The Big Nessie is a first-of-its-kind sampled instrument, made in collaboration with groundbreaking British fashion brand Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY to coincide with the launch of their Spring/Summer 2026 collection Prepared Piano.

It is a playable digital instrument designed for music makers of all levels, enabling producers to experiment with raw, textural sounds drawn from the creative world of LOVERBOY and Abbey Road Studios. The release also marks our first fully in-house built sampled instrument.

The Big Nessie is available to download for free from today!

The Big Nessie is based on the world of Charles Jeffrey and has been designed using Abbey Road’s Curve Bender philosophy and approach, which allows the studio to capture sounds, process them via their range of unique vintage equipment and acoustic spaces, and present these as playable digital software instruments for the music production community and creators of all levels to experiment and play. The original Curve Bender was a device invented in 1951 to shape sound and control tone, and forms part of the incredible legacy of innovation within the Abbey Road story which continues to inspire the team today.

The sounds found in the instrument are a mixture of field recordings from the LOVERBOY workshop in Somerset House and recordings made in the legendary Studio Two at Abbey Road with Charles and his musical director Tom Furse together with our Audio Products team, Mirek Stiles and Sarah Meyz. The sounds were then edited and sound sculpted, before being wrapped with graphics designed by Charles. The resulting instrument triggers a library full of beautifully strange and raw sounds, giving producers warped percussive textures, tonal fragments and experimental rhythms to play with.

Speaking about The Big Nessie, Abbey Road’s Head of Audio Products, Mirek Stiles, who led development of the instrument says:

“There are many beautiful examples of how music and fashion have seamlessly fused together over the years, but this feels like the first time these creative worlds have come together to present a music production creative tool. Working with Charles Jeffrey was a truly inspiring experience that took both Loverboy and Abbey Road out of their comfort zones to make a fun and quirky sampled instrument for the creative community across the globe. The Loverboy workshop in Somerset House and Studio Two at Abbey Road provided the perfect environments to capture unique samples for Abbey Road’s first fully in-house built sampled instrument, and a truly exciting collaboration with the creative mind of Charles Jeffrey and his colourful and vibrant world. I hope artists and producers have as much fun exploring this instrument as we had making it.”

Speaking about the process, Charles Jeffrey adds:

“Abbey Road Studios is not just a music icon; it’s a cultural hub, a laboratory of dreams. LOVERBOY has always aligned itself with institutions that celebrate culture, from the British Library to the V&A. Partnering with Abbey Road, a place that fosters innovation and creativity, felt like the perfect fit as I explore new dimensions in music and fashion. Our project ‘Prepared Piano’ embodies that spirit of experimentation, blending the sound of our creative process with the iconic legacy of Abbey Road, offering a 360-degree experience of what LOVERBOY is all about.”

The Big Nessie is the sonic counterpart to the Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY Spring/Summer 2026 collection: Prepared Piano, a love letter to music making in partnership with Abbey Road. This season, music isn’t simply the inspiration – it’s the output. As LOVERBOY creative director Charles Jeffrey says, “In 2025, fashion for fashion’s sake feels vulgar.” Thus, SS26 is shaped by the process of music-making, specifically the experimental, analogue, tactile kind as long practised at and made possible by Abbey Road Studios.

LOVERBOY distilled archetypes from the characters who emerged across the myriad photos and film material discovered within Abbey Road’s archives. The many collaborators featured across this imagery were often captured during in-between moments, coded by style. There are the authoritative execs in their crisp tailoring and wide-lapelled suits, the musicians for whom formality unravelled in favour of function and flare across the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the engineers in their white lab coats, mixing like mad scientists across the various recording tools within the studio.

In keeping with Abbey Road’s pioneering, future-facing commitment to innovation and play, these archetypes are reimagined for 2026 in the LOVERBOY collection documented here: the Gen Z bedroom producers swallowed up in their fuzzy ears beanie and oversized hoodie, the magnetically IDGAF rockstars adorned in sleeves and hems belling out like trumpets, and the exacting, obsessive technicians in their supersized lab coat made of heavy-duty shirting.

Indeed, it’s these very music makers for whom the collection takes its chief inspiration. Not simply the future superstars making music on their laptops in their teenage hideaways, but the true innovators to whom this new generation are indebted, who came before through cultural institutions like Abbey Road and subverted stuffy conventions in order to define modern music as we know it.

At the heart of the collection lies a pair of inverted questions: What does fashion sound like? How might sound be worn? These provocations fuel the collaborative process behind SS26—a synesthetic dialogue between sound and garment, warped through experimentation and play.

Charles first began sketching while listening to music recorded at Abbey Road Studios, letting the melody inspire colour and form. In tandem with his design team, creative decisions were made like sonic remixes—layered, looped, reversed. From this process came the season’s central visual motif: simulacra. Not quite copies, not quite originals—these garments are echoes, imitations, ghost forms. Classic tailoring is distorted, a collision of tradition and subversion: shirts with extra sleeves that tie around the waist like a belt; trompé l’œil belts already stitched into trousers, shirting with ties pre-attached and askew, sunglasses gone wiggly and weird as if melted by the sun. The result is a collection of mutated staples that demand a second look.

The collection’s name itself, Prepared Piano, nods to John Cage’s 1940s technique of modifying the instrument with bolts, rubber, and cutlery, transforming it into something raw and unpredictable. LOVERBOY applies this logic to garment-making: formalwear is tampered with, lovingly warped away from its origins. Each garment hums with the energy of interruption. Like a prepared piano, nothing quite sounds (or looks) the way tradition intended.