STEINBERG Groove Agent

Nov 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Jim Aikin

           

If you're not a drummer but you need to lay down realistic drum tracks, Steinberg Groove Agent (Mac/Win, $249.99) might be exactly what you need. Groove Agent is a VST instrument that combines two essential elements — stylish beats and crisply recorded drum samples — and gives you plenty of creative control over both. You can combine the program's 54 musical styles and more than 275 MB of sounds in many ways.

Steinberg's Groove Agent is a VST instrument that can substitute for a live drummer. You select the musical style and the level of complexity, and Groove Agent does the rest.

The difference between Groove Agent and a sample loop library is that a loop library supplies prerecorded beats. In Groove Agent, the samples are recordings of individual drum hits. Groove Agent generates beats by triggering samples one at a time from its own internal MIDI tracks.

That approach yields some big advantages. First, no matter how much you change the tempo, there's no sonic degradation. Second, individual drum sounds can be retuned or swapped in and out as needed. For instance, you can substitute a different kick sound from a pop-up menu without disrupting the rest of the beat, or even trigger a sample in a hardware sampler. Third, because Groove Agent can send four independent audio outputs to its VST host, you can add processing to individual drum hits using VST effects. Fourth, after recording the MIDI notes from Groove Agent into a sequencer track, you can freely edit your drum tracks.

When I recorded a Groove Agent performance into a Cubase SX track and opened the piano-roll editor, I found that Groove Agent was not sending Note Off messages for many of its notes. That isn't usually a problem with percussion instruments, because the notes die away on their own, but it makes a mess of the sequencer's editing display. I made all of the notes one 16th-note long, which took care of the problem.

Groove Mania

Groove Agent's menu cleverly lists its styles chronologically, one per year from 1950 through 2003. Selections range from Swing, Samba, and Cha-Cha ('50s) through Reggae, Funk, and Disco ('70s) to Drum N Bass, Hip-Hop, and Nu RnB. Each style has its own associated drum kit, but you can unlink the style from the kit and play New Orleans funk with a world ethno kit, for instance. For still finer control over the kit, you can mix and match by choosing from a menu of between 11 and 25 different sounds for each of the eight drum channels (kick, snare, tom-toms, and so on). Some of the channels play more than one sound (closed and open hi-hat, for instance), and those are always selected as a group. Some electronic blips are included with the acoustic drum samples.

Swapping sounds is just the beginning of the fun, though. Each style includes 25 different patterns, arranged in order of increasing complexity, and 25 fills. Groove Agent has ten preset-memory slots, so you can capture combinations that appeal to you. Need more control over playback? Groove Agent can record SysEx data into Cubase automation tracks.

Groove Agent is packed with useful features. Global knobs let you apply a compressor/limiter, add room ambience and shuffle, and even randomize the timing slightly. Even without randomization, the timing sounds very human. You can individually mute the eight drum channels, and you can also control parameters such as loudness, tuning, Velocity response, and ambience level, but not panning. You can switch from snare to sidestick without having to select a new type of snare sound. The ambience samples can be sent to their own VST output, so you can mix them to taste. There's even a bit of preset filtering, which can be switched off or applied to the vintage (pre-1975) drum kits to give them a more authentic “recorded to vinyl” sound.

Beat It

I've always preferred writing and editing my own MIDI drum tracks to using loops, so I'm sure I'll be using Groove Agent a lot. At first I felt its sound was a bit bland and generic. No matter how I twiddled the Ambience and Limiter knobs and auditioned more and less complex patterns, it never jumped out of my speakers with the over-the-top sound design of a good loop library. Once I started adding other instrument tracks, though, I began to appreciate Groove Agent's versatility. The lack of a strong identity in its sound palette made its beats more adaptable to my musical ideas. For anyone who needs to produce good-sounding drum tracks in a variety of styles, Groove Agent will be a great tool.

Steinberg North America
tel. (818) 678-5100
e-mail info@steinberg.net
Web www.steinberg.net