Tileyard, just north of King’s Cross in London, has become a creative media hub. Tileyard Studios is the UK’s largest professional music community, with more than 70 state-of-the-art studios, and there are many other associated businesses there as well.
Producing music has always been an interesting mix of art and technology. Before digital recording became commonplace, people used to do amazing things with audio recorded onto magnetic tape, manipulated by editing with a knife and all sorts of other physical techniques like turning tape over, making moebius strips, using loops of tape, and more... For example, the sound of Doctor Who’s TARDIS dematerialising was mostly achieved by slowing down a tape recording of a piano string being scraped by a piece of metal. Digital recordings are now called ‘samples’ when they are intended to be used to reproduce specific sounds ‘on demand’. This usage of the word ‘sample’ can be confusing: it does not mean that they are just give-away examples!
So, in the music world, a ‘sample library’ is a collection of carefully made recordings of orchestras or individual musical instruments and other sound producing devices, edited and curated so that musicians and music producers can use them to create music. The process of producing music usually involves software called Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs, pronounced ‘Doors’ or ‘D A Ws’) and ‘Sample Players’ that allow the sophisticated processing and replay of multiple layers of samples from libraries. As a result, producing something like the sound of a time machine dematerialising might take only a few seconds these days...
There’s a lot of finessing required to get good samples of real musical instruments, and this can involve individual recordings of each note (or a group of notes), played in various ways, followed by editing and then creating a single composite set of samples in the form of a ‘sample library’. This can be a huge undertaking, particularly at the high-end, where great care is taken to ensure that the samples are clean and clear, and that the balance of sounds is even across the range of the instrument. This is all classical engineering in action - with ‘music’ as the output! In contrast, at the low-end, then musical toys tend to take one sample of an instrument and simply transpose that sound digitally – this works and is quick and easy, but it also loses quality and fidelity.
One example of a company that is involved at the high-quality end of audio samples is Spitfire Audio. In 2019 they celebrated moving to new premises in Tileyard. If you aren’t familiar with the serious end of the pro-audio production spectrum (as I have taken you through a small window on above), then you might never have heard of Spitfire Audio and companies like it.
Spitfire Audio sell professional sample libraries, produced by people like Hans Zimmer (and his team of engineers), who has created many of the soundtracks for major films/movies you have probably watched in the last few years such as Interstellar, Inception, and The Dark Knight, amongst many others. Spitfire’s target market is professional producers and arrangers of music – which means that their web-site is designed to promote and sell their sample libraries to expert musicians. Through this website they provide not only access to their sounds, but they also offer a lot of support resources about techniques, and these resources have much broader appeal to a more general market – which is why this blog gives you links to some of the best of them.
Hopefully, you now have had a small introduction to the big world of audio engineering, and a much better idea of the sort of engineering, technology, creativity and attention to detail that is required to make the music that you hear (and probably mostly ignore) every day.
Here are some recommended selections for learning more about making and using ‘samples’, from some masters of the art and craft at Spitfire Audio:
Reverb https://www.spitfireaudio.com/editorial/quick-tips/unconventional-uses-of-reverb/ You may have thought that you know what reverberation is, but here, Christian from Spitfire Audio, starts by using reverb to produce a ‘pad’ sound that he then plays on a keyboard to create music that sounds like it should be from a TV show or movie. (Although this page says that you can get the ‘Epic Piano Pad’ sound for free, viewers who are not hi-tech musicians might find that the software required to play it is a little daunting...)
Making your own samples This shows how there is more than one way to record an instrument! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvco_DWMV_g
Creating sound ‘loops’ for drama https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWaqKJ2uh3o (Skip to ‘6:30’ for a good demo of using loops...)
And here are some of the individual sections of the Spitfire Audio web-site to explore:
Videos https://www.spitfireaudio.com/editorial/cribs/
(In the ‘Michael Price’ video, you can see magnetic tape-recording devices in the background!)
Tips https://www.spitfireaudio.com/editorial/quick-tips/
Tutorials https://www.spitfireaudio.com/editorial/in-depth/
Links
Tileyard https://tileyard.co.uk/
Spitfire Audio https://www.spitfireaudio.com/
ICMP https://www.icmp.ac.uk/industry-connections/icmp-at-tileyard-studios