Backbone: Drum Synth Plugin by Steinberg

Backbone lets you layer up to eight samples and decompose them into tonal and noise components. Each part can be modified on its own, which makes it possible to change the body of a kick without affecting its transient, or to reshape a snare's noise layer independently of its tone.

The plugin also includes up to eight effects across two fully routable buses. Steinberg highlights re-synthesis as the core feature, with the aim of manipulating samples in ways that go beyond standard sample playback.

For sound design, the developer lists cinematic hits, rises, swooshes and powerful 808s among the target uses.

DrumGAN generates kick, snare and cymbal samples from scratch, and it can also analyze existing samples, replicate them and produce variations. If a generated sound is close to what you want but not quite right, DrumGAN can create more variations in the same style.

The generated samples are not final sounds. You can layer them, decompose them or re-synthesize them in Backbone, so the AI output becomes a starting point for your own design.

Sony CSL's research team, Javier Nistal and Stefan Lattner, developed the generation system using Generative Adversarial Networks trained on a large collection of drum sounds.