Steinberg has announced the release of Backbone, a drum re-synthesizer designed for unique sound design. The virtual instrument has a well-defined emphasis on creating unique kicks, snares, cinematic impacts, hi-hats and other percussive sounds.

Backbone offers exclusive tools to design drum sounds from the ground up. Users start off by layering up to eight samples and move on to modify individual tonal or noise elements or re-synthesize individual layers, only to leverage the other audio manipulation tools that are easily accessible through the clearly laid out user interface.

Steinberg Backbone

At the core of Backbone is the re-synthesis engine, where samples are transformed into a synthesized version within the spectral domain, allowing users to manipulate samples with the freedom of a synthesizer. And the additional customizable spectral filter provides maximum control for creating new sounds.

Audio decomposition is another extremely powerful tool featured in Backbone. It allows users to separate sounds into their tonal and noise elements and adjust each of these with re-synthesis and classic subtractive synthesis.

Senior Marketing Manager Florian Haack says: “Backbone lets you create and manipulate drum sounds in unprecedented ways. You can feed the Drum Re-synthesizer with your own recordings and combine them with any kind of drum sample. It is such a powerful tool for those who like to get creative and want to develop their own signature drum sound. Personally, I have never had so much fun in crafting sounds as with Backbone.”

Backbone features

  • Intuitively design drums with up to 8 layers.
  • Re-synthesize one-shots and loops.
  • Directly export audio for clip-based music production .
  • Backbone supports VST 3, AU and AAX.

Backbone is available for a suggested retail price of 149 EUR, including German VAT.

More information: Steinberg