwind sounds I really enjoy. I use the flute as well in that demo at the beginning. We've got some piccolo sounds. A range of percussion sounds, okay? Some really nice percussion sounds in here. Some sort of traditional ones. And then some variations on lows as well. You know, timpani's, all the kinds of things you would expect for percussion, okay? And again, the key switch is in there to switch between different modes with those. We also have some drums. This is more like a contemporary drum kit, you know, kick, snare, toms, cymbals, et cetera, okay? And then we have these guitar sounds. Those long guitar sounds. Short, some effects in there. And a whole bunch of synth sounds, okay? So you can see there's a massive variation in sounds here. And they're kind of leaning towards you making sort of soundtrack music. So things for movies, for TV shows, for games, all of that kind of thing as well. So they're leaning towards that, definitely, rather than just your sort of traditional composition sounds for orchestras, okay? Now, why did I want to sort of go over this rather quickly? Well, the actual sounds that we have have something to do with one of the key features, in my opinion. Because the way that Spitfire Audio recorded this, and they recorded it at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, okay? I think in two different spaces, they recorded both a chamber orchestra and a symphonic orchestra. So a chamber orchestra is a much smaller, more intimate orchestra. And the symphonic orchestra is what you normally think of as an orchestra, really big, okay? And it's the fact that they did that, which leads me to the first of the really important features of this plugin, which is called Scale. So I guess one of the keys to creating epic sounds is having the contrast of some softer sounds, okay? And going between the two, because if everything's loud all the time, then sort of nothing's loud, if you know what I mean. Now, we often have the ability to do this in Spitfire Audio products with this dynamics control, which we can see here. As we slide this up and down, we'll go from a softer version of the sound to a louder sound. So let's have a listen to this on this brass sound here. Now, in my opinion there, it's kind of going from very soft to not quite so soft, okay? But it never really gets epic. Let's face it. Now, the first control I'm going to show you here, which is a little bit different from other plugins, really does help towards this contrast between soft and epic sounds. And this is called the Scale control. It's over here. Yeah, you can see me sliding up and down here. Now, this is really important with what I said earlier. Remember, I said they recorded both a chamber and a symphonic orchestra with this control blends between the two, okay? You're going to start to hear a much more stark difference when you use this. Let's have a listen to that demo again. We're going to start off by listening to the chamber orchestra. And now, symphonic. Okay, so we start to get a flavor of some different tones there, okay? And it's definitely starting to sound a little bit bigger. It's not the whole story, but it's a very important control in this plugin, I believe. Now, have a listen to what happens if we link these two controls. We can do that easily here. There's a menu here. Just click on that. And I can link this control to the dynamics control that we were initially using there, okay? So now when we slide the dynamics control, that scale control is going to scale as well, okay? Now we start to get a much bigger difference. Have a listen. Really impressive. I love the combination of just using those two. It's so, so good. However, it's not the full story when it comes to making this plugin sound more and more epic. So another way that we can make sounds more epic is in post-production by applying things like saturation, distortion, and compression. And indeed, we can go to the effects tab here, and we can see we've got a little bit of control over things like compression here. However, what they've done in this plugin really cleverly is give us one control to add in all of those things at once to really add some oomph or some hype. And appropriately, that control is called the hype control. Now, it's actually applied at the moment to this big dial we can see in the middle here. The reason I say it at the moment is because if we click in the middle of this, we can actually apply different things to that control. But by default, hype is applied to this big dial here. Now, before we have a listen to how it's going to change the low strings that I've got loaded up here, let's just recap and see how these strings are affected by the dynamics and scale controls that we looked at already. So we get a good amount of impact when we go to the top of the dynamics and scale controls here. However, hype takes it to a really different level. Let's put that scale up fairly high already with the dynamics. Now, let's add in some hype. There's definitely a lot more depth there. There's a lot more low end to those strings. And I feel like there's a little bit more bite there, a little bit more attack to them as well. Absolutely loving that. And if you do that in the middle of a performance, you can really create some dynamics which creates emotion in music. So it's so, so important. Now, just for fun, what I'm going to do is show you how you can link all of these controls together. We already looked earlier at how you can link the dynamics and the scale control, which I've already got set up here. Now, I've got a controller on my keyboard assigned to the dynamics control. So it's now controlling both. I also have the same controller assigned to this hype control. We can just right click on these controls and learn MIDI CC automation. So you just click that and then adjust a knob on your keyboard and that assigns it. Okay, so let's bring that all the way down. You can see as I adjust the slider on my keyboard, they're all going up together. Let's have a listen to the quite massive difference this all now makes. So you can get so much in terms of, I say, emotion when you're using that range of dynamics. Really, really nice, really, really clever and loving that. You know, I think what we're seeing so far with the scale and hype features is Spitfire Audio have made it really easy to add dynamics with this library without you having to delve into the complexities of doing that and just giving you a couple of sliders to move around so that you can remain focused on the music which you're creating. And in a segue made in heaven, that reminds me of the sponsor of this video, DistroKid, who make it super easy for you to release your music. One of the great things about DistroKid is its simplicity. For the simple price of $19.99 per year, you can upload an unlimited number of original tracks with no extra fees. Those tracks will be distributed on streaming platforms such as Spotify, Tiktok, iTunes, Amazon Music and many more without you needing to open accounts at any of those places. And if $19.99 isn't cheap enough for you, follow the link in the description down below to get a further 7% off right away. I will also get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you. So another control that they've added here isn't so much a dynamics control but it does have a kind of an overall effect on the impact of the sound and that is the depth control. We can see it over here. It's the last slide that we can see here. And this basically controls how close the mics were at the time. So we're just hearing as we slide this up, microphones blended at different positions. Going from extremely close down here, very, very intimate. We don't get so much of the room sound when we have the mics that close to all the way up here which is a lot of room sound. You really hear the particular concert hall that they were in when they recorded this. Now, I'm just going to warn you before I demo this that there's quite a big difference, I'm going to say between say 4% here and around about 20%. Okay, there's quite a big sort of drop off in the closeness of that sound. Just be aware of that as you listen to it. But let's have a listen to the differences in the two sounds. Now you hear there that it becomes much softer, doesn't it, as we hear more of the room. But at the same time, it becomes much wider sounding. Okay, so it's really about blending those two differences there. Now, of course, as you can see, we can also link this. I'm going to link it to the dynamics control again. And just as I had before, I've got one controller on my keyboard for both the dynamics and the hype control, which enables me to push all of the four controls that we've talked about in this video up and down together. And we're going to hear a massive, massive difference, of course. Let's have a listen. So you can hear there that by adjusting that depth control as well, it's sort of softened that really loud and made it much, much wider there. Okay, so a really interesting control to use in combination with the others. You know, Spitfire Audio are renowned for making really high quality libraries, especially when it comes to orchestral sounds. And you pay a price, I think, which is worthy of the quality, especially if you're using these libraries professionally. Check the link down below for a link to this library so you can find out the price on their website there. Now, apart from their paid products, they also do a range of amazing free libraries as well, which you can find in the Spitfire Labs series. I've made a video about my five favorite free libraries from them. You can watch that right here.