Their drum-related background dates back to providing the entire content for the first software drum module ever (Steinberg's LM4) and includes the Wizoo Platinum 24 drum libraries. The AIR team currently consists of 17 people, with a balance of developers, sound designers and technology/product strategists, all "avid users of our own and our competitor's stuff". They have been creating virtual instruments since 2001. Peter and Paul joined Digidesign in 2005 after being in the market under the name Wizoo since 1997. Digidesign: Peter Gorges (Director, Digidesign AIR Group) and Paul Kellett (Head Of Research, AIR).We then expanded it in response to comments from our owner's friends (Dave Stewart, Robbie Robertson and Peter Gabriel) to include MIDI beats in addition to audio loops - making a virtual drum instrument with multisampled MIDI kits." Submersible (Dave Dysart): "We created our software in response to the owner of our company's frustration with trying to find, audition and export drum loops quickly for use in songwriting sessions. Since the beginning, the goal was to combine a huge library of top-quality drum and percussion sounds with a range of player technologies, to create dynamic, ready to-go drums with a few mouse clicks: just choose a music style and a drum kit, and you're off." Steinberg (Helge Vogt): "Groove Agent 3 is the third incarnation of Steinberg's successful virtual drummer. A musical instrument one could play, not an assortment of samples." Then one day, while tracking drums for a production at Teldex, we were so overwhelmed with the sound we had achieved that I started to develop a concept for my own virtual drum set, one that could legitimately be called an authentic reproduction of a drum kit in a recording situation. And if there was one that could, there were mix options missing, or the sound quality wasn't right. Being a musician first and technician second, I was always very dissatisfied with what the drum-sample world had to offer, because none of the products was able to deliver a musical, natural-sounding performance that could follow a song's dynamics and feel, one that I'd like to play to as a musician, or to listen to as a music lover. Mixosaurus (Uwe Lietzow): "The idea for Mixosaurus was born during a drum-recording session at Berlin's Teldexstudio.
FUTURE ELECTRONICA GROOVE AGENT 4 PRO
What led you to produce a drum sample instrument?ĭigidesign (Peter Gorges, director of the Digidesign AIR Group, and Paul Kellett): "We wanted to raise the bar in terms of musical and authentic drum performance and there was a clear need among the Pro Tools community. For now, we'll push on with the questions.
See the 'Product Background' and 'Company Background' boxes for more on these instruments and the people that created them. We talked to a selection of virtual drum instrument producers about their products: Steinberg (who make Groove Agent) Fxpansion (BFD) Submersible Music (Drumcore) Toontrack (EZ Drummer and, just released as we went to press, Superior Drummer 2.0) Digidesign (Strike) and Mixosaurus (DAW Drums Kit A).
Some of these instruments use artificial intelligence to produce drum parts in styles to suit the user's requirements, while others focus more on extremely in-depth sampling of many different drum hits and articulations, enabling the production of highly realistic drum parts in the hands of skilled programmers. No longer content with picking out a couple of loops from a sample CD, music producers who can't or don't want to use a live drummer are turning to a new generation of virtual drum instruments to allow them to create drum tracks that could pass for the real thing. Drums come in a multitude of shapes and sizes, and can be struck, stroked, bashed and beaten in any number of ways, by players exercising their art across all musical styles. The apparently modest demands that drum samples placed on primitive samplers, in terms of memory and bandwidth, made them a fertile area for exploration, and basic drum and drum-loop sample libraries were some of the first sample libraries ever to become available.Īs technology and our understanding of the true complexity of drum and percussion instruments and how they are played has progressed, however, it has become ever clearer that a sampled representation of a drum kit that has any pretensions to authenticity must be extremely sophisticated.
Since its very early days, sampling technology has been applied to drums. We caught up with some of the people behind the leading applications, to find out why this new software genre has appeared and how it might develop in the future. More and more music producers are turning to 'virtual drummer' software to help them realise authentic-sounding drum tracks.
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