FM | SOUNDS & SAMPLES
Spitfire Audio – Trevor Horn £99
>There’s no denying the status of Trevor Horn as a legendary pop producer, and one who’s long career includes a slew of tracks (often as both producer and songwriter) that are firmly ensconced on radio and streaming playlists. In many respects he is thought of as an archetypal ’80s producer, who managed to combine well-crafted songs with technologically advanced production (aided by the swift changes in the studio technology during that decade). This means, that although his discography is extremely wide and varied, there remains deep fondness and fascination for the synths and allied processing that defined his sound in that era. It is with this in mind that many potential users might come to Jupiter By Trevor Horn, a samplebased Spitfire Audio library that claims to deliver the “defining sounds of a pop icon”.
The library itself (which weighs in at nearly 50GB), makes use of Spitfire’s Mercury front-end to host the content, with presets accessed via a drop-down browser at the top of the window. The synth-engine consists of two layers, both with a standard array of shaping and tweaking controls. Each gets its own effect section as well as shared auxiliary and insert effects alongside a rhythmic gate sequencer. This means there’s quite a bit of flexibility in manipulating the underlying sample content.
The big problem, however, is that the global preset browser consists of a long list of presets categorised only by the keywords ‘long’ and ‘short’ – and names such as ‘Wibble Wobble’ give no clue whatsoever to the type of sound it may be. Auditioning revealed some decent presets, but, to be frank, my initial reaction was one of disappointment. To clarify, this wasn’t because of the content per se, but rather that there wasn’t much sense of this being filled with Trevor’s defining sounds (and more like a good-quality, but rather generic layered synth engine).
It was at this point that I decided to explore the raw sounds employed in the individual layers (with all other additional shaping and effects turned off). Hallelujah!
Immediately, I got a sense of the real personality living inside, and with a familiarity of tone that I had been expecting at the start. Not only that, but the sounds were categorised by type (Synths, Bass, Drums etc) and easily accessible in differently processed variants.
This isn’t to say that this experience was perfect – the browser is fiddly, there’s no easy way to switch between the different version of each sound and the sub-window closes each time you make a selection – but in sonic terms, this is where the gold lies, especially when adding some nicely modulated Lexicon 224 reverb to the mix (unlike the rather functional built-in reverb).
That being said, quite a few of the synth sounds here are similar to (or variants of) sounds from cla
