Back in the day, watching BBC TV in the UK, you’d often see a credit to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. They were masters of creating amazing music and sound effects, used in iconic shows such as Doctor Who and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I even remember buying a sound effect CD of sci-fi and technology sound effects created by the Workshop.
Not only did they have some pretty amazing computer hardware, in the days when you needed a mortgage to afford it, but they also had some very interesting, and often low-tech, methods of creating sounds and effects — often recorded painstakingly over hours and days.
Now some of those incredible sounds can be yours, for a relatively small fee, so you can enjoy and use them in your modern music-making setup.
Making the archive available will “preserve an important musical heritage for generations to come”, says the broadcaster. The Radiophonic Workshop created amazing audio for over 40 years in its Maida Vale studios in London.
Sounds will be made available in Spitfire Audio’s Solar engine, meaning that musicians can use modern techniques of bending, stretching and morphing too create new sounds, with access to a variety of virtual microphones, the EMT turntable and Rogers loudspeakers which were made exclusively for the BBC, plus plate and spring reverbs, modular synthesisers, tape machines, EMS vocoder, echo chamber, Roland Vocoder SVC-350 and Eventide H-3000.
The pack is split into six sections: Archive Content, Found Sounds, Junk Percussion, Tape Loops, Synths and a Miscellany.
The library’s RRP is £149, with a special offer £119 running until 17th March.
