Cubase 14: The New Drum Machine

Each of Drum Machine’s sound engines offers something unique. Shown here is the Kick 4 engine, with its FM‑based oscillator section.

Cubase’s Drum Machine features some good kits, but also lets you create original sounds.

Cubase 14 brought some very interesting new additions to all three of its main editions but, for Pro and Artist users, the new Drum Machine instrument is a real treat. Supplied with its own dedicated track type, it comes packed with a broad range of ready‑to‑go preset kits. While these are all aimed very much at electronic music styles, the engine provides plenty of scope for designing your own sounds too, so in this workshop I’ll explore some of those possibilities by targeting some drum‑meets‑percussive sounds that would be suitable for a more cinematic context.

Show Some Backbone

Drum Machine can, in some ways, be thought of as a cross between Steinberg’s Groove Agent and Backbone instruments. It offers the multiple 4x4 grids of virtual drum pads that will be familiar to GA users, and on these pads you can lay individual drum sounds (or create playable pitched sounds). You also get a ‘lite’ version of the layered drum synthesis/ sample‑based sound‑design tools that lie at the heart of Backbone.

Each sound in Drum Machine can be built from up to four layers. The layers can be based on any combination of the instrument’s various synthesis engines or audio samples. The former are divided into categories based on drum type (Kicks, Snares, Hihats, Toms, Claps, Cymbals and Percussion), but each category also offers multiple options in each of the synthesis engines. For example, each of the four Kicks options has a distinct feature set, going from a simple oscillator combination through to a more versatile FM‑based oscillator. Samples can simply be dropped into a layer from the MediaBay or your OS file browser.

With additional filters, distortion and envelope controls at the layer level, plus both per‑pad effects and global delay and reverb with individual sends from each pad, Drum Machine manages to pack a lot of sound‑design potential into a compact, easily navigated GUI. Indeed, there are enough options here that there are multiple ways to approach any specific sound‑design target. With that in mind, please take the examples that follow for what they are: launch pads for your own experiments.

Boom &...