Robert Bruce Kirby (16 April 1948 – 3 October 2009) was an English arranger of string sections for rock and folk music.

He worked on the Nick Drake albums, Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, and with Vashti Bunyan, Elton John, Ralph McTell, Strawbs, Paul Weller and Elvis Costello.

[2] Kirby matriculated at Cambridge University in October 1967 as a choral exhibitioner at Caius College, intending to become a music teacher.

John Wood, the album's sound engineer describes Kirby's involvement:[3] The first strong memory I have of Nick was at the second or third session for Five Leaves Left.

He was very young and he had struck me as a person you could push about – some people in a recording session will do whatever you tell them – but he was getting quietly more and more aggravated, and in the end he dug his heels in and dismissed the arrangements.

(He also was for three years, 1975–1978 one of the two keyboard players for Strawbs, touring the UK and internationally, and getting some composing credits on the albums Deep Cuts, Deadlines and Burning for You).

He talks extensively about his career in Nick Awde's 2008 book Mellotron, subtitled The Machine and the Musicians That Revolutionized Rock, which opens with a quote from him.

Kirby died in a West London hospital following emergency heart surgery after a short illness on 3 October 2009; he was 61 years old.