'Steinberg cites Cubase integration as one of Groove Agent 4's marquee features'Д®ach Agent offers its own feature set. Meanwhile, Percussion Agent patches range from typical Latin styles to dance, pop, funk and soul, and include a good selection of crisp instrumentation, including timbales, congas, triangles, shakers and more.

There are also a few useful 'soundtrack-style' presets, but little in the way of more leftfield or unusual ethnic sounds. The Beat Agent kits lean towards urban and electronic styles, offering good starting palettes for tweaking and/or adding to. For its open sound, the Vintage kit is our favourite, but all three will have their uses, the other two being tight and controlled (Studio), and bright with a couple of bold, ringy snare drums (Rock). The acoustic kits offer a reasonable level of variety, with two snares and kicks each, plenty of velocity layers and round robin playback.

Each Kit has its own Pattern section, and for the Acoustic and Percussion Agents this also incorporates Styles, which are rather like the feature of the same name from Groove Agent 3 (see Pattern o'clock).

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