Spitfire Audio's quest for dominance of your sample drive continues, with today's launch of the Contemporary Drama Toolkit. Designed in collaboration with composer Samuel Sim (whose credits include The Halcyon, The Spanish Princess and The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance, among many others), Contemporary Drama Toolkit (hence CDT) comprises 72 instantly playable patches and 44 patch combinations, which Spitfire are touting as ideal for high-budget TV scores.
CDT is essentially a sister product to 2019's British Drama Toolkit, but while that release majored on traditional orchestral sounds, this new instrument is decidedly modern, combining as it does the sounds of electric cellos, violins and guitars, vintage synths, vocals and more. Processing plays a big part too, and Spitfire tell us they made extensive use of stompboxes, studio effects and Eurorack modules to create textures suitable for underpinning a wide range of dramatic scenes.
Under the hood, Spitfire have mapped keyboard velocity to a number of parameters across all of CDT's sounds, the idea being that experienced composers can simply play along to a scene and “forget about the computer, and respond instinctively to the drama at hand”.
Like all of Spitfire's instruments, Contemporary Drama Toolkit is compatible with Native Instruments' NKS system, meaning you can browse and control it intuitively from any NI S-series controller. It's available now, and can be bought for the special introductory price £129 (after 11th February it reverts to its full price of £169).
To get a taste of what it's capable of, check out Spitfire's walkthrough video below.
