It’s time for an update on the Groove Agent 4 development. In the last post I gave some insight on the creation of the acoustic drum samples that will be part of the content library. But as I mentioned before Groove Agent 4 will introduce a new concept comprising well-known workflows but also new approaches to virtual drummers. An idea that was already featured in Groove Agent 3 will be revised and turned into a new approach. In GA4 there will be again multiple agents that will play on their own or along with other agents in sync. The idea is to have a drum workstation that can be loaded with agents that are “specialists” for specific styles, sounds and genres. The advantage is that each agent’s feature set is as simple or as complex as it needs to be without having to add all parameters or features on every instrument.
Keeping it simple and intuitive is still on top of the list. The agent concept allows us to create instruments within Groove Agent with own personalities, including limits and strengths. Now think about what kind of agents you would like to see in Groove Agent!
Most of you know Groove Agent ONE that has been included in Cubase for several years. We received a lot of positive feedback on the easy and straightforward concept that this little beat machine has to offer, although there are also a lot of suggestions on how to improve the feature set and workflow. It just makes sense that something similar will also be part of Groove Agent 4: a dedicated agent for electronic sounds and beat productions that imports samples and comes with a fully loaded library for all kinds of styles. As with the recordings for the acoustic drum sounds, the content for the second agent is already in the making and is being taken care of by several producers from the US, UK and Germany.
One of the producers is Allen Morgan who has recently worked with Steinberg on several projects, including his own signature drums series for GA ONE and also mixing presets for Cubase 7’s new channel strip. Just yesterday Allen sent us a nice picture directly out of the recording studio in L.A. As you can see, the content library will have some surprises! (And Allen is serious about it!)
Just one last word: There have been a lot of questions about the release date of Groove Agent 4. As you can imagine it is a huge project to create a software application from scratch, even for Steinberg, and producing a new library with exclusive content is always a challenge. For all of you who are hoping for a release in the next couple of weeks this might come as a disappointment, but it won’t be possible to complete this project until the end of the year. We really want to make this right so we can offer our customers the best virtual drummer solution. This takes time, but it will definitely be worth the wait.