Orchestral Tools has announced its latest collaboration with the celebrated English composer and musician, Richard Harvey.
Abacus is an imaginative, one-of-kind orchestra comprised of the sounds of historic children’s instruments assembled from Harvey’s personal collection dating back to the Victorian era.
Intuitive to play and immediately inspiring, the collection puts a broad emotional palette of evocative early childhood sounds at the fingertips of composers and sound designers and is ideal for nostalgic and historic scoring, as well as horror, fantasy, and much more.
An inspiring musical toy shop made for professionals
The genesis of Abacus comes from Harvey’s extensive interest in vintage children’s instruments and the unique sounds and musical ideas that he often found in playing them. Realizing that there was no single collection that brought together these sounds that he often used in his professional work, Harvey partnered with Orchestral Tools to bring his vision of a ‘children’s orchestra’ to life.
“When I wanted unusual, magical, even childlike effects, I often couldn’t find the sounds I needed,” Harvey explained. “I’ve spent years sourcing the instruments to recreate those special, evocative, nostalgic echoes from my past or my imagination, and now I’m sharing this lovingly amassed collection, as high-quality samples, with my peers.”
Abacus brings together the sounds of a wide variety of vintage children’s instruments, many of which are available in a sample library for the first time, divided into six sections: Musical Boxes, Wind Instruments, Tuned Percussion, Plucked Instruments, Toy Pianos, and Toy Percussion.
Each instrument was captured faithfully with the same attention to detail and range of playability as Orchestral Tools’ flagship library collections — ensuring that these sounds are immediately usable within the context of traditional sounds and professional orchestration. Each instrument also includes five mixable mic positions making them easy to blend into any score or sound design composition.
“Richard’s enthusiasm for bringing unusual or overlooked instruments into the context of the orchestra has always inspired us,” said Orchestral Tools CEO Hendrik Schwarzer. “With Abacus we’ve brought that context to a century’s worth of children’s instruments that made us fall in love with music to begin with, and brought to them a sound quality and usability that we can bring into professional scoring without losing that crucial sense of play.”
Running in the SINE Player (VST/VST3, AU and AAX), the collection is available now for an introductory price of 139 EUR until June 21st, 2023 (regular 189 EUR). Prices ex. VAT where applicable.
More information: Orchestral Tools
