The Workshop release a new archive for sampling
The Radiophonic Workshop, BBC Studios and Spitfire Audio have collaborated to produce a sample pack of Radiophonic sounds lifted from their extensive archive, with a whole raft of new audio delights created at the Maida Vale studio in west London where the Workshop was once based, by Radiophonic Workshop alumni including Mark Ayres, Kieron Pepper, Bob Earland, Dick Mills, Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb, Glynis Jones and Peter Howell.
“I’m the youngest member of the core Radiophonic Workshop – and I’m 64!,“ says Workshop Mark Ayres. “We’re not going to be around forever. It was really important to leave a creative tool, inspired by our work, for other people to use going forward. I hope we’ve made an instrument that will inspire future generations.
“This instrument is all formed from the work, processes and equipment that the Workshop
created and used. You know, sampling now really looks like sampling then, but with a few more twiddles. I’ve been saying for years that Workshop composers such as Delia Derbyshire and John Baker were really samplists.”
The archive materials will be available in Spitfire Audio’’s Solar engine which enables techniques like bending, stretching and morphing, as well as having access to a variety of microphones, the EMT turntable and Rogers loudspeakers made especially for the BBC, including the Maida Vale plate and spring reverbs, modular synthesizers, tape machines, EMS Vocoder, Echo chamber, Roland Vocoder SVC-350 and Eventide H-3000. The package is divided into Archive Content, Found Sounds, Junk Percussion, Tape Loops, Synths and a Miscellany.
The Spitfire Audio BBC Radiophonic Workshop VST is available now at spitfireaudio.com at the special introductory price of £119.
