Steinberg Sequel 3 review

VST3 support also reverses Sequel’s ban on pop-up windows, but the benefit is that Steinberg has been able to port a number of excellent plug-ins across from Cubase, complete with their graphical interfaces. These include HALion Sonic SE, a sample-based virtual instrument that comes with 500 built-in sounds. Prologue is a virtual analogue synthesizer with lots of buttons and dials to experiment with. Groove Agent One is a sample-based drum machine, and it benefits from a new Beat Page where drum patterns are arranged on a grid. AmpSimulator is a cut-down version of the excellent Amp Rack that we first saw in Cubase Artist 6.

The new Beat Page makes it easy to draw drum patterns with the mouse

There are over 4,000 samples provided, plus almost 2,000 short MIDI phrases for playing the virtual instruments without a MIDI keyboard. All of these – plus the virtual instrument presets – are extensively tagged by instrument type and musical genre for quick browsing.

Overall, Sequel strikes an excellent balance between instant gratification and flexibility. There’s enough off-the-shelf content to let beginners dive straight in, but it stops short of patronising them by making it impossible to produce bad results. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of depth for those who know their way around soft-knee compressors and filter envelopes – or those with the time and patience to learn these techniques. The two things it lacks are expansion potential – due to the limited number of VST3 plug-ins currently available – and a clear upgrade path.

Cubase Elements doesn’t have these restrictions, and also includes audio crossfades, more effects plug-ins and more effects slots in which to use them. On balance, it’s the better product, but Sequel comes a close second with its shallower learning curve and built-in sample and MIDI phrase library.