Styles package together multiple variations of a pattern, and are controlled via an interface that allows you to select which variation to use, and adjust the intensity and complexity of the resulting pattern. Groove Agent SE’s MIDI player allows you to apply a bit of drum-machine-style timing modification to the pattern too, such as applying varying strengths of swing and quantising to a pattern. Many are bundled with Cubase and you can easily drag in patterns from the timeline, and you can store MIDI patterns in Groove Agent SE’s user folder so that they are available in all of your sessions. MIDI patterns are the most straightforward. When in Pattern mode, each pad can have either a MIDI pattern or a Style assigned to it. Many but not all of the bundled kits have patterns associated with them that can be loaded along with the kit but you can also load kits and patterns as separate entities. PatternsĪs well as being a drum sampler, Groove Agent SE also packs pattern-playback capabilities, accessible by switching the trigger pads into Pattern mode. All of this serves to create a very realistic and believable acoustic drum-kit emulation but it also limits how deeply you can dive into editing and personalising an Acoustic Agent kit. Here, each drum instrument (kick, snare, etc) has multiple velocity switches, and each velocity layer has multiple articulations (that is, alternative samples that are played in turn so that no two consecutive hits sound identical).Įach close-mic’d drum hit sample is accompanied by samples recorded through overhead mics and room ambience mics, and you can even simulate the kick drum sound bleeding into the snare mics. The second engine, Acoustic Agent, approaches things in much the same way as virtual drum-kit instruments such as Superior Drummer and BFD do. Each pad can hold multiple velocity-switched samples, and sample start, end and loop points can all be modified from within Groove Agent SE.

Samples are assigned to the trigger pads – which are themselves associated with a MIDI note, of course – and are passed through a conventional sample-and-synthesis signal path featuring envelopes, filters, etc. Beat Agent is the more conventional of the two, and is most like a traditional MPC-style hardware drum sampler, to the extent that it can actually import some MPC file types. Groove Agent SE can host two different drum engines, referred to as agents.

Groove agent 4 se