The Crow Hill Company Proudly Pens Love Letter to Music Makers

Proudly penning what it collectively calls “a love letter to music makers,” The Crow Hill Company is all set to scale sampling heights by launching as a new eco-verse of resources, tools, and opportunity for music makers from all walks of life — anchored around a hub acting as an aggregation of content commercially centred around IP (Intellectual Property) using sampling technology that is duly designed to achieve that literal aim, albeit entry points to both resources and tools are free to all, with graduated tiers of (one-off and monthly-subscription) payments tailored to those on all rungs of the musical ladder, from students to A-list composers, in a move that is all set to disrupt the current pricing paradigm in the sampling space, the sonic quality of which will readily represent a new chapter marker in the history of electronic music — as of October 19.

Far from setting its sights on unscalable heights, The Crow Hill Company can leverage a rare combination of talent and experience in actively pursuing its ambitious aim — not least founder Christian Henson, an Ivor Novello Award- and BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award-nominated composer who is still scoring music-to-picture projects to this day. Duly responsible for creating some of the most popular tools for composers during the last two decades, he founded Spitfire Audio as a world-leading, multi-award-winning orchestral sample company, while his LABS (Let’s All Become Something) scheme opened up the wonderful world of music making to three-million-plus users; he partnered with the BBC Symphony Orchestra to create a suite of tools to encourage anyone anywhere, regardless of ability, to make orchestral music — this project alone has well over one-million users to date; and last — but by no means least, he nurtured a community around his successful YouTube Channel from which the 300,000-user-strong peer-to- peer Pianobook platform was created.

Calum Minuti-Goold has also come onboard to head up The Crow Hill Company’s world-class production and engineering team, having worked with Christian Henson on a number of Spitfire Audio favourites, such as ALBION COLOSSUS, ALBION SOLSTICE, APERTURE CASSETTE SYMPHONY, and APERTURE THE STACK, as well as previously playing an instrumental role in making independent KONTAKT software instrument developer and deep-sampling specialist 8Dio into another success story.

It is fair to say, though, that many members of The Crow Hill Company team were instrumental in making Christian Henson’s multi-faceted, musically- creative journey happen. However, The Crow Hill Company collectively feels it can take the decades’ worth of experience in both media music and music technology and expand them out further to a broader audience, changing attitudes and approaches to music making forever. For The Crow Hill Company will not just inspire people to get them started, but will also support them and motivate them to use the tools it creates combined with the resources it supplies — satisfying VST virgins programming a rock beat for the very first time to those creating their next Oscar-winning film score.

To truly appreciate where it is that The Crow Hill Company is heading as a small team obsessed with all things audio, one could do worse than pressing the proverbial pause button, thereby freeing up a little record time to register some wise words from the past. As award-winning American record producer, songwriter, composer, arranger, and film and television producer Quincy Jones is on record as sensibly saying: “The only justification for looking down on anyone is that you’re going to stop and pick them up.” Ultimately, then, The Crow Hill Company’s considered ethos — effectively why it is here today to do what it does — comes down to pondering present-day music-making issues and more besides, best summarised as follows: people think that in order to make music it is necessary to study and practice (whereas it could conceivably be argued that making music is the only practice needed); people cannot afford to make music because it is pricey and requires a hefty commitment; people do not have the support, inspiration, and encouragement around them to make music; people who want a career in music do not know how to go about making it happen; people struggle to be heard and discovered; women do not think music technology is designed with them in mind; and the tools available to music-makers today require technical prowess, time, and imagination to make them sound like anything users would want to put in a playlist.

Put it this way, though: there are 100-million people making music with their computers today; The Crow Hill Company collectively think that there are many more waiting in the wings, and all they need is a little help from a small team that is not only obsessed with all things audio but also intent on addressing those perceived present-day issues, music making or otherwise. On the face of it, anyone will be able to put a band, choir, orchestra, or singer in their computer so that they can make the music they want to make, whether wishing to sound like American rapper, record producer, singer, and songwriter Pharell or German-born-and-bred Hollywood hotshot Hans Zimmer, arguably one of the greatest — certainly one of the most prolific — film composers of our time… or even themselves, surely.

Students to composing A-listers alike can clearly celebrate in the fact that The Crow Hill Company definitely does not look down on anyone but rather picks everyone engaging with it — as a new eco-verse of resources, tools, and opportunity for music makers from all walks of life — up. Ultimately, it is surely set to scale sampling heights while striving to build the biggest online music-making community in doing so. It is certainly fair to say that its aim is true, truly living up to its Make Music, Your Music motto as “a love letter to music makers,” indeed!