Steinberg Backbone

Backbone is your new, innovative drum designer for single kicks, snares, hi-hats, percussion, rises, hits and more. Layer up to eight samples and shape them with classic subtractive synthesis, decompose samples into tonal and noise elements, re-synthesize samples to manipulate them in unheard ways and apply up to eight effects with two fully routable buses — all with a slick, extremely fast interface. Backbone takes your drums into a whole new era of sound design — the era of drum re-synthesis!

• Intuitively design drums with up to eight layers
• Re-synthesize one-shots and loops
• Directly export audio for clip-based music production
• Backbone supports VST 3, AU and AAX

Artificial drum intelligence by Sony CSL

Backbone 1.5 now comes with DrumGAN, an innovative drum generator developed by Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. (Sony CSL). Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), it creates new kick drum, snare drum and cymbal samples in a very fast, intuitive way. It also analyzes samples, can replicate them and create countless variations. DrumGAN is the perfect addition to Backbone for crafting new drum sounds entirely from scratch, while staying in your favorite sample editing environment.

AI creates. You design.

The AI generates fresh kick drums, snare drums and cymbals, which can be further adjusted with all the tools that you have come to love in Backbone. Use newly-created drum samples as a starting point, you can decompose, layer, re–synthesize or create any other kind of transformation in Backbone to craft your own, unique sound. If you like a specific sound, but are not completely satisfied with it, DrumGAN will quickly generate more variations in the same style.

DrumGAN: a development by Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.

The research team at Sony CSL comprises Javier Nistal and Stefan Lattner. They have developed a new system to generate drum sounds with Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). DrumGAN analyzed a large collection of kick drums, snare drums and cymbals to develop a new way of generating drums. The result is an outstanding system, which offers a new source of expressive and musical drum sounds. Together with Steinberg, Sony CSL has worked on implementing this impressive technology within Backbone, helping musicians across the world to create new and unique, sample-based signature drums sounds.