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 & Drop
My first cinematic target was a sort of ‘boom with a pitch drop’ sound. I deliberately confined myself to a sound based on a single layer, and the first screenshot (above) shows the settings I arrived at. This is based upon the Kick 4 synth engine and, aside from adding a dollop of Drum Machine’s own reverb, I didn’t touch any of the pad‑level effects.
Kick 4 uses an FM oscillator and offers some interesting ways to change the character of the sound. The key settings to note are that I set the Tune control to ‑12 semitones, for a little extra low‑frequency energy, and both the FM Env and FM Dec were maxed out. While you don’t get full control over all the aspects of the amplitude and modulation envelopes (Backbone gives you more on this front), the latter extends the FM modulation envelope decay time so, when triggered and sustained, the tonal character of my ‘boom’ changes over time.
The other settings to note are the Filter LP Freq (set to 100Hz to focus the overall sound in the lower frequency range) and the relatively long Pitch Decay and Amp Env Decay settings. Alongside the also maxed‑out Pitch Env Depth, the first of these generates an extended pitch drop as the sound sustains. The second lets you influence the overall length of the sound once triggered.
The end result can be heard in the audio examples on the SOS website (https://sosm.ag/cubase-0325): a nice beefy boom, with a little growl and pitch drop appearing after the initial hit, and which responds to MIDI velocity. It’s pretty effective even just using a single layer like this, but you could easily take things further by blending in additional layers to target both the initial transient/hit and the sustain portion of the sound.
Take My Pulse
My second target was a ‘pulse’ sound of the kind that might be used to underscore a tension/drama cue to give it a sense of pace. The second screenshot shows a composite of my Drum Machine settings. I used the very simple Kick 1 synth engine but hardly touched the controls, as the main sound‑shaping came thanks to the Filter and Equaliser modules in the PadFX section. A low‑pass filter was set to 150Hz (and given a little resonance), while both Low Cut (100Hz) and High Cut (1000Hz) were used to shape the low and high end, respectively. Add in just a touch of reverb and the sound – heartbeat‑like, but with a little punch to it — was good to go.
Creating my ‘pulse’ sound was as much about filtering and EQ as it was using the Kick 1 engine itself.
Again, you could add more layers to refine the sound but it could also be interesting to experiment with the combination of the oscillator’s Click settings and the filter cutoff. If you add some ‘click’ and don’t set the cutoff too low, you can create an interesting attack dimension to the overall sound that could be used to give it more emphasis. Alternatively, dial back the oscillator’s Tone control for a somewhat softer end result.
Tick Tock
My third target was a ‘ticker’ sound, something that’s often used as a high‑frequency complement to a pulse. Drum Machine offers a number of potential starting points for this, and I opted for the Closed HH 3 engine. In this case, I made two variants of the sound: a ‘tick’ (mapped to G1) and a ‘tock’ (slightly lower in pitch, and mapped to A1). You could impersonate a ticking clock with this combination, of course, but used in a more percussive role, the two variations simply provide some performance variety.
Set with very short Amp Env Decay, the Closed HH engines all provide plenty of options for ‘ticker’ style sound design.
The final screenshot shows the settings used for the ‘tick’ version. A little reverb aside, there are only three settings to note. First, the Amp Env Decay was made short, so the overall sound is shorter and less obviously cymbal‑like. For the ‘tick’, the Oscillator Tune control was slightly raised and the filter cutoff (which affects both the oscillator and the noise components of the sound) was set to about 11 o’clock. For the ‘tock’ version, the Tune control was adjusted to lower the pitch and the cutoff set to the eight o’clock position. Both these changes emphasised the lower‑frequency component of the sound. There are plenty of other options to explore. For example, if you wished to make the sound more assertive or aggressive, the Closed HH 3 engine’s Dist section or the more flexible PadFX Distortion module could be explored.
Stuck In Reverse
As mentioned earlier, Drum Machine lets you base a layer on an audio sample. I’ve not exploited that possibility in the examples above, but there are plenty of processing options, with low‑/high‑pass filtering, pitch adjustment, a full filter section and adjustment of the sample start/end points and the amplitude envelope. You can also reverse samples but, unlike Backbone, it’s not possible to control the amplitude envelope in a way that syncs to the project tempo — so, if you create a riser effect (for example), triggering it to reach its peak right on your target beat/bar position can be a bit hit‑and‑miss.
You can configure Modulators as automation sources for Drum Machine’s parameters and those can be sync’ed to the project tempo.
Eagle‑eyed Pro users may have also noted that, in its first iteration at least, Drum Machine doesn’t offer a pop‑open upper panel to access Cubase Pro 14’s new Modulators. Happily, you can configure Modulators as automation sources for Drum Machine’s parameters and those can be sync’ed to the project tempo, so you could pretty easily configure a pad’s Level control to gradually increase over the course of (for example) a bar using something like the Step Modulator.
Full Hit Kit
So, Drum Machine might have been designed primarily with electronic drum sounds in mind, but it also offers enough sound‑design features that it can be useful in other musical contexts, and if you’re currently using Elements, Drum Machine might be just another item to add to your ‘reasons to upgrade’ list. With eight banks of 16 pads in a single Drum Machine instance, you could easily build quite a comprehensive single preset containing different types and styles of cinematic hits and sound effects. Yes, there are dedicated third‑party virtual instruments that offer this kind of sound palette too, but rolling your own isn’t hard, it’s fun, and it means the sounds you use will be unique to you.