Spitfire Audio – Steel Drums

These beautifully crafted steel drums, performed by renowned session percussionist Frank Ricotti, will add colour and energy to your film, TV and gaming soundtracks. Steel Drums also contains a fantastic range of presets designed for use in modern R&B, pop and electronic music, hosted on our popular eDNA engine for instant playback and control. 

From hauntingly beautiful soft layers to searing metallic strikes, this exciting addition to our percussion range has been sampled at the world’s finest music recording venue, The Hall at Air Studios, and works perfectly with all of our orchestral libraries.

Spitfire Audio founder Christian Henson has always admired steel drums, renowned for their emotional sound, sub-bass harmonics and rich tonal and dynamic range. Having collaborated with Frank Ricotti on many percussion projects including original Hans Zimmer percussion, we returned to the Air Studios facility to further expand our percussion range.

Our goal was to record these steel drums for a variety of purposes, using a variety of mic positions to capture a variety of sources. The Tree mic position is suitable for those wanting to use steel drums in their orchestral soundtracks for film, games and TV, while the Close and more focused positions are more suited to R&B and electronic tracks. 

We were able to capture a multi-faceted and moving sound at softer levels, all the way through to louder and more dynamic layers creating a more traditional Caribbean sound.

Steel Drums comes in two interface options: a standard multi-mic interface for those familiar with our orchestral range, with the ability to instantly customize articulations and mics. We’ve also loaded Steel Drums into our advanced eDNA engine with dozens of instantly playable presets developed by our award-winning team of composers, producers and engineers.

Every note was recorded by Air Studios’ seasoned resident engineer Jake Jackson using a variety of priceless vintage microphones through Neve “Montserrat” preamps and a well-maintained Studer 2″ tape machine, then digitized at 96kHz resolution using the finest Prism AD converters.

In the Trinidadian tradition, bamboo sticks were used to hit kitchen utensils, trash cans, and drums, which evolved into the steel band movement in the 1930s and became a popular carnival instrument by the 1940s. In film soundtracks, they can be found in original compositions by Jaco Pastorius, Cliff Martinez, and Hans Zimmer, as well as popular dance and RnB tracks around the world. Percussionist Frank Ricotti is a living legend. 

In addition to being one of the most in-demand recording percussionists in the world, he has played on countless blockbuster soundtracks including Inception, Skyfall, The Twilight Saga, Madagascar, Interstellar, The Chronicles of Narnia, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and the Bourne series.