One Sample Can Become Your Signature Sound
Backbone is Steinberg's drum design plugin for anyone who wants to bid farewell to static one-shots. Layer up to eight samples, shape each one independently, then push further with tools that treat each sample as raw material rather than a fixed recording. Resynth turns any sound into a spectral version that plays up to 800 times faster, slower, or frozen as a static spectrum, so one kick can become a bass tone, a pad, or a riser. Decompose splits samples into tonal and noise layers. Pitch matching locks everything to your track's key, and a spectral filter handles tone shaping right inside the plugin. Furthermore, DrumGAN, an AI drum generator developed by Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL), can analyze a sample and generate fresh kicks, snares, and cymbals or new variations of a favorite sound. You also have the freedom to route everything through two fully customizable effects buses, print and reimport processed audio as new layers, and export with full control over format. This drum designer doesn't just play samples; it lets you build entirely new ones.
Related Videos: Backbone Drum Designer Plugin
Drums that sound familiar, not recycled
Feed DrumGAN an existing kick, snare, or cymbal, and it will build a stereo version of a mono hit or pull several usable alternatives from a single favorite sound. Even without a reference sample, DrumGAN can generate drums from scratch, giving you a musically usable starting point instead of an empty layer. Either way, everything it creates can be dropped straight into the rest of Backbone's tool kit, so a generated kick can still be decomposed, resynthesized, layered, and routed through effects like any other sample. It's a fast-track way to get unique, creative drum sounds.
Steinberg Backbone Features:
- Drum designer plugin with myriad creative ways of designing your own unique, custom drum sounds never heard before
- Layer up to 8 samples per sound, with independent processing on each layer for full control over pitch, filtering, and FX
- Decompose splits samples into tonal and noise layers that can each be tuned, filtered, or effected without affecting the other
- Resynth section plays samples up to 800 times faster, slower, or frozen as a static spectrum for radically reshaping any sound
- DrumGAN AI drum generator from Sony CSL analyzes a sample and generates new variations in the same style
- 250 handcrafted presets, including 60 snares, 25 claps, and 35+ toms, each built with individual layers intact for instantly usable sounds and references for how to design your own
- 2 fully routable FX buses with parallel or serial routing for shaping your sound's mix character
- Up to 8 FX per layer from a full studio FX collection gives each layer its own dedicated processing chain
- Freely adjustable spectral filter for surgical, frequency-specific tone shaping
- Pitch matching across layers and to a chosen root key locks your stacked drum sounds to your track's key instantly
- Direct export with adjustable sample rate, pitch, velocity, channel format, and tail, so sounds leave Backbone correctly formatted and ready to use for your sample library or DAW
- Drag-and-drop reimport of printed audio as a new layer lets you stack processing passes that couldn't otherwise be applied twice
