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A Revolutionary Way To Design Your Own Drums

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

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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.

What you can do with Backbone

  • Re-synthesize drum samples

  • Design cinematic hits, rises and swooshes

  • Make 808s fatter than ever

  • Warp drum sample libraries into the future

  • Modify tonal and noise parts separately

  • Craft your own signature drum sound

Listen to Backbone

Sound design tutorials

How to use Resynthesize Part 1

How to Use Resynthesize Part 2

How to Use Resynthesize Part 3

Overview of Revolutionary Drum Design with Backbone

Creating a huge 808 trap kick bass

Create larger-than-life hybrid-layered snare

Six tricks to design unique drums

Bring the analog world into Backbone

Enjoy the best of both worlds: Take the sounds of your 808, analog drum machines or modular synthesizers into Backbone and layer, combine or re-synthesize them. This gives you a whole new creative toolkit like Resynth, Decompose, Purity, Inharmonicity, Acceleration and, of course, a lot of additional high-end effects.

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What Backbone brings to the table is an entirely new way of going about drum sound design, an approach that allows you to blend different characteristics of different samples in different ways, while remaining quick, intuitive, and fun throughout. There’s nothing like it, so be sure to try out the demo.
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250 new groundbreaking presets

Explore our biggest collection of hand-crafted single drums sounds, yet — with 250 brand-new hand-crafted presets. Explore 60 avant-gardist snares, 25 astonishing claps, new crisp hi-hats, more than 35 fresh toms and lots more — all coming with individual layers.

  • Improved export options

    If you like you can automatically export the last played note if activated on the Options page.

  • Export layers

    Sometimes you only want to make use of a decomposed or re-synthesized layer in your arrangement — so now you can bring individual layers simply by drag-and-dropping into your DAW.

  • Tweak samples even faster

    Small changes, big impacts: Edit the range of a sample or loop by moving start and end marker simultaneous. And Backbone now also shows the gain increase after normalizing a sample as parameter which you can adjust manually.

  • Improved re-synthesis

    The re-synth algorithm now takes the stereo correlation into account — which highly improves the re-synthesis results for stereo samples. In the noise model of the re-synth, we also removed artefacts near the sample end marker.

  • Support for Windows scaling factors

    Big steps forward: Backbone now supports Windows display scaling factors in 25% steps.

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