Can I create a drum map in Backbone? So I can load multiple drum sounds in one Cubase track like in Groove agent. And use the Cubase drum editor fiddle around with the separate drum sounds? Or is it just one drum sound per track?
An instance of Backbone is monotimbral while the sound of the up to 8 Layers (stacked) is mapped all over the keyboard range.
best regards
Gerrit
Hello Gerrit,
Thanks for your reply, but I completely don’t understand your answer. So again : Can I use Backbone just like Groove agent?
LOL 
No, with Backbone you can produce only one sound at a time (containing up to 8 layers). It’s a different beast, made for manipulating sounds, not to give a virtual drumset or percussion set, like GA.
You can however drag and drop complete sounds to Groove Agent pads or whatever other drumsampler that supports drag and drop, so a drumkit is quite easy to make yourself.
Actually, you can use the key commands to trigger layers individually and record to a track.
Can also pan layers hard left and hard right.
Not to mention, with some pretty basic MIDI programing, you could open 8 instances of Backbone and then use the MIDI utilities in Cubase to split your keyboard to each instance of BB
There are ways to play multiple backbone sounds on one keyboard without exporting one specific sample. If You use Bitwig you can use the Drum Machine Container and load a single instance of backbone in each pad - very cool and convinient - may be cool if Cubase has such a device and device architecture. But with a little bit more klicking you can do something in cubase with Groove Agent SE too. Create as many backbone instrument tracks as you need and set for each of them the note filter parameter in the midi parameters section of the inspector to exact the note that is shown on the GA pad you want to replace and select Groove Agent MIDI out as midi input for this tracks. For 16 or morge GA pads this is a lot of klicking so one schould make use of the track presset ability to save multiple tracks to create a basic preset that just do this mapping.
The cool thing about this is you now can simply record all drum patterns with different tracks for each drum and tune them later easyly in midi editor or by using chord track - lot of flexibility here.
Downside - obvioslly you have so many tracks just for drums - but one can create a folder and use color coding and good naming and …
Hope this helps I have just asked the same question how to do a bitwig like thing in cubase with backbone and so have tryed this out.
This is ridiculous, why can’t you trigger each layer with a different MIDI note?
Sure, it might not be the precise workflow as envisioned by the makers, but Backbone is in fact a very powerful sampler, and there are many times when you’d want to be able to trigger each layer individually.
For example, say you’ve brought in a drum sample to freak in Backbone and you want to try a few different variations, see which is best, so then you want to trigger layer one with C3, layer two with D3 etc etc, so you can easily compare.
And i think think of many other such examples.
Please, let us have this in a future update, it’s crucial for getting the most out of Backbone.