Steinberg Groove Agent - VSTi Virtual Drummer

Review by Glen Clark, AbstractFriends.com

How many “drummer” jokes have you ever seen, lots I’ll guess, there seem to be thousands of them around, probably because it is fairly easy to be a bad drummer, but very hard indeed to be a good one. I’m no drummer myself, so I took a look at some of the tools available to help me programme my drums. Eventually I settled upon Steinberg Groove Agent as being my VSTi drum aide. This review will look at the plus and minus points of the software and how well it lives up to the job.

My test set-up

As ever, since this is software, the nature of the test set-up is important, I used my Pentium IV desktop pc with 1GB of DDR RAM and a 2.67 GHz processor. The software was loaded under Windows XP Home and run under Sonar 3.11 and Cubase SX 2.0.2.31 as hosts. Minimum requirements can be found on the Steinberg website www.steinberg.de but basically are are OS9 to 10.2 on a MAC G3 500 (there is no AU version for OS-X so you would have to use a wrapper) or Pentium III PC running Windows 2000 or above. Minimum RAM is 256MB in both cases, but 512MB is recommended because it loads samples into memory. You need 300MB of disk space for the install, mainly for the samples.

Installation

This went without a hitch for me, insert the copy protected CD and then follow the instructions. No problems to report at all, it was immediately visible under SX and after having re-run my VST wrapper was there in Sonar.

The Screen

Despite the simplicity of the software there are number of different possible screen views – below is the most simple:

It contains most of the standard controls you need to operate Groove Agent in a basic way. Across the top are the two main sliders, each of which is in fact two linked sliders. The top pair changes style and drum kit type. Linked these are matched together but unlinked the choices are considerable. You can play a cha-cha style with a world ethno kit, for example. The second slider is the complexity slider which sets the complexity of the drum and fill patterns. If you unlink you can get a complex pattern with simple fills and vice versa.

The knobs down the left side control shuffle percentage, humanize, limiter and ambience. Most do what they say and will be familiar, humanize does get a bit wayward when you turn it right up and produces the sort of thing that drummer jokes are made of, limiter is like a standard audio limiter. Ambience is interesting, all the samples were recorded using close and distant mics, either by Mats-Erik Bjorklund for acoustic or by Primesounds for electronic. The ambience setting basically dials in the distant mics so you get a big room sound without using conventional reverb algorithms.

The stop and run buttons are obvious, there is a little led-type beat counter above the run button. There are mute buttons for the eight drum groups, in case you want to get rid of something, the link buttons that tie the sliders together are just above those.

The other row of buttons allows you to choose between straight hit and sidestick hit to the snare, accent plays kick and snare at the same time and can give you a syncopation effect, fill lets you manually insert fills starting at any point in a bar, half tempo strips the pattern so it feels half tempo and random basically selects all patterns two steps either side of your selected one and randomly puts them together.

Finally you have random fill and auto fill. Random fill basically selects a fill pattern from the aforementioned set of two either side of the selected pattern and auto fill ensures a fill is played whenever style or complexity level is changed.

You can play a fill at the start by clicking fill before playback starts.

Finally you have the little LCD-like screen which gives you info about the selected styles, bar position, fills and also information on tempo ranges and the kit and style selected. The screen gets more populated as you unlink things. And can end up looking like this (when playback is stopped):

However, that’s not all, on the bottom ride you can see the word “EDIT” if you click this you get this:

 

 

which enables you to tweak the 8 drum groups separately. You can mess with velocity, tuning by up to an octave, decay, ambience and volume. The “out” box allows you to send only some of the pattern to midi out, if you so desire. At the bottom are 10 numbered buttons which store 10 snapshots of the complete set up at the time, which allows you to chop and change mid tune, without having to have 43 mice and lots of hands. The master volume control is obvious.

Finally if you click on “SETUP” you get this:

It’s not very clear, but there are 4 switches, which are Midi Output, GM Output, Amb to Out 4 and Vintage Mode. There is also a reset button which clears out the ten memories and resets everything to defaults. The first two switch on the Midi Output and map the midi output to GM drum types respectively. Amb to Out 4 routes ambience effects to output 4 and dry drum sounds to outputs 1 to 3, that’s if your host can deal with multiple outs. Vintage mode uses EQ to narrow stereo width and add a bit of warmth to the sound.

In Operation

Once you get the hang of it, it is relatively straightforward to operate. There are some 25 variations of each form of style, some are just too simple, some are just too complex, but if used wisely you can assemble some quite nice stuff really quite quickly. The sounds in the box are not bad, but they do get a bit samey after a time, the consistency of the sound makes them sound like a drum machine, which of course they are, so really the only way to get it right is to export the midi (dedicated section on that later).

For those of us who are a bit challenged on the drum pattern front (me, for instance) getting a basic pattern down quickly can be useful, the fills can be worked afterwards and the variations can be worked as well. I suspect that Steinberg thought this might be the case when they were trying to get together 25 variations in complexity, I would have preferred a normal distribution type of approach, whereby you have two or three really complex ones, two or three really simple ones and then the rest all in the middle, it would have given more usable variety.

Nonetheless to address the point Steinberg have made it Midi responsive, so you can have the beat playing along and trigger fills and individual hits with a keyboard, which is quite nice. This seemed to work reasonably well albeit a bit tricky to work out the options on even numbered and odd numbered channels and the special options on channel 10, but I suppose it is a case of getting happy with it and using it how you will.

So I would summarise this section with the fact that it sounds okay, but by far the best way is to export the midi and tweak it a bit or perhaps play along with it using a keyboard. There is a demo via ftp here: ftp://ftp.pinnaclesys.com/Steinberg/download/Downloads_PC/VSTi_GrooveAgent/demo/ so get your hands on it and see if you like it, it is a fully specified version, but has a very limited sound set.

Midi Export

As promised a little bit about midi export. Steinberg claims that it definitely works with Cubase SX and Nuendo, but won’t guarantee it with anything else. Well, it does indeed work with SX, no problem at all, simply engage the Midi Out (GM or otherwise) and it transmits Midi which SX will happily record and them play back if you want. This is a tremendous advantage because of a quirk which does not allow you to start playback at a particular bar. I am in the habit of giving myself a 1 bar blank start so everything starts at 2.0.0.0 rather than 1.0.0.0. I do this to give the machine time to get going, if I don’t, I tend to get very poor midi playback in the first bar. This was clear in Groove Agent where the first kick sounded really strangled, but was fine thereafter. The quirk is that you cannot tell Groove Agent that bar 2 is bar 1, it is insistent that bar 2 is bar 2 and plays the second bar pattern for that bar whatever. So exporting midi enables you to take the basic pattern and just slide it back if you want. Alternative would be to leave an 8 bar gap just to be certain the pattern has come back round to start point, most are 4 bars long, but I cannot claim to have tested them all.

In Sonar the VST adapter provided will not do the job, because it has no facility to receive Midi. For this you need to purchase Tonewise DirectIxer 2.5, a VST adapter which is both delay compensated and has a Midi Loopback driver which allows one to record midi created by a VSTi. It is okay, but the start timing is messed up on the recording and the first bar gets broken up, so it is best to start 4 or 8 bars in, identify the pattern and slide it back so it is correctly time aligned. Well, they didn’t promise it would work perfectly did they?

Using this facility you can use Groove Agent in real time to play back a soft sampler or hardware sampler, using the internal patterns and different sounds. This can be quite a powerful tool, but to get the best out of it you do have to put a little work in.

Summary

Compared to other things on the market, Groove Agent is about as close as it gets to being an adequate solution in one package. It has the tools needed to create a reasonably realistic drum track, but don’t expect to get one for no work at all. It has a few funny quirks but most of these are about getting used to how it is going to behave and leaving things armed so it gives you a major fright when you start your sequencer, or doubles up on everything. In that sense it is no different to any instrument which you have to learn and get familiar with. I quite like it, I think the ambience methodology is very nice and well implemented, and the whole product has loads of tweakability which will allow you to get it right. In the time I have used it, it has never crashed and never behaved in an inexplicable fashion. The only things I would really like to change are the patterns, which I think are spread too evenly on the complexity scale and should be grouped around the middle, and I would like the ability to tell it which bar is “bar 1”. Not bad, have a go with the demo and see how you get on with it.

Glen Clark bio

I am 36 based in Cambridge and whilst I have always been a music lover, came to recording and performing quite late in life. I have appeared on stage in a variety of amateur productions and over a period of time have assembled a respectable, if small, studio set up and have learned the basics of recording and production. In the process I have had my fair share of technical mishaps which have been a valuable learning experience.

I play the piano and keyboards (badly) and do vocals of varying kinds, which is how I started as a performer on stage. Now I write and compose my own songs as well as assisting others in setting up their recording set ups.

You can write to me about anything on my reviews at glen@abstractfriends.com I am happy to take questions on them and happy to discuss and advise on any aspect of recording. Visit my website www.abstractfriends.com under the "services" heading for more info and for more details about my small studio set-up.

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