In response to repeated requests, music-making community tools-maker The Crow Hill Company is proud to present MARSHAL BRASS — available as an all-new brass library featuring a never-before-assembled ensemble for a sample project, portrayed as being rich, moving, reflective, and plaintive in the great British tradition that is not the lofty, noble sound of beautiful horns, nor the regal connotation of the trumpet, but something more honest, heartbreaking, and truthful to the human spirit without breaking out a violin, cello, or piano — as of February 26…
As a result of setting out to create a library that embraced the lesser-visited area of brass — that of courage, valour, and loss in the face of heroism, something honest and truthful, The Crow Hill Company arrived at MARSHAL BRASS’ beautiful-sounding combination of a flugelhorn and three euphoniums, respectively performed by Mark Addison, Peter Moore, Tom Berry, and Simon Johnson, creatively captured at Assumption Studios, a recording, filming, and green screen facility located in the north side of Glasgow, Scotland. By bringing them together, MARSHAL BRASS succeeds in recreating the beauty of the types of tone normally achieved with French horns and trumpets, but with slightly less identifiable characteristics. The tuning, for example, on the euphonium — often referred to as a tenor tuba — is more fragile than that of a French horn, so when played as an ensemble it carries a very special, very moving richness, while the flugelhorn has less of the huntsman and more or the hunted about it — a wistfulness that is very unique to the instrument with a core tone that is not too alien or distracting.
Cue composer Christian Henson who co-founded The Crow Hill Company on the back of primarily working on television and film soundtracks, so the musical mechanics of MARSHAL BRASS are clearly close to his heart: “The euphoniums don’t have the regal quality of the horns because of their idiosyncrasies in the tuning that just makes every note different, which is what really suits sampling.”
Serious sampling, of course, is what led to those repeated requests for what became MARSHAL BRASS being made by the music-making community tools-maker’s ‘AAA-list’ composer friends who were seeking a brass library that took them to grave emotional, reflective states and memories, both fond and fateful. “This is a library that’s been requested by a bunch of massively successful professionals,” confirms Christian Henson, before adding: “As this is a flavour of brass that we believe hasn’t yet been sampled, we thought that we’d deliver what is — for us — a very grown-up library. It really is like, ‘Okay, you’ve got all your orchestral libraries; if you want to slot in this heroic element into your existing template then we want to give you the choice of articulations and depth of sampling that you would expect.’ So we’ve forgone the temptation of Gestures as a cutting-edge concept, whereby an orchestra interpreting its user’s composition and making it into music and art lies behind every key played in this instance, instead opting for a real selection of different shapes, articulations, and lengths of note. So we have CRESCENDO; DIMINUENDO; HAIRPIN SHORT and LONG], which are, basically, a colloquial term for going up and then down, but, because these don’t loop, if you stagger them then you can develop these pealing effects which are just stunning; and SFORZANDO — not particularly idiomatic of these types of instruments, but if you want a bit of loud, bright, and brassy, we have that, too.”
For more information, visit thecrowhillcompany.com.
