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

Steinberg's Groove Agent is a VSTinstrument that can substitute for a live drummer. You select themusical style and the level of complexity, and Groove Agent does therest.

The difference between Groove Agent and a sample loop library isthat a loop library supplies prerecorded beats. In Groove Agent, thesamples are recordings of individual drum hits. Groove Agent generatesbeats by triggering samples one at a time from its own internal MIDItracks.

That approach yields some big advantages. First, no matter how muchyou change the tempo, there's no sonic degradation. Second, individualdrum sounds can be retuned or swapped in and out as needed. Forinstance, you can substitute a different kick sound from a pop-up menuwithout disrupting the rest of the beat, or even trigger a sample in ahardware sampler. Third, because Groove Agent can send four independentaudio outputs to its VST host, you can add processing to individualdrum hits using VST effects. Fourth, after recording the MIDI notesfrom Groove Agent into a sequencer track, you can freely edit your drumtracks.

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

Groove Mania

Groove Agent's menu cleverly lists its styles chronologically, oneper year from 1950 through 2003. Selections range from Swing, Samba,and Cha-Cha ('50s) through Reggae, Funk, and Disco ('70s) to Drum NBass, 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 funkwith a world ethno kit, for instance. For still finer control over thekit, you can mix and match by choosing from a menu of between 11 and 25different 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 selectedas a group. Some electronic blips are included with the acoustic drumsamples.

Swapping sounds is just the beginning of the fun, though. Each styleincludes 25 different patterns, arranged in order of increasingcomplexity, and 25 fills. Groove Agent has ten preset-memory slots, soyou can capture combinations that appeal to you. Need more control overplayback? Groove Agent can record SysEx data into Cubase automationtracks.

Groove Agent is packed with useful features. Global knobs let youapply a compressor/limiter, add room ambience and shuffle, and evenrandomize the timing slightly. Even without randomization, the timingsounds very human. You can individually mute the eight drum channels,and you can also control parameters such as loudness, tuning, Velocityresponse, and ambience level, but not panning. You can switch fromsnare 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 canmix them to taste. There's even a bit of preset filtering, which can beswitched off or applied to the vintage (pre-1975) drum kits to givethem a more authentic “recorded to vinyl” sound.

Beat It

I've always preferred writing and editing my own MIDI drum tracks tousing loops, so I'm sure I'll be using Groove Agent a lot. At first Ifelt its sound was a bit bland and generic. No matter how I twiddledthe Ambience and Limiter knobs and auditioned more and less complexpatterns, it never jumped out of my speakers with the over-the-topsound design of a good loop library. Once I started adding otherinstrument tracks, though, I began to appreciate Groove Agent'sversatility. The lack of a strong identity in its sound palette madeits beats more adaptable to my musical ideas. For anyone whoneeds to produce good-sounding drum tracks in a variety of styles,Groove Agent will be a great tool.

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