What is Groove Agent?
Need a real drummer for a song, but don’t have time or space for a complex recording session? Don’t know a drummer who can do the job right now? Groove Agent 3 is the perfect solution. Steinberg’s virtual drummer can play drum grooves and accompaniments in music styles from the last 50 years of music history. Groove Agent 3 gives you complete drum tracks in just a few clicks that sound as dynamic, lively and fresh as if you had a real session drummer playing in your song. The huge number of variations, fills, complexity levels, drum kits and the almost limitless combinations will fuel your imagination as well as your songs. Groove Agent 3 is also the ideal sparring partner for practicing your instrument – or as a drummer for your jam sessions with other musicians.
How does Groove Agent Work?
The classic Groove Agent concept (called Classic Agent in Groove Agent 3) is based on 1000s of MIDI sequences, which were played by top studio drummers especially for Groove Agent 3. With an extremely easy-to-use slider, you select a music genre, another slider sets the complexity of the groove being played. Each complexity level has its own drum fill, halrf-tempo and sidestick variations. The Edit area lets you change sounds or swap instruments around.
Special Agent and Percussion Agent use a different concept. These 2 Agents feature styles directly recorded as audio loops in a huge array of variations. They aren’t quite as flexible as Classic Agent, but give an even more authentic sound.
The Styles
Groove Agent 3 features 123 dynamic and ready-to-go drum styles from the past 50 years, with 42 new in this version, each including up to 25 variations and its own drum kit assigned to it. Up to 25 complexity levels serve to select different variations of the given style. In addition to variations on the basic rhythmic pattern, fills and halftime grooves suitable for each style are also available. Random and auto fill functions liven up the proceedings, while the Shuffle and Humanize knobs add a dash of swing and natural feel to the rhythm recipe.
Groove Agent 3 suits almost any musical style from classical to contemporary, capturing the full sonic palette of several high quality drum kits and digital drum machines. This makes it a rich and versatile instrument and style library. one that sounds just as powerful and emotive in the context of a heavy rock song as it does in a dance music production.
The Sounds
The sound library of Groove Agent 3 was created to cover as many musical bases as possible. Authenticity was also a key issue: the idea was to tailor drum kits and percussion instruments to a perfect fit for each musical style, as well as to capture natural room ambience for every sound.
What’s more, special stylistic devices were employed during the recording of drum sounds to invoke the spirit of the given era and lend these sounds authenticity. Case in point: ‘50s-style kits were played with brushes and mallets, while ‘80s-style kits featuring additional piccolo snare drums were played with rods.
Rather than recycling a sample library for the contents of Groove Agent, every drum sound was recorded in a pro studio in Sweden using high quality analog equipment. All sounds were recorded with multiple microphones to capture the room’s natural sound, which can be added to the VST instrument using the Ambience control. Contemporary electronic sounds feature standard studio effects such as reverb and echo.
Groove Agent Analog Kits:
- ‘50s Jazz Kit - Slightly dampened, a relatively open and loose-sounding drum kit
- 60s Pop Kit - A heavily dampened kit, recalling a time when towels were draped over toms.
- ‘70s Rock Kit - Loud, deep and resonant, this kit sounds enormous.
- ‘80s Studio Kit - Retro, hip sound as featured on contemporary CDs
- Studio Kit - A top of the line set with some of the best drums and cymbals around: punchy, clean, modern.
- Heavy Kit - This drum-set is intended to fit many of today’s Metal and Rock styles, where busy bass drumming is a vital ingredient.
- Noisy Kit - We wanted to create a modern drum sound using traditional drums, with very small instruments but combine with a boom-box effect they sound much bigger than they really are.
- *Gula - It looks a bit odd with its extended bass drum (two kick drums mounted head-to-head), but the sound is easily recognized as the very popular sound found on many hit songs recorded at Gula Studios in Malmö, Sweden.
- *Clean Adult Fun - The second kit was a set with pinstripe heads, tuned to produce a dry, clean, elegant and widely-useful sound, hence the name “Clean Adult Fun”
- *Fula - For the third set of recordings, we moved into the reverberant Stone Room and used an old, precious kit from the early sixties, nick-named “Fula”. Mother-of-pearl finish, white heads and almost no damping gives a very dynamic jazz-to-pop sound that can be used in a wide variety of situations.
*New in Groove Agent 3
Percussion
Groove Agent 3 offers a wealth of various percussion instruments in its sound library’s treasure-trove. Alongside standard GM sounds, a battery of intriguing instruments, including African drums, rain stick, tambourine, cascabeles, and many more are included. We included lots more Percussion sounds in Groove Agent 3 which play hand in hand with the all new Percussion Agent.
Vintage Drum Machine Kits
Some of these beauties are over thirty years old. We think we’ve managed to capture and re-package the better part of the magic of these drum machines of yesteryear. These vintage drum machines get their ambience from a vintage plate reverb unit. In Groove Agent 3 we also spiced up the sonic palette with some very well known digital drum machines from the eighties.
Real Ambience Technologie
The Real Ambience feature offers true recorded ambience that can be perfectly blended into any mix or production. During production of the Groove Agent 3 library, the natural ambience of different recording spaces was captured using special microphone techniques. Using no artificial reverb, Real Ambience builds an extraordinarily convincing drum room environment with fully adjustable wet/dry balance for each individual drum kit piece.