Spitfire Audio Joey Santiago review

Pixies man gets his own Spitfire library

  • £199
Reviews
By ( Future Music ) published

MusicRadar Verdict

A fittingly impressive library for a superb player.

Pros

  • +

    Great sounds. Pixies fans will lap it up.

Cons

  • -

    Not cheap.

MusicRadar's got your back Our team of expert musicians and producers spends hours testing products to help you choose the best music-making gear for you. Find out more about how we test.

The problem with signature sound libraries can be the difficulty of placing their content into other contexts.

But Spitfire's new guitar-lead Kontakt library helmed by the legendary Pixies guitarist - subtitled as 'a monstrous sonic plough' - covers a wide range of styles with enormous depth.

The basic guitar tone is captured through a variety of great amps and from different mic positions. 18 different styles of single-note multisampled plucks provide the bread-and-butter content here, alongside some heavily processed tones by Joey himself.

The 'Pad' and 'Mutation' presets load a bunch of looped playing segments into Spitfire's eDNA engine for serious warping, and with a plentiful supply of modulating options.

With an uncompressed size of 14GB, this isn't a small collection - and at £199 it isn't an impulse buy. However, the more you dig and play, the more you discover the ways in which it can be used.