Spitfire Audio BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Spitfire Audio’s BBC Radiophonic Workshop library is housed in the Solar plug‑in, also used for Jupiter by Trevor Horn and the Mercury instrument collection.

Spitfire travel through time to uncover the secrets of the BBC’s mysterious ‘special sounds’ department.

Since 2014 Spitfire have done their fair share of collaborations, joining forces with eminent film composers, producers, performers, orchestras and recording studios (including Abbey Road, AIR and BBC Maida Vale) to create their sound libraries. The latest Maida Vale tie‑in is one of the most intriguing: a deep dive into the BBC’s legendary Radiophonic Workshop, guided and overseen by Workshop archivist Mark Ayres.

Spitfire’s Paul Thomson explains how the plan took shape: “Having finished the BBC Symphony Orchestra project (reviewed in SOS November 2019) we started discussing ‘what can we do next?’ and the idea of something centred around the Radiophonic Workshop was bounced back and forth between us and BBC Studios. Having grown up listening to Doctor Who and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as a child, this was incredibly exciting to me! Over the course of a few meetings we came up with the idea of archive plus new recordings; we brought in Mark Ayres early on to help us spec out what might be possible and desirable, and then went into the planning of the new sessions while exploring the archive.”

This 27.8GB library is housed in Spitfire’s Solar plug‑in, also used for Jupiter by Trevor Horn and the Mercury instrument collection. Owners of those libraries will need to install BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the same location as their Mercury and/or Jupiter folder. No other sampling platform is provided, but as long as your DAW supports one of the AU, VST2, VST3 and AAX plug‑in formats, you’re good to go.

BBCRW’s presets utilise Spitfire’s eDNA engine, which offers facilities for mixing, layering, crossfading and oscillating between its twin sound bays (though if you prefer to hear a single preset, you can always mute its companion). Each bay has its own complement of built‑in effects, so you can experiment with your own sonic treatments, but given the extraordinary imagination of the original sound designers, that’s hardly necessary!

Archive Content

The collection’s core archive sounds were collated by Mark Ayres, a self‑professed massive fan of the Radiophonic Workshop who was called in to write incidental music for Doctor Who in 1988. Eight years later, Ayres rescued the Workshop archive from oblivion, stepping in to catalogue thousands of tapes that were otherwise destined for landfill — an enormous (and largely unpaid) labour of love. The tapes were finally transferred to the main BBC archive on April 1st 1998, 40 years to the day after the Radiophonic Workshop was founded.

Many of these archive effects have a Doctor Who connection: ‘Time Winds’ is a brilliant electronic realisation of (ahem) ‘a form of temporal radiation which causes anomalies and glitches in space‑time’; the eerie atonality of ‘Time Lord Count’ nails the early Workshop sound, while ‘07 Daleks’ defies expectations by evoking the mournful sighing of soft alien winds. I was pleased to get my hands on the Doctor’s ‘sonic screwdriver’, and look forward to using its superpowers to repel any daleks looking to barge into my music room....