Groove Agent 4 announcement

Spam deleted as well as spamer zuluss.

Regards

Good!

Hi ,
I’m a guitarist and would love Groove agent to react to my playing and build a basic drum pattern that I could export edit or loop. I notice Rocksmith 2014 claims to have a virtual band for jamming that will react to your guitar playing - its that kind of idea but I’m sure stein berg could do a much better job and it needs to be drums only. Almost like a learn mode for groove whereby I can play a guitar part - repeating if necessary - and groove agent will work out a groove for the drums - possibly presenting variations on a groove for me to select my preference.
This would be a very powerful tool for those of us that play instruments but have no knowledge of how to create a drum pattern

11 months announcement? and when release ?

Groove Agent 4 SE in Cubase 7.5 … khm…

I guess … something …

With the release of Cubase 7.5 we are very happy to introduce the first family member of the new Groove Agent 4 series — Groove Agent SE 4.

Groove Agent SE ushers in the future of Steinberg’s virtual drum instruments with a sample engine built on latest HALion technology and based on a new concept superior to previous versions of the Groove Agent series. As I already explained in one of the earlier posts, Groove Agent 4’s new approach provides specialists for different drum purposes which we refer to as Agents. Clearly, a virtual acoustic drum kit with overhead and room miking has different requirements for the GUI and feature set than a drum machine with a sample editor and slicing tool. Groove Agent 4 will sport several different Agents for acoustic and electronic drum productions that can be used individually or combined.

Groove Agent SE on the other hand is limited to just one Agent at a time and introduces Beat Agent, the first Agent dedicated to electronic drums and MPC-like drum sample handling.

Beat Agent is a classic drum sampler with up to 128 pads in 8 groups, 8 sample layers per pad, a very nice editing section with filters, envelopes, sample and slice editor, a mixer section with lots of effects, and a pattern player. When comparing Groove Agent SE to Groove Agent ONE the amount of features has been multiplied while the new workflows lead to a faster and more intuitive editing and designing of your own sounds. Speaking of which, the fourth iteration of Groove Agent isn’t just another new feature in Cubase 7.5, and there’s certainly more to it than can be put down in a couple words.

Since Groove Agent SE 4 is basically the successor of Groove Agent ONE, here now some of the improvements we implemented:

  • Playback modes (vintage and turntable) for authentic 12-bit sound emulation
  • New filters (Classic, tube drive, hard clip, bit red, rate red)
  • Envelopes for pitch, filter and amp
  • New sample editor (Zoom, fade in/out, velocity start range, reverse mode)
  • AudioWarp (music and solo mode)
  • Slicing editor with direct mapping and up to 128 slices
  • Mixer section with 27 effects and 4 Aux buses
  • Pattern player with import and export of MIDI files
  • Custom pad colors

There are some highlights in Groove Agent SE that I would like to point out.

Playback quality modes
Sometimes there are features that hold more than you’d expect at first. The new playback modes in the Beat Agent are these kind of features. Why is it that so many contemporary producers still relay on these old school drum machine heavyweights? It is the 12-bit special sound that adds crispness to your drums and samples. So, in order to make a serious approach to emulate this sound, the team analyzed some of the classic 12-bit drum samplers to get to the bottom of the sound, recorded different samples, from drums to sine sweeps, and experimented with different ideas to replicate the signal flow. As a result, we came up with two different modes: the vintage and the turntable mode. The vintage mode is basically a “high-quality bit-crusher-resampler” that reduces the bitrate to 12 bits and resamples to 26.04 kHz. Add some distortion with the hard clip filter and you will get pretty close to the vintage drum sound that is so popular in hip hop and electronic productions. But that’s only half the story. The limitation of the classic 12-bit drum samplers has always been the memory that only allowed a sample time of about 2.5 seconds. In order to get longer samples into the memory the samples had to be recorded by switching the turntable from 33 RPM to 45 RPM, recording the samples at a higher speed of about +35% and then pulling them back down by just about 5.2 semitones within the sampler. This workaround had significant impact on the sound since it created explicit aliasing artifacts. Exactly this aliasing side effect can be heard when you pitch samples in the vintage mode. In turntable mode the recording at a higher speed and down pitching is simulated in advance to include the aliasing automatically. It may sound strange that adding aliasing artifacts should be a desired effect to enhance a sound, but basically that’s the stuff.

We could have added fixed distortion or low-pass filters and even crackle noise as included with some of the other VST instruments, but that just didn’t feel right. The control of these aspects should be left in the users’ hands. What do you think differently about it?

Slicing
The slicing editor is an adaptation of the one available in HALion 5, with differences in the workflow in order to meet the demands of modern beat production. The transient detection algorithm of the slice editor has been further improved to realize better results when dealing with drum samples. In most cases further editing of the slice points won’t be necessary. You will also notice that as soon as slicing is activated the slices are instantly mapped on the pads and are ready to play. It is basically a one-click solution and makes working with slices very convenient. Additionally, every change in the slice editor will provide instant changes to the mapping on the pads. In the manual mode there is just one slice when you start and with each slice marker added the resulting slice will be automatically mapped on the next pad, making the editing very fast and letting you instantly start playing your slice. Compared to other slicing approaches this workflow feels more like playing an instrument than processing a sample. Another point worth mentioning is that every time a sample is sliced, a MIDI pattern is created that can be exported to your Cubase project or instantly played on the pattern page. This brings us straight to the next feature.

Groove patterns
With the new pattern player in the Beat Agent, MIDI grooves can be triggered directly in the instrument. All of the drum kits come with 8 full grooves and 8 grooves triggering just single kit pieces that can be combined and mixed, i.e., one loop for the kick alone and another for the snare. All grooves can be played in the Beat Agent or exported into your project, and when exporting the MIDI groove into your Cubase 7.5 project, drum maps can be created that read out the pad names from Groove Agent SE for further editing. Vice versa, MIDI files can also be imported into the Beat Agent from the project window, the MediaBay as well as any file explorer.

Deep editing or programming of grooves is not a part of Groove Agent SE though, but there will be way more features available in the full version of Groove Agent 4. We have only just begun…

And this leads us to the last question most of you’d like to have answered:

What about Groove Agent 4?
The development of Groove Agent 4 is now the main focus of the VST instrument team. The recordings of the acoustic drums have been completed, and we are now finalizing the groove recordings. In the tradition of the Groove Agent series the ability to control the complexity for grooves will also be implemented in Groove Agent 4, but that, of course, increases the efforts put into the recordings significantly.

Groove Agent SE or basically the Beat Agent is just one part of the new Groove Agent concept and shows you what Groove Agent 4 will be capable of. Nevertheless, please check out the SE version and let us know what you think. We listened closely to your comments to improve Groove Agent ONE in the past, and considered a lot of your feature requests this time too. Groove Agent 4 is on its way. Still, please have a little more patience. We will keep you up to date.

Is there a way to step through samples in a folder using a pad in Groove Agent SE 4? Something like Previous or Next sample?

If not, will this be included in Groove Agent 4?

I prefer the sliders in Groove Agent 3, allowing us to get a groove going without thinking about programming at all. The whole point is to not do any drum programming, because I’m a guitarist.
Can we use Groove Agent 3 in Cubase 7.5? I have a lot of projects that were started with GA3. Can I still open those up if I move to Cubase 7.5 from6.5?

Matthias,

It is nice to see Groove Agent 4 SE!

Is there a manual or video tutorial for it?

Please, post a manual for Groove Agent SE 4. I need to know how to layer samples. I finally figured out how to get multiple samples on a pad, but I haven’t figured out how to make them share received velocities.

Nevermind - After at least 30 minutes I figured it out. This is not fun . Maybe this will help somebody.
My mini guide to layering samples in Groove Agent SE4:

  1. Drag and hold (don’t release your left button) an audio file from the MediaBay over one of Groove Agent’s cells.
    You should see the cell turn dark. Hover your mouse to the upper portion of the cell and release it over the icon that is a single square with a plus beside it. Let’s call that the “layer” icon.

2.Near the upper middle of the Groove Agent plugin (beneath the “Beat Agent” icon) there is a row of buttons. They are: Main (It’s colored Orange as an indication that you are on the Main page), Pitch, Filter, etc.
Beneath Main, you will see the name of your sample in a light gray box. Beneath that, almost in the center of Groove Agent 4, you will see the word “Mode”. Next to “Mode”, there is a grey button with the word “Velocity” on it (assuming that you are starting from a blank/reset instance of Groove Agent SE 4). Click that button and select “Layer”.

  1. Now, repeat step one with another sample.
    GAME OVER. You win!

Basic Summary:

  1. Drag sample to a cell and release on the “layer” icon( the single black square with a plus).
  2. Change the mode to “Layer”.
    *The order can be reversed if you already have a kit loaded.

Steinberg, thanks for this plugin! :smiley:
I’m going to bed…

I found the manual:

Open Cubase 7.5, go to help menu, documentation, groove agent se. You can then save manual in PDF format if you want.

There is also a video of the new instruments in 7.5 on the Steinberg youtube channel that has a large section on groove agent se 4.

  • 1 !

big FR for me!

Can anyone verify if you can open old projects with Groove Agent 3 in Cubase 7.5? Or can you just use Groove Agent 3 in new Cubase 7.5 projects?

As there’s a few +1’s for this

There’s Media-Bay which can step through samples in a folder.

Also:
Within GA SE4
Using a pad with a pre-existing Sample
Edit:
Right click on sample:
Replace Sample
And this brings up a Folder view with Pre-Listen Enabled
And then you can step through samples in a folder.

It would be nice to have a more elegant graphical solution - but this is certainly a usable way to do this.

My thoughts on GA SE4
I really like it - it works for me - very intuitive.
I’m looking forward to the full version with full hardware integration.

+1 for next and previous sample in SE, not just in the unlimited version since it’s almost a basic modern software sampler obvious thing to exist.

It would be nice to be able to save and load a Pad with all the samples, envelopes, etc. (This is the Cell level in Battery from NI). That way one could combine multilayer pads from different Drum Kits easily, or make own library of layered (or velocity layered) Kicks, Snares etc.

  • 1 ! nice FR!
    :slight_smile:

You can have more than one GA-SE open at a time - and simply drag cells (with all of their layers, samples, settings etc) from one instance to another.

Aloha d,

Great advice!
This is my approach as well.

{‘-’}

Well, it’s not exactly the same thing I was talking about. If you can a have a Pad (or cell) library, then you can build a new kit from it much quicker. Let’s say, you want to build a kit out of ten different sources. With the method mentioned above, you have to load ten different kits (even if one by one), and then drag and drop. GA-SE is a sampler, and in samplers in the hierarchy usually there is a level between the sample and the whole instrument, which is often savable and loadable. (Sometimes it is called zone or partial) With a dedicated drum sampler it could be a quite useful feature.