Orchestral Tools has launched Abacus, the fruit of a creative partnership with eminent English composer and musician Richard Harvey. Abacus, a whimsical orchestra of historical children’s instruments, is culled from Harvey’s collection, some dating back to the Victorian era. This library offers an unprecedented assemblage of nostalgic and evocative sounds and is intuitively playable and instantly inspiring. It is ideal for historic, nostalgic, horror, and fantasy scoring, among other styles, providing composers and sound designers with a rich sonic palette.
The collection is available now for an introductory price of 139 EUR (189 EUR regular) until June 21. For more information and to purchase, please click here
The inception of Abacus finds its roots in Harvey’s fascination with vintage children’s instruments and the peculiar, compelling sounds they produce. In an attempt to amalgamate these distinctive tones he often used in his work, Harvey collaborated with Orchestral Tools to actualize his vision of a ‘children’s orchestra’. Harvey remarked, “I’ve spent years sourcing the instruments to recreate those special, evocative, nostalgic echoes from my past or my imagination. Now I’m sharing this lovingly amassed collection, as high-quality samples, with my peers.”
The Abacus library unites a myriad of vintage children’s instruments, many of which are featured in a sample library for the first time, distributed into six categories: Musical Boxes, Wind Instruments, Tuned Percussion, Plucked Instruments, Toy Pianos, and Toy Percussion. Captured with the same meticulous precision and range of playability as Orchestral Tools’ leading library collections, these instruments blend seamlessly into any score or sound design composition, featuring five mixable mic positions for added versatility.
Orchestral Tools CEO Hendrik Schwarzer admired Harvey’s passion for integrating unusual or underrated instruments into the orchestral context. “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,” he said. Harvey, known for his collaborations with acclaimed artists such as Hans Zimmer, Paul McCartney, and Elvis Costello, adds Abacus to his previous successful projects with Orchestral Tools, including Andea and Phoenix Orchestra. This unique orchestral library marks another step in sharing his remarkable instrument collection with the global composer community.
Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
