Steinberg Backbone

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!

FEATURES

• 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.

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.

• Match the pitch of your samples
  Sometimes you get thick, muddy sound when layering drums, because the pitch of the sounds do not match. In Backhone you can match the samples by analysing their pitch in your favourite root key, or even match the pitch of different drum layers. This is a big time-saver and gives your drums the punch and definition to stand out in the mix.

• Use a spectral filter
  The spectral filter in Backbone is freely adjustable. Customize the filter with lightning speed until you get the sound you always wanted.

• Freeze sounds to create new ones
  Once you have resynthesized any audio material, you can freeze the sound at each position of the sample. This lets you work with it like it's an oscillator. For example, you can also hold the last spectrum of an 808 - which makes it a combination of kick sound and synth bass.

• Keep the punch & pitch the noise
  Bring more life into static drum samples: split any sample easily into its tonal and noise parts. Now you can keep the bunch of the noise and, for example, pitch-shift, distort or manipulate just the tonal paprt. It's a great workflow for any modern drum sounds in genres like trap, future bass and EDM.

• Distort. Export. Repeat.
  Use the new distortion effect to destroy your kicks, then directly import the audio with the printed effect into Backbone again and distort it further. This works with all kinds of sounds. For example, try a guitar sample with the distortion effect and make it an additional layer.

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.

System Requirements

Operating systems (Windows): Windows 10 (64-bit), 64-bit Windows 11 Version 21H2 (or higher)
Operating systems (Mac): macOS Mojave, macOS Catalina, macOS Big Sur, macOS Monterey, macOS Ventura, macOS Sonoma, macOS Sequoia, macOS Tahoe
Apple silicon–based Mac: Rosetta 2 App, Native App
Display resolution minimum at 100% UI scaling: 1920 x 1080
PlugIn format (Win): VST 3, AAX
PlugIn format (Mac): VST 3, AU, AAX
Hard disk free space: 2 GB
Internet connection for: License activation, installer download, account sign up and product registration