SPECTRASONICS STYLUS RMX
Mar 1, 2005 12:00 PM, BY JIM BATCHO
If human evolution is defined by increasing levels of complexity as time passes, Stylus RMX shows just how far people have come since banging bones on split logs to make rhythms. The Stylus RMX Realtime Groove Module is the latest Spectrasonics instrument plug-in to bear the Stylus name. But other than the purple interface, this version is completely new. RMX operates on the new Spectrasonics Advanced Groove Engine (S.A.G.E.) technology, which features total real-time operation and instantaneous response for live performance, jamming and bpm sync with host applications for remixing. Stylus RMX is an eight-part-multitimbral, sample-based instrument with multiple interface pages, a boatload of sounds and a whole host of features. But all of that seems so superficial. Dig in to see what an advanced species this plug-in really is.
GIGABYTES OF INSPIRATION > Stylus RMX comes loaded with the 7.4GB Core Library of percussion sounds and grooves that covers everything from the slickest processed bits of electronic percussion to arena-rock madness and everything in between.
NO, OFFICER, IT'S JUST S.A.G.E.
Stylus RMX shares the familiar design of most modern virtual instruments. By that, I mean it looks one part spaceship and one part massive rack of endless synthesis power. It's split up into several easily accessible pages, including the Standard Edit page with corresponding Easy Edit section, the Chaos Designer, an Effects page, a Mixer and a Browser section. Thankfully, also present is a Footer section, with all the controls you'll need for playback and navigation, that never changes — no matter what page you're on. There are typically two approaches to navigation with instrument plug-ins: a more linear signal-flow approach and a more visually oriented form of access. Stylus RMX uses the latter, which means that you find your way around by clicking on distinctive icons or buttons. This isn't to say it's simplistic, because Stylus requires some quality time before becoming completely comfortable with its few idiosyncrasies. One little quirk is that the Footer section shows four selectable pages front and center: Edit, Chaos, FX and Mixer. But the Browser is where a lot of the housework is done. To get to that page, click on either a folder icon or the name of the sound being played. It makes sense once you're working, but I still like the idea of five main pages, five buttons.
Before getting too far into the separate interface pages, a brief vocabulary lesson in the Stylus way of naming things is necessary: Sounds are placed into main categories called Suites. There, you find subsections, called Elements, for the individual pattern types; these are broken into three types: Grooves, Sound Menus and Kit Modules. The Groove Suites are numbered by bpm value, which is kind of a cool way to do it, because if you know what tempo and feel you're going for, say something around 145 bpm, you can scroll to those Suites in that value and audition them. Now, it's worth noting that one of the great benefits of Stylus RMX is that it syncs perfectly to the host bpm. So if you're at 145 bpm on the host sequencer, you can pull up an 85 bpm Suite, and it will play at 145. But the numerical values are nice because at least you know what they were originally written at. In terms of more standard nomenclature, libraries are what you might expect — massive bundles of grooves and sounds. Stylus comes with a 7.4GB Core Library, and you can buy S.A.G.E Xpanders kits to add to the available groove options.
The first page you see when you launch the plug-in is the Standard Edit page, which is the master sound-design area. There, you get five sections for sound shaping — LFOs, Power Filter, Envelopes, Pitch and Master Filter — as well as Level, Pan and Sample Start sliders and a Reverse button. Stylus RMX features three independent LFOs (assigned to amp modulation, filter and pan, respectively) each with simple Rate, Depth and waveform adjusters. You can sync the rate of the LFO to the host application using different note values, and there's a retriggering button that triggers at each slice start point. The Power Filter section has individual sliders for Cutoff, Resonance, Width, Drive and Gain, and you get your standard filter types. The Master Filter is completely separate from the Power Filter, and it's based on a different design that takes up less CPU bandwidth. Furthermore, the Master Filter is a nice little tool because it's just a basic variable slider that goes from extreme lowpass filtering at the left end to extreme highpass filtering at the right end, with zero modulation at the center point. It's handy for jamming and live performance.
The Envelopes section includes amplitude, filter and pitch types, each with Velocity and Depth knobs. An interesting design note is that the envelope sliders are delineated by attack, hold, decay and release rather than your standard ADSR. The reason for the hold (H) slider is that it functions as a kind of gate effect to add punch to the envelope type, which is a nice thought given that you're dealing with a groove machine. The AHDR shaping approach is really nice for putting some muscle into the beats, particularly when used in conjunction with the Drive and Gain sliders on the Power Filter. The Pitch section adjusts in semitones (Coarse slider) and cents (Fine slider). I really made good use of the simple Sample Start slider, which allows you to make fine adjustments on the point in the waveform that the sound of the sample is first heard. You can have the sound begin anywhere in the sample from start to end. If doing so creates a little clipping sound, you can just slightly pull up the envelope attack value to give it a tiny fade-in. Used together, they can really mellow some of the individual loop sections, which is good given how much layer building you can do with this program.
The Mixer page is pretty straightforward. Being an eight-part-multitimbral instrument, it has eight channels aligned horizontally for each groove layer, with volume faders, panning knobs, mute and solo buttons and four auxiliary send knobs. You can also go straight to the Browser page from there by clicking on each individual instrument. The Mixer section is also where you choose between Multi and Kit modes. Multis are combinations of sounds and grooves that can be loaded up and played back by the program. When you load a Multi from a drop-down menu, it spreads each element into distinct channels (up to eight) for mixing and layering. It's a quick way to call up a performance without building one from scratch. Kits, on the other hand, can only be used with MIDI signals. Loading a Kit assigns all of the instruments (kick, snare, hat and so on) to a controller using General MIDI mapping. You can then play chromatically to cycle through all of the sounds in a groove. This is useful if you want to perform or record something using a keyboard rather than playing it back in the plug-in window. The Kit mode is great for creating your own patterns by using the plug-in as a sound module.
Stylus RMX's Effects section is a good example of the many ways you can get deep into this program and really take individual ownership of stock sounds. The routing is well-implemented, with four aux sends/returns for each of the eight parts. This is the place that you would typically use common effects, like reverb, and adjust the sends on the mixer for various wet/dry settings. Each aux return has three rackspaces, which means that you can build some superdeep effect characteristics for each aux assignment. You can also set up aux sends for Edit Groups (explained later) for more flexible routing. In addition to the auxes, there are also individual inserts for each of the eight parts, each also with three virtual rackspaces. Finally, the master effects section is another rack trio that is the last link in the master output bus. It has a nice assortment of effects divided into categories such as dynamics, EQs, reverbs, delays and special effects, including a couple of really cool offbeat ones such as Valve Radio and Flame Distortion. The EQs are simple but really effective at carving out some frequency space, which is valuable considering how much insane layering this program allows. Another nice touch: Each effect has its own Bypass switch.
Rounding out Stylus' five page sections, Chaos Designer is, as the name suggests, an elaborate randomization tool. It features a series of value sliders for Pattern, Repeat, Reverse, Timing, Pitch and Dynamics. These features are hit-or-miss in software instruments and plug-ins, but Chaos Designer is a useful addition because it can add something of a subconscious element to particular elements in the mix. If you have a bizarre pattern that may not be quite as essential to the overall groove, you can play with Chaos Designer to make that element float in and out of the groove at randomized moments. It adds a bit of substance to the performance that can save it if there's too much of a static-loop feel.
HANDS ON THE KEYS
Moving on to the all-important issues of sound and playability, a key distinction to note is that this is not an average instrument that you play as much as it is a groove-construction machine. It's better for quickly and intuitively building deep rhythms synched with a host bpm and then importing what you like into your sequencer for further manipulation. In this sense, Stylus RMX is a dream for remixers and keyboard players looking to easily build rhythms. It's also perfect for the serious tweak-head rhythm programmers. In terms of sounds, Stylus RMX has you covered. The whopping 7.4 GB of material includes 2,500 groove elements, 3,000 kit modules and more than 10,000 single hits. Clearly, you have a lot to choose from. Stylus does have its own particular vibe, and the vast majority of sounds are on the processed side of things. If you choose to become a full-time citizen of the Spectrasonics universe, Stylus RMX allows you to convert your own loops into the proprietary RMX format, and you can buy the company's add-on S.A.G.E. Xpanders, one of which is the BackBeat drum kit collection (and given the examples I heard on the Spectrasonics Website, it's downright scary-realistic). With the included Core Library (which includes both Classic Stylus and the newer RMX Grooves), you get a great variety of sounds, from industrial kits to otherworldly noises to intense ambient textures.
Auditioning is simple: You click on a Groove Element; it plays — in tempo with the host and free of artifacts. You click on it again; it stops. Many of the Suites are divided into constituent parts of Elements, so you can choose to load the whole performance or one without a kick drum, for example. Because the Browser engine is so effective in real time, you can quickly load files as the Groove continues playing. Again, Grooves and Multis are categorized by bpm value and use typically nebulous names like “95-Jungle Jan” and “120-Yesteryear.” But the Favorites section in the Browser makes it really easy to save all of the really choice ones and even name multiple categories of favorite Elements. The Browser also includes a few important features of note for auditioning and placing Elements: First is the Speed section; it has two buttons, Half and Double, for half-timing and double-timing the sound. This is great not only for manipulating the grooves themselves, offering yet another sound-design parameter, but also for changing the feel of the Grooves when remixing. There is also a MIDI-file portion of the Browser that lets you drag and drop individual MIDI files into your sequencer application. This is a nice feature that makes composition effortless when used with most host applications.
And that brings you to Stylus' integration with such apps — an important issue with this program. Although Stylus RMX is fun and inspiring on its own, it becomes a serious compositional tool when integrated with the functions inherent to particular hosts and when operated with a keyboard controller. This allows you to achieve a kind of operational synergy between the plug-in, a controller (if desired) and the host, which makes remixing and composition quick and effective when building songs and patterns. The drawback is that it works better with some applications than others. It really seems to shine with Audio Units — and VST-based apps, such as Apple Logic and Steinberg Cubase, that have strong MIDI functionality and a more open architecture. But Digidesign Pro Tools, for example, doesn't support drag and drop — something beneficial with Stylus. Although Pro Tools doesn't support drag and drop, you can drag the individual MIDI files from the Stylus Browser into a separate folder and then import them one by one into the MIDI regions list and drag them into discrete tracks. Any instrument changes in the plug-in are reflected in the MIDI data in Pro Tools. Ableton Live works in a similar function; it isn't drag and drop direct to the sequencer, but it works.
While I'm on the topic of MIDI, there are two modes to note: Slice Menu and Groove Menu. These two correspond to how you use your keyboard controller or sequencer application. Groove Menu mode lets you play distinct Elements within a Suite, which is useful for live remixing or linear song construction. Slice Menu mode, on the other hand, allows you to play the different slices within a particular Element. These modes can be used with different trigger-setting options to enable certain performance characteristics. One minor annoyance is that if you're not in the same MIDI and trigger modes when playing back that you were in when you recorded, the Grooves will not play back correctly and you'll have to dig in to see why — or remember what mode you were in.
One of the more powerful tools in Stylus RMX, buried underneath its basic functionality, is Edit Groups. The name is a bit curious because you're actually editing the individual Elements within a Groove. In a nutshell, Edit Groups allows you to isolate as many slices as you'd like and route them individually to all of the various effects, filters and any other parameter you want. You can isolate downbeats, backbeats, dotted notes, triplets, the fourth 16th note — you get the idea. This is the place to be when adding your own personality for remixing projects, because of the depth of fine tuning that is possible. Edit Groups is really a manifestation of what's so ingenious about Stylus RMX overall, which is its ability to give you total control of its Kits, Suites, hits, what have you, with such a vast web of possibilities. If RMX were a console signal-flow schematic, you could probably wallpaper your bedroom with it. Of course, this means that the deeper you go, the more CPU cycles you need. I threw a lot at it, and my Mac G5/dual 1.8 could handle it. Overall, Stylus RMX is very efficient at what it does. But as with any feature-laden plug-in, I wouldn't drop six of them into a 40-track mixing session without expecting a bit of CPU slowdown.
There are a few other nagging problems to address. The first is that you have to be careful regarding what sound you are editing and what sound you are hearing, because they don't naturally correspond. For example, to edit Element 3, you would probably hit the Play button under 3 to audition it. But Element 1 might be highlighted, and that's the one whose knobs you're twisting. It seems that Stylus could have defaulted to displaying the Element you've clicked on to audition, but it's not a huge issue if you're paying attention. This does, however, enable you to use the play buttons to trigger parts in a live performance while editing another at the same time.
A bigger issue is that the review copy of Stylus RMX did not come with any manual other than an installation guide. There are 18 QuickTime tutorial videos that are extremely helpful, but no documented instruction guide in print or electronic file is a bit annoying, particularly because some features, like Edit Groups, are completely hidden from view. Apparently, a PDF manual is in the works, and it should be integrated into the program by the time you read this. Also of note, the company recently released version 1.2 of the program, which adds a number of new features. Included with the free download (for registered users) is patch management for the effects (single effects or racks of three), three new effects (Pro Reverb, Radio Delay and Spring Reverb) and support for multiple outs in Apple Logic 7.
RENDER TO DISK
In a word, Stylus RMX is huge. It's impossible to give an overview and analysis of all its capabilities. Given the enormous depth to this program, it takes some effort to get familiar with the way things work in a comprehensive sense. But once you spend some quality time together, it's like hanging out with a new best friend. In essence, Stylus RMX is an elaborate, highly evolved and heavily loaded drum machine. It does have its own particular personality, especially regarding navigation and the different modes, and some might consider it a better replacement for a percussionist than a tool for a percussionist. Overall, Stylus RMX absolutely shines as a remixing tool. I opened up an old Pro Tools session, created and imported a new rhythm, and in a matter of seconds, I had a perfectly synched new rhythmic performance. It may take a few days to become familiar with it, but once you do, it's a very cool place to be. When you throw in the low price tag, the expansion options and the amazing library of sounds and grooves, Stylus RMX is a winner.
SPECTRASONICS
STYLUS RMX > $299
Pros: Inspiring. Amazing remixing potential. Killer sound-sculpting and effects capability. Nice MIDI implementation.
Cons: No manual. Certain features work better with some host sequencers. Some navigation quirks.
Contact: www.spectrasonics.net
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MAC: G4 or G5/1GHz; 512 MB RAM; Mac OS 10.2.6 or higher; RTAS-, VST-or Audio Units — compatible host
PC: Pentium 4/1GHz; 512 MB RAM; Windows 2000/XP; soundcard; VST-compatible host
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