Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5 Stars
With a quick browse of the Song Athletics website, you will quickly realise that this is a sample library, virtual instrument and plug‑in development team that walks a somewhat individual path. Their compact product catalogue provides an eclectic suite of options. The latest addition to this range is Friends, a Kontakt‑based sample library that provides a collection of fairly conventional piano, keyboard, guitar, bass and drum options. All of which doesn’t really seem to fit the somewhat quirky nature of many of the other Song Athletics offerings. So, is there a suitably creative twist?
Well, yes... and no... but I suspect the ‘no’ bit is very much by design. The library provides 14 instruments in total, built from just over 15GB of samples and, once purchased, can be downloaded through Native Access. The instruments themselves span various pianos (grand, upright, felt, electric), four different synth patches (drawn from Roland SH‑101 and Juno‑106), an acoustic drum kit featuring Ludwig, Rogers and Paiste components, a Gibson acoustic guitar, a Nash T‑style electric guitar, a Jazz‑style electric bass and a Paul Claudot upright bass. It’s here that we begin to see some of the Song Athletics aesthetic as you get the very distinct impression that these instruments have been carefully chosen for their classy sound. They have certainly been carefully sampled. All the recording was done at Snap! Studios in London through a classic 1970s Neve console, with sampling at 96kHz, and the final playable instruments feature up to eight round robins and six dynamic layers.
Normally, this would be the point at which your reviewer might say something about the Kontakt UI employed but the second rather individual (unusual?) element of Friends is that said UI has absolutely zero controls! Therefore, for each instrument within the collection, what you see (or rather hear) is exactly what you get. If you want to tweak the sounds, or add some ambience treatments, then you will need to do that within your DAW. However, those carefully crafted 14 instruments don’t half get you off to a good start as they sound beautiful. Warm, natural, and very musical, this is a rather wonderful palette of sounds.
Friends gives you a compact, easy‑to‑use collection of high‑quality — and very organic — sounds within a single library.
And that is, I suspect, the key point of Friends’ design: to give you a conventional set of instrument sounds, with a very natural sonic ethic — no fuss, just play and compose. If your styles include acoustic pop or singer/songwriter type productions, Friends gives you a compact, easy‑to‑use collection of high‑quality — and very organic — sounds within a single library. It would make for a great production/songwriting soundbox on your laptop for composition sketching on the move. No, it may not be for everyone, and it perhaps won’t be the only sample library you’ll ever need, but Friends does what it does with some considerable class.