The drum designer for layering, re-synthesizing and shaping kicks, snares, hi-hats, percussion, rises and hits from up to eight samples.

Backbone combines up to eight layers, each of which can be shaped with subtractive synthesis, re-synthesis, filters and envelopes or split into tonal and noise parts with Decompose, making it suitable for all kinds of drums, bass sounds and cinematic risers, hits and swooshes. The Resynth section creates a spectral version of your sample that can be played up to 800 times faster, slowed down or frozen, at which point it acts like an oscillator. DrumGAN, an AI drum generator developed by Sony Computer Science Laboratories, creates new kick, snare and cymbal samples, analyses existing samples and generates similar-sounding variations. Up to eight effects such as EQ, compressor, distortion, bit crusher, delay and reverb run across two fully routable buses, and finished sounds can be dragged into your host, a drum plug-in or a folder with selectable sample rate, pitch, velocity, stereo or mono and tail.

Features

• Intuitive drum design with up to eight layers
• Re-synthesis of one-shots and loops
• Decompose splits samples into tonal and noise parts
• DrumGAN AI drum generator by Sony CSL
• Up to eight effects with two fully routable buses
• Direct audio export for clip-based music production

Technical details

• Type: virtual instrument (drum re-synthesizer)
• Operating systems: Windows, macOS
• Plug-in formats: VST3, Audio Unit (macOS only), AAX
• Architecture: 64-bit
• Licensing: internet connection required for activation

System requirements

• macOS 10.14 Mojave to macOS 26 Tahoe
• Windows 10 (64-bit) or Windows 11 (64-bit) version 21H2 or later
• Apple silicon Macs: native or via Rosetta 2
• Display resolution: at least 1920 x 1080 at 100% UI scaling
• Disk space: 2 GB
• Internet connection for licence activation, installer download, account sign-up and product registration
• Additional software is required for installation

The licence is registered with the manufacturer at https://steinberg.net/sda. You will receive your serial number and the download link by e-mail immediately after purchase.