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Review: Spectrasonics Stylus RMX™ V1.1&dagger; by Rick Paul

1. Review Spectrasonics Stylus RMX V1 17 by Rick Paul 25th February 2005 NOTE Shortly after the main body of this review was completed and sent to Spectrasonics for a fact check Stylus RMX V1 2 was announced with immediate availability You can find a sidebar at the end of this article with an overview of the V1 2 changes A few notes have also been made in the article in the course of incorporating Spectrasonics feedback Such changes are clearly noted as being relevant to V1 2 All hands on testing other than to verify specific changes mentioned was carried out in V1 1 I wasn t originally supposed to write this review Back at Winter NAMM 2004 when CakewalkNet and Spectrasonics first crossed paths with regards to potential product reviews they had three shipping software instruments Trilogy Atmosphere and Stylus and one newly announced future product Stylus RMX I was particularly eager to take a look at Trilogy Jeff Sorbo signed up to review Atmosphere and we d agreed that a look at Stylus should wait until Stylus RMX was shipping since it had already been announced At that time the plan was that another of our reviewers who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent or guilty whichever the case may be would cover it Not only had he not gotten in on the first round of reviews but he was also particularly eager to check out Stylus RMX after watching Spectrasonics founder Eric Persing s demo of the product in Anah
2. tambourines and play tambourines manually or via MIDI while letting the rest of Stylus RMX s channels groove along in Slice Menu or Groove Menu mode The other is that the sounds are not laid out in General MIDI fashion You might have up to 64 sounds in a given Sound Menu and you will need to just figure out which ones you want to use where This might seem confusing at first but it is a way to create more human sounding parts than by simply using say the tambourine sample in a GM kit at different velocities Shifting our attention back to the left side of the Browser window just under the library and directory selection area is an area for halving or doubling the speed of a groove In fact there are two buttons intuitively labeled Half and Double Remembering that Stylus RMX will follow the tempo of your DAW these buttons are not actually affecting the tempo of your project Rather they are affecting the rate with which the current groove element plays back against the tempo of the project either halving the rate i e slowing the groove element down or doubling the rate i e speeding it up You might be thinking this is cool and gives you three grooves for the price of one Well it s even cooler than that Either button can be pressed repeatedly and operates against the rate of playback of the groove element at that time Thus if you want to quarter the rate of playback of the groove element press Half twice If you want to quadru
3. we find the Pitch section which is used to tune whatever the Edit page is modifying There are two slider controls Coarse and Fine The Coarse slider adjusts the pitch in semi tones while the Fine slider adjusts pitch in cents Last but not least in the lower right hand corner of the Edit page is the Master Filter with its two simple slider controls Tone and Emphasis Center the Tone control and the Master Filter is inactive Slide it to the left and it becomes a lowpass filter Slide it to the right and it becomes a highpass filter The Emphasis slider is similar to the Resonance slider on the Power Filter basically emphasizing frequencies around the cutoff point established by the Tone slider Mixing it Up Thus far we ve picked some groove elements and perhaps customized their sound a bit using the Edit page Remembering that Stylus RMX is 8 part multi timbral another fairly obvious thing we ll need to be able to do is either create a blend of the up to 8 parts within Stylus RMX or route those parts to some number of inputs to our DAW This is accomplished using Stylus RMX s Mixer page A A A We got a quick glimpse of the mixer page when discussing Kit mode above At the top left of the Mixer page are the buttons to select whether you want to use Stylus RMX in Kit mode or Multi mode Note that changing which mode is selected clears any choices you have made in the mode you d been in so if you w
4. a Converted REX Files directory which translates to a directory in the User Library in the Stylus RMX groove library hierarchy However you can move them around as needed as long as you keep the suite level directories intact and I created a directory level called DOD 4 Country Crossover to make it easy to keep all the loops from this particular collection together I had not renamed the actual REX files before conversion so the loop names got Drums On Demand song set style names e g Vs for the main verse loop in the song set Vs Alt for an alternate verse loop etc rather than Stylus RMX style names but if you wanted to enforce Stylus RMX style naming you could always rename the individual RX2 files before conversion if you are converting off hard disk rather than directly from a CD ROM For my purposes though the Song Set style naming works just fine One of the key benefits of the organization Drums On Demand uses is to make it easy to put together the basic drum beats fills and so on from all sections of a song from a single Song Set One last minor wrinkle encountered with the SAGE Converter and Stylus RMX was that when I initially opened Stylus RMX and tried to access my new User Library it automatically switched me back to the Core Library I found by accident that if I disengaged the Settings button which is on by default and tells Stylus RMX to set all parameters relevant to the channel of a groove being auditioned to value
5. a user reference manual or printed user guide is not yet available Spectrasonics indicates that a fully searchable reference manual will be integrated directly with the plug in and is expected to be available in early April 2005 There is a printed Installation Guide and Spectrasonics also recently provided a PDF format index to the tutorial videos The latter is searchable within the Adobe Acrobat Reader and it includes time stamps for discussion of various features within each video file If you have 650 MB of extra disk space available you may want to consider copying the videos to your hard disk until such time as the user reference manual is available Stylus RMX is available for both Windows 2000 XP and Macintosh OSX platforms Plug in formats supported on the Mac include Audio Units RTAS and VST Windows support is currently VST only though Stylus RMX runs Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 3 well under SONAR using Cakewalk s VST Adapter Spectrasonics indicates that an RTAS plug in will be available for Windows in March 2005 The software is provided on two DVDs in addition to the tutorial videos CD While system recommendations for mono timbral use are decidedly non state of the art if you are looking at using Stylus RMX multi timbrally especially using the built in FX and other advanced features you will want to have a relatively beefy PC This means a minimum of a 1 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent al
6. bus settings and individual output assignments for each channel We re really only scratching the surface at this point but it s helpful to work your way around some of the key elements of Stylus RMX s user interface at basic levels before diving into deep and we re talking very deep waters In particular it is very easy to get lost in the details of Stylus RMX if you haven t first gotten your arms around its basic workflow including how it will interact with your DAW If on the other hand you ve got a basic notion of Stylus RMX s basic workflow and how that can mesh with your individual working style it becomes pretty easy to add on deeper touches such as via the Chaos Designer Edit Groups and more Ready to dive deeper Get Into the Groove Let s take a more detailed look at working with Stylus RMX when operating in groove box mode which Stylus RMX calls Multi mode Your journey when working with Multis is likely to begin in the Browser The Browser page is reached from any page in the user interface by clicking on a groove name or the little folder symbol beside it If you start out in the mixer view where you will see up to 8 grooves representing each of the multi timbral channels of Stylus RMX clicking on the groove name will also make the channel corresponding to the groove you selected the active channel Otherwise the active channel will remain whatever you have made active in the Stylus RMX footer prior to clicking on th
7. capabilities that cross over with the capabilities you ve already found and that simple real time groove module description starts sounding just about right though perhaps your mental image of what that implies may be a lot more encompassing than it started out being We ll cover many of the more specific aspects of what Stylus RMX can do in the detailed sections below For the moment though let s look at some of the bullet point level features Despite the similarity in name and in some areas of basic functionality to Spectrasonics now superceded Stylus Vinyl Groove Module Stylus RMX is really a brand new virtual instrument It is the first product to feature the Spectrasonics Advanced Groove Engine or S A G E which I ll further abbreviate to SAGE for simplicity for short SAGE provides the underlying core technology to maintain audio sound quality while allowing the real time manipulation of loop based content We ll get into the types of manipulation Stylus RMX provides later For now suffice it to say the breadth and depth of capabilities provided were the first aspect of the product that elicited my above noted wow reaction In fact they did this at several junctures during the course of my review process Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 2 Speaking of grooves Stylus RMX includes a 7 4 GB core library of loops and sounds created by Spectrasonics and produced by sound programmer extra
8. get some idea of how you want to build the overall groove tracks for your project For example will you string individual grooves together like you might do with audio loops play the grooves in real time from a keyboard program them from a sequencer or some combination of these Will you want to slice and dice the grooves up so you can play them out of order kind of like a drum set or possibly use them concurrently in loop stretching fashion while playing fills manually You may decide for example that a set of converted REX loops will provide the basic beats for your song but you will need to add custom fills based on the same sounds You may also want to add percussion and sound FX type parts over the top of that using some combination of looped and manually played parts Once you know this you can decide which of the up to 8 multi timbral parts in Stylus RMX will be used in Groove Menu mode and which will be used in Slice Menu mode In Groove Menu mode you trigger the individual groove elements in a suite via MIDI be it from a keyboard or MIDI sequence Each groove element is triggered by a single MIDI note so you can also play a chord to overlay groove elements thus creating more complex grooves This mode might be used to build your basic foundational beats If you decide to trigger the grooves from a programmed MIDI sequence Stylus RMX simplifies things by letting you drag and drop a MIDI clip representing the note used to play the gr
9. handy to have available outside of Stylus RMX Steinberg set a good example for this by making the pedal board for Virtual Guitarist Electric Edition available this way and it would be great if Spectrasonics could do this with the rack of highly capable effects they ve provided in Stylus RMX Perhaps this could be an idea for a separate product from Spectrasonics at some point in the future All in all the FX component of Stylus RMX is a valuable addition for sound sculpting power There may be some areas where things could be improved further in the future but the bottom line is the sound and it is good Injecting Chaos Chaos is often thought of as being undesirable but Stylus RMX s Chaos Designer is decidedly not a bad thing In fact I might go so far as to suggest it along with the notion of chaos as it is used here is one of the key strengths of Stylus RMX Not only does it set Stylus RMX apart from other percussive tools but it also allows breathing new life into loop collections you may already have See the problem with loops in general is they repeat and repeat again and then again and so on with nary a variation You can use dynamic tools such as filters to lend sonic variation to them but the nature of the beast is still relative monotony By contrast a human drummer who attempts to play the same exact beat over and over again will inherently play that beat slightly differently over time Whether this is a good thing o
10. have pretty much the full range of what Stylus RMX brings to the table with this detailed level of control I ll say it again Wow Can you say grooves on steroids I knew you could All this power does come with some caveats though One key one is that as you might imagine if you re processing lots of different things especially with the FX devices you can quickly get to a situation where you need a CPU on steroids to process your grooves on steroids Another is that all this power in the context of Stylus RMX s relatively simple interface can sometimes mean that you can find yourself wondering where did I do that Just remember you can solo any of Stylus RMX s channels and solo and mute the various edit groups within that channel You may need to play around awhile using your ears to find out what it is you re looking for then look around the interface to find what you did I suspect this may be why Spectrasonics initially hides the Edit Group functions behind a faux grille That way people can get used to the basics of Stylus RMX processing and editing before they add the extra dimensions Edit Groups bring to the table Teaching a New Groove Box New Tricks We ve talked about Stylus RMX mostly as a groove building environment thus far but Stylus RMX is also an instrument in the sense that you can play it in real time We ve already talked about using Stylus RMX in Kit mode where you play it just like any drum machine as well as in
11. here to address the latter one In fact I can probably sum up this whole review in one word Wow Okay so maybe that would be going too far in the other direction on review length Let s dive in Background re STYLUS as Stylus RMX is marketed as a real time groove module Paradoxically that designation seems both overly simplistic and overly broad Its simplicity belies the breadth and depth of the territory covered by this virtual instrument Yet so many products have been described as groove modules or groove boxes over the years that there is a natural tendency to look for a more concrete characterization of what the product does Is it a drum machine a rhythm sequencer a loop player a loop library a production workstation or what And what exactly does the inclusion of real time in the description mean The truth is Stylus RMX covers a good deal of territory and every time you think you re getting close to understanding what it is and does you run into another area of functionality or way of approaching similar functionality Couple that with the fact that Stylus RMX is expandable and that it needs to work in conjunction with a VST or other plug in format host program and the way you work with it may be affected by how you and it interact with the host program and you start to get the impression that any simple summary of the product will necessarily evolve into a few run on paragraphs Then you run into still further
12. on the next beat The next beat option is perhaps the most useful for triggering grooves for auditioning purposes Either next beat or next sixteenth note could be useful for live playing of Stylus RMX in Groove Menu mode when wanting to keep the grooves synchronized with each other without having to be too tight in your triggering them Besides Slice Menu and Groove Menu mode there is also Sound Menu mode which will be activated any time you set the current channel to a Sound Menus element from the Core Library However to actually hear the sounds you need to set Slice Menu mode in the footer I think Spectrasonics could make things a little less confusing in this area if they either put Sound Menu mode in the footer as another option or automatically caused Slice Menu mode to be selected whenever the current element selected was set to a Sound Menu In fact Spectrasonics evidently agrees as they have indicated this is a planned feature for the next update i e post V1 2 I like it when my wishes are granted When you are in this mode the sounds in whatever Sound Menu you have selected which are typically sounds in a similar category e g toms kicks tambourines etc are laid out across the keyboard and you play them similarly to how you would play sounds in Kit mode However there are a few important differences First is that Sound Menu mode is available in Multi mode Thus you can have one channel of a Multi set to Sound Menus for say
13. previously been able to achieve in this genre This was thanks to the combination of the grooves the sounds used and the effects with special kudos to Chaos Designer s ability to keep the loops from getting stale over the course of the song Perhaps even more significantly I was able to pull those tracks together much more quickly than anything I d ever tried that called for creative modern sounding percussion tracks Next up was the electronica and disco influenced pop dance track This project was different from my norm if there is any such thing in a few ways First was that the vocal was to be a female vocal and at least for the time being I d decided it would be generated with Zero G s Vocaloid MIRIAM This particular project was the continuation of a project I d been working on in the course of putting my MIRIAM review together and in any event the lyrics were still a work in progress Second was my decision to move the project from SONAR over to Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 20 Project5 This arose partly from my desire to test Stylus RMX out in the Project5 environment since my feeling is that Stylus RMX s Core Library should be particularly attractive to Project5 users Also I wanted to force myself to learn Project5 a bit more since it s been sitting there on my computer for some time with only a bit of experimental use i e no real projects This particular project however seemed to
14. rather set a parametric EQ curve with a half dozen knobs or with a graphic curve with nodes that can be manipulated possibly even against an FFT meter that shows the signal coming in or going out of the EQ module I also do wish Stylus RMX s effects provided preset and user settings capabilities As it is you will need to create your settings from scratch i e if you use anything other than default settings each time you pop an effects box in the rack even if you ve already set things similarly on another insert Moreover you will also need to do that again if you decide to try changing say the modern compressor for the vintage compressor to see which better suits the needs of a particular track NOTE My wish was granted in Stylus V1 2 While there still is no way to drag an effects box from one rack position to another if you decide to reorder your effects chain there are both rack and Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 13 individual FX module level presets Spectrasonics provides an extensive library of presets at both levels and users can create their own too Perhaps though the biggest wish I have for the Stylus RMX effects is that they were available directly at the VST plug ins level While I probably wouldn t pick say EZ Reverb over my plug in reverbs from Lexicon Waves PSP Audioware and various others too often some of the more esoteric effects Retroplex for example could indeed be
15. straight for Stylus RMX s Slice Menu mode with the idea that I would use Chaos Designer to humanize whatever grooves I found to suit the project allowing me to capture the chaos and edit in SONAR as needed This turned out to be a good plan I ended up finding 6 grooves to weave in and out over the course of the song I used Chaos Designer to add some variation to prevent things feeling like I was simply stretching individual loops out In some cases this stretching might be for as much as the duration of the song such as in the case of the foundational groove I d chosen but it was more typically a song section or a portion of a song section Dealing with the captured chaos turned out to be a little more involved than I d anticipated Chaos Designer always captured more than I wanted even when I thought I was triggering it to capture just the right amount However slip editing the extra data out on the SONAR side then sliding the resulting clip to the place where I wanted it was no big deal Once I d had the captured MIDI information and edited and slid things around to get my groove arrangements how I wanted them I decided I d deal with effects in Stylus RMX to give all those cool rack modules a workout I particularly found myself liking the Imager which is a stereo imager and auto panning device for varying the width of the various grooves and keeping the percussion dynamically moving around the stereo image I ended up using three instance
16. to write a song to feature them at some point They are that cool All in all the BackBeat Xpander provides an excellent complement for Stylus RMX and is one easy way to get Stylus RMX into pop rock and similar uses At a list price of 99 best street price I found was 95 they come in at Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 25 roughly double the price of many similarly sized ACID loop collections REX loop collections vary much more widely from the same territory as ACID collections up to considerably more and Groove Control collections tend to be at least double the price of this Xpander but they are ready to go right into Stylus RMX and are certainly high caliber performances with convenient organization I predict this is one Xpander that should help Spectrasonics do some brisk add on business for Stylus RMX Countrifying Stylus RMX with Drums On Demand Vol 4 Country amp Crossover and the S A G E Converter Wer Satee 4 25 00 Use Oran rach Camumnes f 1G be PVE 24 Ba ITTU BT or Laune Loops Parmas I first came into contact with Drums On Demand when I reviewed their first volume of ACID format loops back in September 2003 Click here if you d like to see what I had to say Since then they ve come out with additional volumes of loops they re up to Vol 4 now and brought out additional formats REX and Apple Loops When I found out about Stylus RMX s ability to convert and import REX loops
17. used for configuring something like a killer acoustic drum kit ala FXpansion s BFD or ToonTrack s Drumkit from Hell Superior That is not to minimize Stylus RMX s value as a drum machine especially for styles that aren t heavily ity rE F m e LES ei ie Serer rerererere a gt gt gt gt Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 5 oriented toward acoustic sound nuances For example Stylus RMX could be a killer drum machine for modern pop or most any form of electronic music and it would do at least a passable job in most any genre Rather that just isn t the exciting part of Stylus RMX Besides most of the operations you ll need for configuring a kit are the same as you need for configuring grooves with the key exception that you are configuring sounds instead of groove elements The short summary of Kit mode though is that once you ve chosen your sounds or picked a preset kit you like and Stylus RMX includes 40 preset kits covering various styles and over 3 000 kit modules for building your own kits you would play Stylus RMX like you would any other GM compatible MIDI drum module There is no worrying about mapping of sounds because Stylus RMX handles that for you You just have to pick the relevant kit modules via Stylus RMX s Browser page to suit your musical needs If you d like to you can also use Stylus RMxX s FX page to process any of the indiv
18. used within an individual multi timbral channel when working with Stylus RMX in Multi mode We ve already talked a little about Slice Menu mode and Groove Menu mode In case you ve forgotten Slice Menu mode allows you to play individual slices of a single groove element by sending the relevant MIDI note for that slice to the applicable Stylus RMX MIDI channel Groove Menu mode on the other hand allows playing one or more of the groove elements in the current suite depending on which note has been sent The first element is selected by playing middle C i e usually in suites with a large number of groove elements a C in a lower octave may be used the next one by playing the C just above that the next by the D above that and so on Playing multiple notes allows playing multiple grooves You will also remember that Slice Menu or Groove Menu mode are selected via pull down menus in the footer There is also another pull down menu in the footer just to the right of the mode menu that selects when the groove starts playing after receiving a MIDI note in Groove Menu mode or in auditioning grooves in either Groove Menu or Slice Menu mode The options are to start immediately you ll want to use this if programming the triggers for either mode and also for playing back MIDI patterns dragged and dropped to your DAW from Stylus RMX to start Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 8 on the next sixteenth note and to start
19. ve read my Drums On Demand Vol review you know that those loops were high quality acoustic drum loops played by drummer Todd Sorenson and very useful in their setup Vol 4 maintains the same high standards on the quality front and improves on the usefulness front by typically offering more in some cases many more variations of key sections within each Song Set This should prove particularly useful for using the loops in Stylus RMX s Groove Menu mode The song sets are a mix of country oriented styles with a combination of brushes side sticks and normal snares Time signatures are mostly 4 4 but there are several 12 8 song sets and a 6 8 set in there too Noticeably absent are 3 4 signatures There are brush ballads rim ballads country rockers train beats Drums On Demand calls these paddle balls in a variety of tempos shuffles classic 12 8 beats and plenty more As best I can characterize the difference between this set and the earlier two volumes that hit on roughly the same genres i e Vol 1 and 2 Vol 3 was geared at hard rock and other edgier styles this one is more country That is you d more likely find something here to suit traditional country and other twangier country styles than you would in the earlier volumes though there are certainly Song Sets in those volumes that can fit traditional country It is a matter of both beats and playing The others on average rock a bit harder while these tend to be more in line
20. via the SAGE Converter I thought it might be fun to revisit the Drums On Demand loops in the context of bringing their REX loops into the Stylus RMX environment This would enable me to kill a few birds with one stone For one thing I didn t have any REX loops so this would provide a fair number of loops to run through the SAGE Converter to see what happened both on the conversion side and in use thereafter In particular I was curious how something that wasn t designed or otherwise tweaked for use in Stylus RMX would fare once converted This would be particularly easy to do with Drums On Demand loops since I was already familiar with how their ACID loops worked in SONAR Second I was curious what the Drums On Demand guys had been up to in the period since my last review so it would give me a good chance to check things out closely Finally I happened to have a number of to be demoed country songs sitting on my to do list and it just so happens that the latest Drums On Demand loop collection Volume 4 is entitled Country amp Crossover and advertised as being particularly suited for new country pop rock and traditional country genres Yee hah Working with the SAGE Converter I used V1 1 was pretty straightforward at least after viewing the applicable tutorial video to refresh my memory on how things worked I didn t even have to load the loops onto my hard disk I could convert them directly from the CD There were a few minor wrin
21. was time to move beyond new toy syndrome and figure out how I might use Stylus RMX in actual projects I have to confess that it was also at that point that I quickly found myself hopelessly lost While I d read the marketing materials on the Spectrasonics site so had some clue as to what Stylus RMX could do making the translation from features to the user interface didn t come intuitively for me This is not to suggest Stylus RMX is unintuitive but rather that there are some basic concepts and aspects of its user interface that you must grasp to get very far with Stylus RMX Thus next stop was trying to figure out how to make my QuickTime Player sound tolerable it turned out routing it to my studio audio board rather than the consumer one built into my PC which I use for most all other plain old media playing uses did the trick At that point I could go through the tutorial videos Spectrasonics has provided Note that we re not talking about a short fifteen minute introductory video or even an hour long overview We are talking almost three hours worth of videos including overviews and more in depth tutorial information honing in on specific areas While the tutorial videos don t get into every little feature within Stylus RMX they do cover it in Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 19 sufficient depth to keep you going for a long time While I ll further admit that I didn t become an instant phat groove b
22. with a normal drum track this could be just the ticket for dealing with adding fills to tracks built based on Groove Menus For example you could play or program the main track with various grooves from a suite in Groove Menu mode then use a second track with one of those grooves in Slice Menu mode for programming fills This could be mixed over the top of the first track or in spaces in the first track depending on whether you want to put the fill over the top of a basic pattern or replace the basic pattern with a fill This is another case where the flexibility of Stylus RMX wins out over typical loop usage As for this project it is also still a work in progress I found I am not the most adept turntable fill programmer things are sounding a bit heavy handed in hindsight and the slowdown with ProjectS s multi timbral instrument support made things go even more slowly than they would have otherwise Still the concept proved itself out It also taught me some new things about Stylus RMX s capabilities I will probably be more likely to apply those lessons in SONAR for the foreseeable future though I m happy to say I also got a lot farther in Project5 than I d ever done in the past Okay thus far I ve talked about using Stylus RMX on projects picked specifically because I felt Stylus RMX s Core Library might suit them What about trying to apply Stylus RMX to projects that just happened to be sitting near the top of my prioritized stack of to
23. with country beats and playing styles If you re making country recordings though and want to use drum loops you ll probably want all three volumes To try these out I decided to work on an up tempo modern country song with an instrumental hook that has a feel that makes it a bit hard to find compatible beats Nevertheless I found a few song sets that could work with the song and picked one to start playing One thing that is noteworthy in the Drums On Demand collections is that they tend to have one primary loop for each song section e g verse chorus bridge intro etc then often have multiple alternate loops for the section such as with a crash cymbal at the start a fill on the end an alternate beat etc When building a part with ACID style loops in SONAR this is very quick for stretching out the relative loops to fill your song section and you re at a quick drum part rapidly If you want to get more nuances you can decide where to put alternate loops for the sections and if you want to get really fancy you might try varying things up most every measure or however long the loops are as there are some longer ones Using these loops in Stylus RMX though you can use Chaos Designer to take care of nuances for the sake of trying to simulate a non looped performance not to mention to tweak the feel especially if you add Edit Groups to the picture This gives you the possibility of using the primary loops for longer stretches without h
24. Besides the benefits once the loops have crossed over to the other side so to speak are significant Remember all the things you can do with Stylus RMX loops from the main article They are all available with the converted loops too I ve used the Drums On Demand loops in ACID format before and they are well ACIDized However like most ACID loops you can only stretch them so far Quality ACIDization helps in letting them stretch Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 27 farther without getting too many artifacts but you can only go so far especially in the downward direction I did one experiment where I played an ACID version of one of these loops at its original tempo which was 72 BPM Stretched up to much higher tempos I tried 144 BPM it actually sounded pretty good too not the case with loops that aren t as well ACIDized However then I brought the tempo down to 36 BPM Ever heard a spring reverb The nice natural ambience on the loop I d started with ended up sounding like a spring reverb bouncing around Some of the hits flammed pretty severely too Not what was intended to be sure Using the converted version of the same loop in Stylus RMX the double original tempo experiment really ended up being in the same ballpark The differences were subtle with the best my ears could distinguish being a difference in ambience the sped up ACID loop sounded drier With the half tempo version though th
25. Groove Menu mode where you can trigger multiple grooves in real time from a MIDI keyboard Much of what you may want to do with Stylus RMX in real time though has less to do with the notes that you will be playing than the evolution of sound over time For example you may want to bring a filter in and out in a musical fashion that relates to your specific song or to increase the probability of groove pattern variations toward the end of a song section Using Stylus RMX s MIDI Learn capability it is an easy matter to map any of Stylus RMX s controls to the sliders and knobs on whatever MIDI control surface you might have available That control surface could be a MIDI keyboard or a full dedicated mixer like control surface or whatever else you have lying around The idea is to give you the flexibility to play those controls like you would play an instrument rather than having to resort to manipulating the controls with a mouse or programming automation envelopes Setting this control up is as easy as it could possibly be Simply invoke the MIDI Learn command from the menu on whichever page holds the control you want to automate move the relevant slider or knob or whatever on your control surface then move the Stylus RMX control you want to map to the physical control There is also a MIDI Learn Inverted control to map a Stylus RMX control to the opposite direction of a control surface control s movement Additionally you can map more than one
26. Just to the right of the Level and Pan controls is the LFO section which provides LFOs low frequency oscillators for modifying amplitude filtering modifies the cutoff frequency of the Power Filter and pan position Just click on the Amp Filter or Pan button respectively to access the individual controls for that LFO Those controls include Depth turn to zero to turn the LFO off Rate waveform sine square triangle forward and inverse ramps and sample and hold Sync synchronizes the LFO with the host s tempo otherwise it is free running and Retrig retriggers the LFO for each slice of the groove There is also a clickable indicator LED which determines whether the modulation is positive or negative blue for positive red for negative To the right of the LFO section is the Power Filter This filter was created in collaboration with G Media based on technology from G Media s ImpOSCAR softsynth The Power Filter has lowpass bandpass and highpass modes only one of which can be active at any given time A 24dB switch toggles the Power Filter between 4 pole 24dB per octave and 2 pole 12dB per octave operation Parameters for controlling the Power Filter include Cutoff Resonance Width Drive and Gain Together these parameters provide a high degree of control Remember too that the Filter LFO or Filter Envelope can modulate the Power Filter Speaking of envelopes next up is the Envelopes section Envelopes are available for modify
27. ONAR 4 I was using my MOTU 2408 mkII interface in ASIO mode and the highest latency that can be set in that mode at 44 1 kHz is around 49ms It turns out Stylus RMX doesn t like high latency I ve sinced verified that by setting higher latency in SONAR using the WDM driver for the MOTU interface Once this was discovered it was a simple matter to turn the latency down in ProjectS initially with my consumer sound card and later substituting my MOTU interface in ASIO mode and after doing that Stylus RMX worked just fine with Project5 too NOTE The high latency crashing problem has been fixed in V1 2 though Stylus RMX still does not like latencies of 100 ms or higher For example audio is much more likely to break up above the higher latency mark even in situations when it would be just fine at the 50 ms mark This may seem counter intuitive since raising the latency is often a cure for performance related audio problems but I have also also heard of other software instruments having issues with latencies above certain thresholds Once Stylus RMX was working with ProjectS my next decision was how I would use it In particular would I use Slice Menu mode again Groove Menu mode or Kit mode I started out defaulting to Slice Menu mode simply because it had worked so well in the previous project and I liked the idea of dealing with the chaos the way I had previously done Pretty early on I discovered that Project5 doesn t support dragging and d
28. Stylus RMX control to the same control surface control Putting this together with the MIDI Learn and MIDI Learn Inverted commands it could create the possibility of creating crossfade like controls such as for two mixer channels For example you might want one channel to fade in when another control fades out thus essentially creating a balance control between two groove elements Opportunities for Xpansion Stylus RMX s built in library of sounds and grooves is superb but it leads decidedly toward creative sound design and modern grooves and perhaps you are looking for something more acoustic or something a bit more vanilla or Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 18 perhaps something even more out there on the creativity scale Also I ve never heard of anyone being satisfied with having to use the loops from one and only one company Of course you could buy standalone audio loops for using alongside Stylus RMX but Stylus RMX provides such a useful groove building environment that once you re spoiled by working there you may never want to build grooves any other way Also if you ve enjoyed working with loops in the past odds are you already have built up a library of audio loops and wouldn t it be cool if you could also make those work in Stylus RMX s powerful environment To satisfy the need for more and different types of grooves and sounds Spectrasonics provides optional expansion library add ons c
29. ady that if you leave the Pattern slider at its default position of 0 000 i e 0 probability of changing slice order and haven t changed any of the other Chaos Designer controls from their default positions you will get the original loop playing over and over If on the other hand you set the Pattern slider to its maximum position of 1 000 i e 100 probability of reordering slices odds are you won t recognize the underlying groove at all or that there is even any true groove underneath because it will be different each time In my book neither of these extremes is terribly useful for playing a groove multiple times in a row Just how much chance for variation is useful is of course a matter of taste and may differ for different types of music However I find that somewhere on the order of 0 050 i e 5 seems just about right for keeping a pattern that seems steady while still feeling more human than just repeating a loop would There is another element that can enter into play here too even in this simple case That is the notion that it may be more musical to place variations in a groove in some places than it may be to place the variations in other places For example you may find that in a four bar pattern you are more likely to want to vary the groove in the second half of the second measure and anywhere in the fourth measure than in either the first or third measures The good news here is that pretty much all parameters of Stylu
30. alled S A G E Xpanders As of the time of this writing Spectrasonics has announced five Xpanders These include BackBeat live drumming geared toward basic beats Retro Funk vintage drumming and percussion Liquid Grooves natural and processed live drums and unusual organic percussion Burning Grooves blazing live drums and extreme remixes including less common time signatures and Metamorphosis creatively processed remix oriented grooves These Xpanders come ready to use with Stylus RMX after installation so there is no conversion needed on the user s end They list for 99 apiece See the sidebar for our hands on look at the BackBeat Xpander For users who would like to incorporate their existing loop collections or loops they create themselves within Stylus RMX Spectrasonics includes a SAGE Converter in the Stylus RMX package As of SAGE Converter 1 1 there is support for converting Spectrasonics own Groove Control libraries in Akai and Roland formats most of these overlap with the available Xpanders but existing users may prefer to convert their loop collections rather than purchasing the equivalent Xpander as well as REX2 format loops Spectrasonics indicates that support for ILIO s Groove Control CD ROM libraries will be available in early March The REX2 format which was created by Propellerheads is a fairly popular format for commercial loop libraries owing to its support in a number of applications including Propellerhea
31. ant to experiment with the other mode make sure and save any settings you ve made that you want to keep into a user setting before switching modes Speaking of which next to the Multi Kit mode selector is the display to list the current multi or kit click on it to select another preset or user setting There are also up down arrows to select the previous or next kit or multi On the right at top is an icon that looks like a diskette and which calls up a menu of operations such as for loading or saving multis or kits loading or saving parts within a multi or kit and learning or unlearning MIDI controller connections to the mixer controls The main body of the Mixer page holds 8 track strips with the name of the current groove element or kit component as usual click on the name to go directly to the Browser and traditional mixer controls such as Mute and Solo buttons level faders and Pan knobs There are also 4 Aux Sends per channel output selectors to set which of Stylus multi timbral outputs the channel in question is routed to and channel numbers which if clicked work just like the channel selectors in the Stylus RMX footer One point worth noting is that while the Mixer will show the output destinations of the various components of the multi or kit the listings of output designations on the Mixer page is not necessarily the definitive list of what is routed to any given output when in Multi mode In fact it could be that a groove el
32. aving it feel like you re using a loop Pretty cool The bottom line on this particular project was I got distracted many times just playing around with all the loops Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 28 trying different things out in terms of Chaos Designer Edit Groups and even processing though one other key feature of the Drums On Demand loops is that they come ready to sit in a mix so any processing will tend to be more for effect than to make them sit right in your project With all the other projects I had going on in parallel I didn t get very far on this one However I played around enough here to have a strong sense that not only will Stylus RMX and the Drums On Demand loops work well for the project but the combination of the two should end up with a drum part that feels more like a real drummer playing the specific song than either product would have allowed on its own To put it another way the result is definitely greater than the sum of its parts and the parts are pretty darn good to begin with For 49 95 it s hard to go wrong with this collection if you want Stylus RMX to go country However if country is your thing and you don t already have the other Drums On Demand volumes I might suggest their Country Bundle which adds Vol 1 and Vol 2 for a grand total of 119 95 Just remember to pick the REX2 format version for use with Stylus RMX Stylus RMX V1 2 Update Shortly after th
33. ay I can describe it is wow I know I keep using that word but I warned you up front that was the short version of this review Beyond the actual projects I also did experiment a bit with Stylus RMX here and there from just playing around with grooves to trying out Stylus RMX in Kit mode on various MIDI files I had laying around that were voiced for General MIDI drums It was a blast playing around with the Kit mode presets and Stylus RMX also makes it a fairly simple matter to change the individual kit components quickly to build a kit that is customized to the song s needs I d certainly have no qualms about using Stylus RMX in kit mode for a modern pop song or any other genre where I was either working with MIDI loops programming beats directly at the MIDI level or wanting to play explicit parts from a MIDI controller where the sounds suited the genre and project It would not be my first choice for using in acoustic drumming applications in this manner but it could also do well enough in a pinch or if you didn t already have one of the dedicated acoustic drumming solutions It would also be an excellent way to go for adding percussion acoustic or otherwise especially when you take the Sound Menus mode of Slice Menus into account Closing Notes The way I see it Stylus RMX has now become the solution to beat for drum and percussion groove building applications While it isn t perfect it is currently as close as you can get to being th
34. be demoed songs To understand why this consideration is different you have to realize that most of my music tends toward country or pop rock though my teenage kids would probably more Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 22 likely call it classic pop rock or some such thing In particular these styles tend to be heavily based around natural sounding acoustic drums While there are some acoustic drum components in Stylus RMX s Core Library finding enough matched sounds and rhythms for a full song where you have preconceived notions about the basic rhythms you d like to have will likely prove an exercise in frustration If you choose to switch to Kit mode you ll likely fare better However there are better ways to go than Stylus RMX for dedicated acoustic drum modules Besides the real temptation for me to use Stylus RMX had much more to do with getting quality beats quickly while allowing use of the Chaos Designer to make things live and breathe This is something that would be especially desirable when trying to use audio loops in an application geared toward live playing instead of programming The net here is that Stylus RMX on its own didn t suit my particular priority projects very well However remembering that Stylus RMX is expandable via S A G E Xpanders and REX2 loops I was very curious as to how these expansion capabilities might work in this application My feeling was that with quality acoustic dr
35. be the type for which Project5 should be fairly well suited though Project5 s lack of audio support would require dealing separately with the MIRIAM generated audio track for the vocal As part of my shift to Project5 I d also decided I would try and do more track programming other than for use of audio or MIDI loops for drum and percussion parts most all my tracks tend to be played live on a MIDI keyboard This was really to get into the Project5 style which is geared toward building arrangements from patterns Finally the history of this project s development meant that I d be replacing drum and percussion tracks fairly late in the game whereas I d usually be working with rhythmic tracks pretty early in the game for this type of song Ah challenges My first attempt at hooking Stylus RMX into Project5 was a dismal failure While it plugged in just fine as soon as I tried to audition a groove Project5 would crash This was 100 repeatable in Project5 even though Stylus RMX had never crashed SONAR on me It turns out the problem was not Project5 specific but rather related to having a high latency set for the audio driver I was initially using in Project5 In particular because most of my use of Project5 to that point had been playing around and mostly after hours I d configured it to use the consumer style sound card built into my PC s motherboard and its default configuration in Project5 had a latency somewhere over 100ms By contrast in S
36. calls this section of the screen the footer and it is the main navigational center for the product s user interface At the far left of the footer is a master volume control This can be handy for quick overall adjustments Just to the right of that are the master transport controls These include overall Play and Stop buttons for starting playback of all groove elements configured in a groove and stopping playback of any playing groove elements respectively Just below the master transport buttons is a three mode Value display By default the Value display shows the value of whatever the most recent parameter edited is but it can also show Stylus RMX s overall memory usage or the name of the active Slice Edit Group when Edit Groups are in use more on Edit Groups below In the center section of the footer are three rows of buttons The top row consists of buttons numbered 1 8 which correspond to the 8 multi timbral channels of Stylus RMX These buttons select the currently active channel to which parameter manipulations in the main portion of the editing screen other than on the Mixer page where you Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 4 can manipulate parameters for multiple channels in parallel apply Whichever channel is currently active has its button lit up Just below each channel activation button is a Play button for that channel Pressing repeatedly alternately toggles it between playing and stopped state Th
37. corresponding to some of the most used editing functions with big easy to manipulate knobs sliders and switches These include Level Pan Pitch with a switch to toggle between coarse and fine control amplitude envelope Decay and Release with a switch to toggle between them and master filter Tone and Emphasis Note that the same grille like area exists in the Easy Edit page as on the Edit page You will also see this on a few other pages we will get to a bit later Moving back to the main Edit page on the left hand side of the screen there are Level and Pan sliders Note that these can be used interchangeably with the similarly named controls on the Easy Edit page These affect the volume level and stereo field position for whatever you are editing By default that whatever will be the groove element playing through the current Stylus RMX channel as selected by the channel selector in the Stylus RMX footer If you re intrigued by my saying this affects Whatever you are editing that is good because it provides a further hint toward the exciting feature alluded to above Another hint before we progress with the sound editing features themselves is that you may want to consider what sorts of whatevers you d like to be able to edit when talking about a percussive groove One final hint is that this same qualifier applies to all the controls on the Edit page as well as to controls on a few other pages of the Stylus RMX user interface
38. d on to Project5 but it will likely be in Cakewalk s hands not Spectrasonics to make the ProjectS enhancements that will make that be the case Process slowdowns aside using Stylus RMX in Groove mode did work and I could use Chaos Designer in real time to add some variations to the grooves Thus this approach was very similar to the process of creating a track with ACID loops but having the flexibility to use any of Stylus RMX s enhancements Chaos Designer s being the main one that interested me most here for added spice One little twist I added here was using Stylus RMX s Sound Menus for the second rhythmic track This is a special use of Stylus RMX s Slice Menu mode where instead of having slices of a groove laid out on ascending keys on the keyboard there are sounds of a related character laid out on those keys For example in my case I was looking to put some turntable style scratching on the track However I wanted to use this scratching more or less like drum fills not for a constant groove In this case having a broad assortment of scratching sounds from a Sound Menu was just the ticket I could play or program the scratching patterns in Project5 s P SEQ editor then send them to the relevant track in the project at the appropriate place for the fill and voila Note that using Slice Menu mode in the scratching track didn t preclude me from using Groove Menu mode in the basic drum track both in the same instance of Stylus RMX Even
39. ds own Reason Steinberg s Cubase SX Native Instruments INTAKT and KONTAKT sample players and many more While it may not be as popular among SONAR users as the natively supported ACID format and Stylus RMX does not support conversion of ACID format loops this capability may still be of strong interest to SONAR users After all there are a large number of libraries available in the REX2 format The potential of using these loops with all of Stylus RMX s features including Chaos Designer and Edit Groups and the fact that you can stretch tempos a lot farther with converted REX2 loops inside Stylus RMX than you can with SONAR s native ACID loop stretching capabilities are strong carrots See the sidebar for experiences with converting REX2 format loops from Drums On Demand a vendor whose ACID format loops have been extremely popular among SONAR users for use with Stylus RMX Playing Around When Stylus RMX first arrived and after I got it installed I decided I d just start out bringing Stylus RMX up in SONAR 4 to see how far just playing around with it got me This is largely because there was no user manual an on line reference manual is coming in the near future and I ve had some troubles getting clean playback of QuickTime videos on my PC I must have spent a few hours playing around with the grooves just checking out sounds and rhythms which are way cool especially for genres favoring modern or electronic sounds At that point though it
40. e Chaos Designer And we haven t yet gotten to the fine tuning potential of Edit Groups What we re talking about is the difference between drum loops and a dynamic sounding performance Of course if you take things too far you can also end up with sloppy drummer syndrome but that is where your taste enters into the picture Okay so now you ve got a righteous human sounding groove going and it s perfect for using in your current project but it keeps changing and changing and will never be the same again What do you do to capture that magic Funny you should ask Down on the left side of the lower portion of the main Chaos Designer window is a Capture button and it Captures whatever Chaos Designer performance has been made from when you start playback in Chaos Designer to when you hit the Capture button I should note here that I am talking specifically about using Chaos Designer in Slice Menu mode in this instance Use of Chaos Designer in Groove Menu mode is limited to real time playback You can of course bounce or freeze the track output but what it plays will be calculated while your DAW performs the bounce or freeze operation not what you heard while tweaking Chaos Designer settings or even playing the song through the previous time in your DAW Chaos Designer is still useful in Groove Menu mode just less predictable since you can t capture what you ve already heard Back to Slice Menu mode after you ve hit the Capture button Chaos D
41. e Range knob controls the degree of potential change Wide variations here will be most useful in the context of electronic percussion but keeping range low may also provide a degree variation similar to hitting a snare drum head in different places where the exact position of the hit subtly effects pitch among other things Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 15 The final chaos factor is dynamics and here the controls are Dynamics Soft Loud and Range By now you have figured out the Dynamics slider sets the probability for changes in the loudness or softness of a slice the Soft Loud knob controls the direction of dynamic changes and the Range knob controls the potential degree of variation For example setting things in the Soft direction with Range and Dynamics set to taste could provide an effect similar to the injection of ghost hits into a groove Before we move on to the remaining Chaos Designer controls it is worth noting that though we ve talked about each of these controls in isolation the real magic happens when you put them all or at least several of them together For example setting small percentages for pattern variation even smaller percentages for repetition no reversing and subtle settings in a particular direction to your taste for timing pitch and dynamics can make an acoustic drum loop sound much more human than repeating that same drum loop over and over without benefit of th
42. e bottom row of buttons in the center section of the footer selects the user interface page to view The pages selected this way are the Edit page Chaos Designer FX page and Mixer page There are two additional user interface pages that are not selected from this section of the footer We ll get to those shortly At the far right of the footer are four additional controls Across the top is a combination display and control that shows the currently selected groove s name Clicking on it or the folder button immediately to its right brings up the Browser page which is used to select groove elements and sounds and to perform various operations related to the groove libraries and the grooves themselves Under the right side of the groove name display is a pull down menu used to select whether Stylus RMX will respond to MIDI information in Slice Menu mode or Groove Menu mode In Slice Menu mode each note sent to Stylus RMX triggers a slice from the currently active groove element A groove element corresponds to a single groove loop and the slices are more or less beat divisions Playing an ascending chromatic scale would play the groove in its natural order However there is nothing saying you have to do that and you can also play the individual slices as you might play a drum set for example to play a fill In Groove Menu mode every note sent to Stylus RMX plays a groove element within the currently active directory for the multi timbral chann
43. e difference was amazing No more spring reverb central and flam city Furthermore I could use Stylus RMX s Half button to further slow things down I hit it twice to effectively get one eighth of the original tempo i e since I was starting at half the original tempo when I hit the button and hits were still plenty smooth The main thing noticed in terms of artifacts was that the ambience tails became less natural the lower you got but still not bouncing around like a spring reverb This is likely due to the extra space between hits that would normally not be there and thus the any ambience would be masked by the next hits Still we re talking about taking a 72 BPM loop down to an effective 9 BPM Just for laughs I tried that with the ACID loop It was no longer spring reverb city but now more like equal volume multi tap delays with probably on the order of 8 taps then space in between that and the next hit would come in with softer sounding repetitive taps 9 BPM is of course a pretty absurd tempo but it s still pretty impressive how Stylus RMX handles this More importantly there might be times where you want a sparser beat and the combination of changes from the original tempo and using the Half button to get a sparser beat might add up to a non trivial slowdown It s always nice to know that you ll be able to go as far as you re ever likely to need to go and then some So what about the Country amp Crossover Collection itself If you
44. e groove name Of course you can change the active channel at any time by clicking on another channel selector in the footer Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 7 The bottom portion of the Browser window is the same footer as you will see everywhere else in Stylus RMX The top portion called the header is largely decorative However it includes a button to close the Browser page and return to the page you were on when you opened the Browser as well as a Spectrasonics logo which if clicked will display the names of members of the team that created Stylus RMX Below the header and above the footer sits the meat of the Browser s interface In the upper left corner are the drop down menus to select the library whose sounds you wish to audition and the directory within that library The center portion of the Browser lists the groove suites available in the current library and directory Depending on the specific directory you ve chosen these may be in the form of BPM ratings followed by a creative or descriptive style name e g 60 Volcano 70 Datalife 112 Jive Walking etc instrument groupings e g Bongos Cowbells Shakers Sticks etc or whatever the library designer or user for user imported grooves or grooves collected in a the User Favorites library has picked as a convention Two special cases deserve mention One which is only available when using Kit mode is categories of Kit Modul
45. e holy grail tool that combines the best of audio loops playable drum sounds ready made grooves and various other goodies for a best of all worlds combination of sound quality efficiency flexibility and musicality Makers of audio drum loops should be advised that Stylus RMX is likely to dramatically increase the demand for REX2 format loops or preferably if Spectrasonics allows other developers to license their Groove Control technology which has advantages over converted REX2 loops loops that have already been converted for use as a S A G E Xpander The sounds included with Stylus RMX are top quality and will be just what the doctor ordered for certain genres Those who need or want more on the acoustic drumming side will want to add either relevant Xpanders or convert REX2 loops or both The grooves will keep you going for a long time but being able to add chaos to them makes any individual groove a living breathing entity The MIDI control you get over this process and in fact over most Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 23 all the controls inside Stylus RMX just adds further to this notion of loops as more than just static entities Add two dozen high quality effects and a powerful CPU to run them and synth style sound editing capabilities and things just keep getting better and better Top it off with being able to get at the individual slices within a loop through Slice Menu mode and Edit Gr
46. eim I didn t get a chance to see Eric s demo and the impression I d had based mainly on the marketing of Spectrasonics earlier Stylus product was that it probably wouldn t be all that useful to me In particular it seemed to be oriented mainly toward electronic music hip hop and other forms of music that tend toward extremely creative drum and percussion sounds whereas most of my music tends to go for natural acoustic drums Cut to Fall 2004 with many more reviews under our collective belts along with backlogs of reviews still stacked up and Stylus RMX made its debut I d been following the press releases and occasionally checking out the Spectrasonics web site where they had a countdown of Stylus RMX features starting a few weeks before the actual product release Right around release date I figured I d go through the countdown and I came away from it thinking there just might be more to this Stylus RMX thing than my earlier expectations would have led me to believe That turned out to be a dramatic understatement In any event I somewhat innocently offered that if the other reviewer who d nominally been signed up to review Stylus RMX had changed his mind I could probably force myself to fit it in I fully expected he d have a laugh Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 1 then very quickly laugh me off As fortune would have it though the other reviewer already had a backlog of some fairly heavy d
47. el of Stylus RMX being accessed Playing multiple notes concurrently makes it possible to trigger multiple groove elements at once and keeps them all in sync with one another Next up and just to the right of the Slice Groove Menu mode toggle is another pull down menu that tells Stylus RMX whether groove starts stops and changes will be reflected immediately on the next beat or on the next sixteenth note V1 2 adds the option to reflect the changes at the start of the next bar Your choice here will depend on how you re using Stylus RMX at the moment For example if you re auditioning grooves against a playing song e g to select the groove for a percussion part the next beat option may be ideal since your timing in turning the groove on or off can be a bit sloppy while keeping things easily synchronized with the song s beat On the other hand if you re programming parts in a sequencer you might want to use the immediate option so changes happen exactly where you program them Last up in the lower right corner of the footer is a small button that looks like a floppy disk but brings up a menu of various functions related to maintenance of multis kits and parts as well as the MIDI Learn facility Before we get to the details of what the various screens do it may be helpful to get an idea of some basic workflow for building grooves in Stylus RMX and introduce some of the concepts that are important to understand to get past the initia
48. ement shown as being routed to a particular output in the mixer does not have all slices of it going to that output This relates to a capability called Edit Groups that we have been alluding to several times above and the reasons for this will become clearer when we discuss Edit Groups I mention it here because this notion along with some related details related to Edit Groups means the Mixer is not as useful as a source of routing information as it might appear to be on the surface This is Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 12 not necessarily a complaint as the Mixer is more about controlling levels and balances of the multi timbral parts than about providing routing information However as your usage of Stylus RMX gets into deeper waters you may find yourself wishing there were such a definitive location for examining routing information specifically when using multiple outputs along with Edit Groups To What Effect We ve still got a couple more pages of the Stylus RMX user interface just to get through basic functionality Next up is the FX page The FX page provides a three slot effects rack for each insert aux bus master bus and Edit Group more on these later in Stylus RMX Into each effects slot you can put any of the 24 effects that come with Stylus RMX Of course you can also leave some of those slots empty which for performance reasons is probably a good idea unless you ve got a much fast
49. epeated use loop style These grooves are typically numbered in order of complexity which helps keep track of what is what when playing the grooves in Groove Menu mode After this some suites have breakdowns Next up most suites have multiple grooves labeled FBar for fill bar i e measure long fills then additional fill grooves that aren t necessarily measure long Finally some suites have one or more extra special groove elements such as grooves featuring ride cymbal grooves featuring side stick instead of snare and a few other special cases This arrangement makes it very easy to piece a beat together using Groove Menu mode along with a MIDI keyboard The basic flow is to find a suite whose basic beats feel right for your song note how many grooves of each type are in the suite and how this corresponds to your keyboard then hit Record in your DAW and play generally in at least measure long notes though that is not mandatory and using the fills will be a special case I used this approach for quickly building a drum track for a country rock song needing a demo and had something passable together in the time it took to play the song through once Of course playing mistakes and changes of mind can be accounted for later through MIDI level editing This is an extremely quick way of getting something together that is right in the ballpark though and any editing needed is likely to be fairly simple such as transposing a MIDI note to choo
50. er computer than I do Even without considering Edit Groups we are talking about the possibility of as many as 39 effects units i e 8 inserts 4 aux sends and one master bus for a total of 13 different FX racks each with up to 3 FX in it and using lots of effects can eat up CPU power pretty quickly When you start getting into Edit Groups the number could be significantly higher though my computer would certainly have bitten the CPU power dust long before that point What kind of effects are we talking about There s a tube limiter tape slammer modern and vintage compressors a gate expander stereo imager including autopanning four graphic equalizers 2 3 7 and 12 band two parametric equalizers 2 and 3 band wah wah Power Filter using the same technology built into the Edit page valve radio flame distortion two phasers an EZ Phaser with 4 or 8 poles and a PRO Phaser with 3 to 22 poles a flanger three tempo based delays single dual and left center right a vintage to modern 1960 to 2000 tape style delay called Retroplex and a simple reverb called EZ Verb The V1 2 update adds Radio Delay Pro Verb and Spring Verb Perhaps the quicker question to answer would have been what effects Stylus RMX doesn t have Of course if you don t find what you re looking for here you can always send whatever it is you want to process to one of Stylus RMX s individual outputs and process that channel separately in your DAW usi
51. er of the Chaos Designer screen is the on off button Perhaps obviously leaving this in the default off position means the groove element you re playing on the current channel is just like any other audio loop i e it ll play back identically as many times as you care to repeat it Turning Chaos Designer on doesn t change that You will need to set some other controls to do that What it does do is allow those other controls to take effect thus allowing you to easily turn Chaos Designer on and off to hear the difference with and without chaos On the left side of the main body of the Chaos Designer screen are three sliders Pattern Repeat and Reverse All three set probabilities that Stylus RMX will vary whatever it is the slider governs In the case of the Pattern setting what is varied is the slice order within the groove element So if you set the pattern slider to for example 0 050 then Stylus RMX will vary the order of slices in the groove approximately 5 of the time Repeat governs the Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 14 probability of repeating a slice of the groove and Reverse controls the probability of a slice s being reversed i e as in a backward tape effect Before we move on to the rest of the Chaos Designer parameters let s stop to consider the possibility of using these initial three controls musically In fact let s just focus on the Pattern slider for a moment It may be obvious alre
52. es i e components for building drum kits when using Stylus RMX as a GM compatible drum machine In this case the suite names you will find begin with a category of instruments followed by some further descriptive name e g CLAPS Aggressive HI HATS Chunky KICKS Lo Fi etc When you are using Multi mode though there is a similarly named set of suites for the Sound Menus directory of the Core Library These suites have names that begin with SOUND MENUS followed by a descriptor of the basic category of sound menus in that suite We ll talk a bit more about sound menus shortly but the general gist is that they are not grooves but rather a layout of sounds which are playable via MIDI but which unlike Kit modules are available in Multi mode Over on the right side of the Browser sits the Elements pane which is used to list the individual elements available in the selected suite If we are in Kit mode then the elements will be Kit modules If we are in Multi mode but the selected suite is in the Sound Menus directory the elements will be Sound Menus Otherwise the elements will be groove elements which are for most practical purposes loops The naming of any given elements will generally be related to the type of element it is For example groove elements typically have the original tempo in BPM followed by the descriptive name of the suite and finally some further descriptive label e g 60 Two Speeder Kick 73 Caravan H
53. esigner takes a little while to put together the MIDI information from what has just played Eventually it puts the groove name followed by chaos in the little LCD like display that resembles the groove name display we saw earlier in the Browser window You can then drag this MIDI information to your DAW after which you can play it back repeatably The one key exception is that currently Chaos Designer pitch variations are not captured to MIDI You can however leave Chaos Designer on the Stylus RMX MIDI channel in question turn down the other probability sliders just leaving the Pitch settings on and Chaos Designer can at least add pitch variations in real time Once you have the MIDI information in your DAW you can edit it like any other MIDI information for example to adjust any timing that feels too random to you or even to just pare down the MIDI clip to use the best parts and slip edit the rest out There is also an Export button which provides the direct ability to save the Chaos Designer s MIDI file to hard disk for later use Of course you could also just drag the MIDI file from Stylus RMX to Windows Explorer to do a similar thing The main difference is that using the Export button gives you the chance to rename the file before saving it to disk with Explorer you could still rename it after saving it to disk Note that Chaos Designer settings are specific to the MIDI channel or possibly an Edit Group not Stylus RMX wide Thus
54. for example you could have different settings on a tambourine loop a congas loop and the drum set loop When I first read about Chaos Designer I thought it sounded like a cool concept but wondered how well it would work in practice Once I actually got using it though it seemed like each time I d dig a little deeper I d get to a point where about all that I could say was wow That is the more you experiment with what Chaos Designer can do and the control you can have over it for tuning things to your taste the more levels of capability get revealed Adding Chaos Designer to the bits and pieces we ve discussed thus far would make Stylus RMX a winning solution for creating more human sounding drum and percussion parts from looped material However we re not finished yet and I hope you re ready for one of those wow moments because we re finally going to get to a capability I ve Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 16 been hinting at and even name dropping a few times at various times during the course of this review It is really the combination of Chaos Designer all the other Stylus RMX components and the feature I am about to get to specifically how they can all work together that really takes things over the top Ready or not here we go Edit Groups The capability I m talking about is Edit Groups If you ve been paying attention to the screen shots included in the review to this point you p
55. hich groove is which within a suite and my not being able to translate the little I can remember in this area into a real time performance made this approach frustrating As an aside I do think this is a method of operation that I d like to use in the future but I also think it will take a good deal of practice and maybe some slowed down tempos to make it comfortable Spectrasonics indicates that a future version of RMX will have a couple of different ways to display what groove is assigned to play from each MIDI key that you play Then I decided since Project5 is about pattern programming maybe I d create a pattern per groove and just drag and drop Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 21 patterns The problem was I wanted to take advantage of Stylus RMX s sensitivity to velocity having a number of different velocity levels to vary the dynamics over time and combining multiple velocity levels with multiple grooves meant more patterns than I really wanted to create I decided to compromise and just make three velocity level oriented patterns then use Project5 s loop transpose feature to deal with the different grooves remember in Stylus RMX s Groove mode each groove is a different note This actually ended up being reasonably intuitive once I got into it as I could count the offset from the first groove to the one I wanted for any given part and transpose up by that same amount for the instance of the pattern f
56. i Hat 79 BossaLuv Electro NoKik However if the groove elements came from an imported REX library and the user did not rename the individual REX loop files prior to importing the groove elements will have whatever the original loop designer named the individual files For Sound Menus the name of an element always begins with MENU and will generally be followed by some descriptor which may include an instrument category name e g MENU Bongos an instrument name and further descriptor e g MENU Hi Hats Chunky or just some creative name e g MENU Weirdness 1 With grooves clicking on the element s name starts the groove playing for auditioning purposes If you want to audition sound menu elements you need to either play notes from a MIDI keyboard or send MIDI notes from your sequencer through Stylus RMX Just above the Elements pane in the top right hand corner of the Browser window is a Settings button When you change groove elements in a Stylus RMX track this easy to miss but important button determines whether various settings such as which output that track will use are left as is or are reset according to settings associated with the groove element being loaded If you re using Stylus RMX multi timbrally you ll likely want to turn this button off the default state is on to avoid having to repeatedly change mixer faders track outputs and more Now is as good a time as any to mention the different modes that can be
57. idual kit elements to your taste You can also use the mixer to blend kit elements send part of the sound to Aux buses for shared effects and process the master output bus if you d like However you can just as easily send all the individual outputs to SONAR or whatever other DAW you might be using for processing and mixing at that level or mix a bit of both if you prefer It s that simple If you decide to go down the groove box path you will leave Stylus RMX in its default Multi mode and your first destination will likely be to the Browser window to audition groove building components We ll get into details of the Browser window below but it is worth spending a few minutes here on the organization of groove libraries and the terminology associated with those At the top level there are multiple libraries including the Core Library i e those built into Stylus RMX EXP Libraries from any installed SAGE Xpanders or Groove Control libraries User Libraries from conversion of REX loop libraries and User Favorites collections of grooves specified by the user and sourced from the one or more other libraries for example for use in a specific project Below the library level come directories What these are will be library specific For example the Core Library includes directories called RMX Grooves new grooves created for Stylus RMX Classic Stylus the groove library provided with the original Stylus Vinyl Groove Module G
58. ing amplitude filter modifies the cutoff frequency of the Power Filter and pitch Just as in the LFO section toggling on the button for a specific type of envelope selects the edit controls for that type of envelope Individual envelope controls include Attack Hold Decay and Release as well as a Velocity knob controls the sensitivity of the envelope to keyboard Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 11 velocity a Depth knob turns the applicable envelope off or sets the maximum modulation depth for the envelope and a clickable indicator LED determines whether the modulation is positive or negative To the right of the Envelopes section are the Reverse button and Sample Start slider If the Reverse button is engaged the samples within the slice are reversed it s like a backward tape effect except local to the slice of the groove element i e the groove itself is not reversed The Sample Start slider determines if slices start at their beginning or some offset into them This could create clicks i e due to samples starting at locations other than zero crossings but the Attack control on the Amplitude Envelope can be used to fade the sample in quickly thus getting rid of any clicks If the Reverse button is engaged instead of controlling the point for the beginning of the slice the Sample Start slider controls the ending point of the slice Moving down to the lower left hand corner of the Edit page
59. is review was finished Spectrasonics announced the immediate availability of Stylus RMX Version 1 2 Version 1 2 fixes the issue with crashes at high latencies noted in this review It also grants one of my bigger wish list items by adding effects rack presets including supplying a library of over 450 effects presets Other enhancements include three new effects Radio Delay Pro Verb and Spring Verb a new Next Bar trigger mode instead of triggering a new pattern on the next beat as in Next Beat mode it triggers it at the next measure division very handy additional MIDI Learn able controls a new footer display option for MIDI continuous controllers and some features that Logic 7 and Pro Tools users didn t have in earlier releases multiple outputs for Logic and parameter automation for Pro Tools SONAR users already had these with V1 1 The update is available as a free download to all registered Stylus RMX users at http www spectrasonics net updates Rick Paul is a songwriter living in Southern California You can contact him at http www RickPaul info Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 29
60. kles though Drums On Demand organizes their directories into Song Sets and the first one I converted worked just fine However on the next one I tried the SAGE Converter crashed on me In fact after trying to convert all 30 song sets on the CD I found that the SAGE Converter crashed on 13 of them while the others converted just fine Trying to troubleshoot this a bit I discovered that in each of the cases there was a single loop in the set called Ending rx2 that the SAGE Converter didn t like If that loop was deselected from the batch conversion the rest of the song set would convert just fine The problem was reported to both Drums On Demand and Spectrasonics As of this writing a little over a month later I have had no response from Spectrasonics tech support beyond the initial auto reply acknowledging my message Drums On Demand indicated the difference with these particular loops may be that they have lengths which do not go out to an even measure boundary I have also heard from some Mac based Stylus Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 26 RMX users that the SAGE Converter V1 0 was able to convert these loops however trying this with the V1 0 version for Windows did not yield similar luck Thus about all that can be done for now is to convert these song sets without their endings and wait for Spectrasonics to issue a SAGE Converter fix to reconvert the song sets with their endings Spec
61. l confusion factor Perhaps the most fundamental thing to decide when getting started is whether you want Stylus RMX to behave as a relatively straightforward General MIDI compatible drum machine or whether you would prefer it to function as a simple to complex groove box This distinction governs whether you will want to use Stylus RMX in Kit mode or Multi mode respectively By default Stylus RMX comes up in Multi mode While Stylus RMX is not primarily a drum machine but rather a loop based instrument I am going to cover the drum machine aspect first for simplicity If you decide to use Stylus RMX like a drum machine your first stop will be on the Mixer page to turn Kit mode on This affects all the multi timbral channels of Stylus RMX i e you cannot use a single instance of Stylus RMX as both a kit and for playing groove elements Instead each of the mixer slots gets configured with a module of the kit These kit modules will typically correspond to parts of a drum set and instead of choosing grooves you will be mixing and matching kick drums snares hi hats and so on We won t get into much detail on using Kit mode in this review Quite frankly though Stylus RMX can serve as a reasonably powerful drum machine and its extensive sound library is a major asset for use in this fashion this area isn t its greatest strength For example it doesn t support velocity layers and other sampler style programming attributes that would typically be
62. m grooves to complement the Stylus RMX Core Library You won t have to look far Spectrasonics S A G E Expanders series provides several acoustic drum set based options including the BackBeat Xpander we examined here BackBeat can best be described as meat and potatoes beats typically of a relatively driving nature thus the packbeat connotation These are live acoustic drums played by established drummers Gregg Bissonette Bob Wilson John Ferraro and Eric Boseman They were recorded in world class recording studios and feature a clean sound These loops will be most suited to pop rock country rock classic pop and rock and similar styles Original groove tempos range from 65 BPM to 148 BPM Or course you don t have to respect original BPM designations the 65 BPM loop sounds just fine up at 148 BPM and vice versa What s more Stylus RMX s Half and Double controls can be applied here just as easily as they can to Core Library grooves The content includes 39 suites of matched loops plus add on Sound Menus The loops range from ultra clean to big and boomy Beats range from straight ahead rock and shuffles to more intricate patterns though never really going as far as say hip hop or funk Loop names range from the relatively generic but useful e g Blues Shuffle Solid Rock Push Pop to those that perhaps hint at specific artist or band styles e g Cops Mondo John to that Originally published on CakewalkNet c
63. ming rearrange slices and so on If you re in Groove Menu mode what gets dropped is a single note whose length is the length of the groove element s pattern and whose pitch is whatever note corresponds to that particular groove within the current suite So for example the first groove in the suite would create a middle C and if the groove is two measures of 4 4 time you d get an 8 beat note This drag and drop feature may be one of the handiest features in Stylus RMX once you ve got a happening groove going All you need to do is get a build your groove in Stylus RMX There is no need to worry at all about what MIDI notes will be needed their timing which grooves are named what and so on When you ve got something you like you just go to each active part in the groove drag its pattern to your DAW and next time you hit Play in your DAW you ll hear the same groove play back under DAW control But it gets even more useful Say you ve got all 8 channels of Stylus RMX going for a complex groove You don t really want all 8 channels going all the time in your Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 9 project of course but you do want to bring elements in and out over time using variations of which grooves are playing at any given time to build an interesting dynamic in your project If you want to you can just drag all eight elements to SONAR once designate them as MIDI groove loops then drag them around and stre
64. ng from the left side The timing controls include the Timing slider itself a Rush Drag knob and a Range knob The Timing slider sets the probability of introducing timing variations in the same way the sliders mentioned above work for their areas of influence The Rush Drag knob sets the direction of the variations If it is centered then there is an equal chance of rushing or dragging but if you turn the knob more in the Rush direction you get a better chance of rushing while if you turn it in the Drag direction you get a better chance of dragging The Range knob controls how far Chaos Designer can push or drag things So for example setting a value of 0 100 for Timing turning things in the Drag direction and keeping the Range value low would translate to something on the order of subtly dragging on the order of 10 of the time Of course you may not want to drag a whole groove but rather just the backbeats You might be able to influence that via automation but we ll look into a more powerful way to accomplish that sort of thing below with something Stylus RMX calls Edit Groups For now suffice it to say that this sort of power is there with Stylus RMX In the case of the Pitch controls in Chaos Designer there is the Pitch slider an Up Down knob and a Range knob As you might guess the Pitch slider controls the probability of changes in pitch i e at the slice level the Up Down knob controls the direction of the changes and th
65. ng your full slate of plug in effects I have mixed feelings on the effects capability as it stands in Stylus RMX On the one hand at least to my ears the effects provided are excellent and the variety provided is superb The effects are on par with what you might expect from dedicated effects plug ins rather than those built into a sample playback module On the other hand pretty much all of the user interfaces for these effects boxes emulate a hardware interface which is my least favorite form for software effects interfaces to take it s so well hardware ish Don t get me wrong the value of having the effects there is significant I can also appreciate the amount of design work and likely extra cost that would need to go into making each effects box have an interface that was ideally suited for its function I also realize that the simple interfaces provided may make it easier to deal with automating the controls of these interfaces another decided positive factor by the way and there is always the possibility of using effects at the DAW level anyway Still I ve gotten spoiled by software plug ins over the last half decade or so In particular the most usable plug ins tend to have interfaces that use the graphic interfaces provided by modern computer operating systems to make plug in setting more intuitive and to provide good feedback for monitoring what is coming into them and or going out of them Just to give one example would you
66. om February 25 2005 Page 24 make me ask where on earth did that come from e g Sphincter Duga Duga Of course depending on your point of reference some of those that seem out there to one person might be obvious references to another For example a Google search on duga duga suggests to me that perhaps it may be in the style of the Tubes and reference to a particular song and Sphincter comes up not only as a body part but also as a band name The suite of add on Sound Menus includes 13 sidestick menus plus menus for crash splash china and ride cymbals Note though that you must hold MIDI notes out for the full duration of a cymbal ring as the sound will cut off prematurely if you let the note up prior to the end of the decay This in particular makes it relatively inconvenient to play ride cymbal grooves using these menus since the notes do not behave like real cymbals when struck in reasonably rapid sequence Due to the nature of the grooves in the BackBeat Xpander they are likely to serve as the foundation of your song which means that the organization of the suites can be critical to usability This is especially true in cases where you need to put the backbone of the recording together quickly as in a song demo Spectrasonics has taken this need into account Each suite of groove elements consists of beats intended to go together At the top of each suite are anywhere from one to six basic grooves intended for r
67. ong with 1 GB or more of RAM Stylus RMX carries a suggested list price of 299 with current street prices only marginally less best I found as of this writing was 279 While this isn t exactly cheap it ends up being a much greater value than it might seem on the surface even if it turns out that your particular musical style isn t addressed very well by the included loops We ll get into more details on this below However the gist of it is that Stylus RMX s expansion capabilities alongside all the tweaking power contained in the product s engine and user interface can add serious value to your existing loop collections as well as to loop collections you may create yourself or acquire in the future Licensing for Stylus RMX is the typical form that allows use in any of your musical projects The main restriction is that you cannot use Stylus RMX to make a sample library or another kind of sample based projects Certain types of non musical uses such as if Stylus RMX samples are encoded into a computer game may require additional licenses Installation of the software on Windows is not fully automated and will require some technical knowledge of Windows especially if you choose to install the large core groove library in a non default location which will be a good bet for most users due to the library s size This makes paying attention to the Installation Guide a must Thankfully installation should be a one time thing and updates to the
68. oove from the Stylus RMX user Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 6 interface to any MIDI sequencer that supports drag and drop of MIDI files This works nicely with SONAR though SONAR does not pick up the name of the groove element in the MIDI clip so you may want to name it manually after the drag and drop operation If you will want to extend the groove to multiple instances you may also want to designate it as a groove loop in SONAR so you can just stretch it rather than needing to copy and paste to get additional sequential repetitions In Slice Menu mode each MIDI note triggers a slice of the currently selected groove element To play the whole groove you would play an ascending chromatic scale to trigger the slices in order If that is what you want to do though Stylus RMX makes this easy Just select the groove element you want to use and drag and drop the MIDI clip for that element to your DAW where you can edit it quantize it or whatever else you d like to do Note that if you change the current groove what you hear will change because the slices of the second groove element will not correspond to the slices of the first groove element You can also easily use this mode to play or program fills using individual slices of the groove element much like you would use the individual drums in a drum kit We ll get into more detail on the operations in this area later on but you may have already guessed tha
69. or that part Also dragging patterns corresponding to groove length around was very similar to dragging and dropping ACID loops around from a beat programming perspective so you could say I got into the groove of things reasonably quickly once I adopted this approach Okay my apologies for the bad pun Once I took on this Groove mode based approach things started to go much more smoothly for building the first of the percussive tracks I d use for the project When it came to build the second track which would be using a separate MIDI channel but the same instance of Stylus RMX and thus the same track in Project5 things got less comfortable again In particular Project5 currently does not have multiple lanes per track nor the ability to address a single instance of a multi timbral instance from separate tracks like SONAR 4 does This means all clips for different MIDI channels routed to the same software instrument go in the same track in Project5 and dealing with which ones are visible and which ones are hidden behind other clips is a challenge To be clear this is a Project5 user interface issue not a Stylus RMX issue Short of using multiple instances of Stylus RMX one per MIDI channel in Project5 though or Project5 s being enhanced to better deal with multi timbral instruments this will at least slow you down somewhat when trying to use Stylus RMX inside Project5 It s too bad because I still believe Stylus RMX could be a fantastic ad
70. ordinaire Eric Persing We re not just talking flat loops though Most loops are also available as component level submixes called groove elements which provide the ability to mix and match say the hi hat from one loop with the kick drum from another and the snare from yet another loop The elements are further broken down into slices don t worry about the vocabulary for now we ll deal with that below which can be accessed directly under MIDI control be it live or from a DAW s sequencer Many individual sounds are also provided for purposes of building MIDI playable kits The core library consists of two primary sets of loops along with related groups and sounds The RMX Grooves directory is oriented toward remixing and the sounds tend toward the electronic Groove suite names like Scuba Duba Datalife Plasticism and Defender as mystifying as they may sound in terms of giving a clue as to what to expect somehow still manage to convey the flavor of these grooves The Classic Stylus directory which contains the entire library from original the Stylus Vinyl Groove Module is best suited to hip hop and other modern urban music genres Some example groove suite names there include Jay Boyz Crenshaw Barrio and Watts Towers In addition to these primary loops there is a third directory of loops called Groove Elements which consists of individual instrument components of the loops categorized into suites by instrumen
71. orrect channel once I ve sequenced MIDI tracks in SONAR to correspond to the channel layout in Stylus RMX that is The drag and drop operation will create additional tracks if it needs to and will even assign the correct MIDI channel However it won t assign the track s output port to Stylus RMX so you ll have to do that manually Unfortunately Cakewalk Project5 1 5 users will not be able to directly take advantage of Stylus RMX s drag and drop since Project5 does not support MIDI drag and drop from other applications However you can work around this by dragging and dropping the MIDI information to Windows Explorer then use Project5 s MIDI file import feature go get the information into a Project5 track This is nowhere near as convenient as the direct drag and drop but does get the job done One last area in the Browser window is the Favorites area If you re familiar with that term from Microsoft s Internet Explorer you ve already got an idea of what this does There are two buttons in this area The first is the Add button which you guessed it adds the current groove element to your Favorites in particular a Current Favorites suite There is also a Jump button which takes you directly to your Current Favorites suite Once you re there and you will still see the Browser window at this point you will also see a Favorites Utility menu underneath these two buttons That menu lets you save your current Favorites suite specifically so
72. oups and well wow Sure there are things that could be better Most of these are details though and you have to remember that Stylus RMX is still a brand new instrument even if Spectrasonics did have the experience of the Stylus Vinyl Groove Module under their belts If you look at Stylus RMX in comparison to the original Stylus though it is like the original Stylus was more like a prototype compared to what Stylus RMX brings to the table and that is certainly not to disparage the original Stylus If I may leave you with one closing thought I ve mentioned that Stylus RMX is a very deep instrument You can do a lot with it pretty quickly once you get used to a few basic concepts but every so often you come to some new area and find you can do so much more when you add in this little bit of functionality Then it happens again and again and If this is the kind of thing you get with a version 1 1 product I ll be sitting on the edge of my seat to hear where a version 2 might go some point down the line At the high level I think my biggest wish in that regard would simply be even tighter integration with DAWs so it can become a seamless part of the overall arranging and production processes The little niggles here and there become almost noise level when you look at what Stylus RMX brings to the table today Congratulations to Spectrasonics on this groundbreaking product BackBeat S A G E Xpander Looking for a set of acoustic dru
73. p in order to apply special handling at the slice level At the same time the MIDI information is used to adjust the timing and trigger the playback of those slices Spectrasonics calls this Groove Control We now return to our regularly scheduled review Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 17 Edit groups to the rescue First assign the downbeats group and put it through the Flame Distortion box in the FX page then bop over to Chaos Designer and assign whatever dynamics and other variations you like If you want to hear the downbeats isolated while you re tweaking press the Solo button in the Edit Group section Next assign the Backbeats group and go into Chaos Designer to give it some dragging and dynamic variations then into the FX rack to assign some reverb Finally go back to the Main group i e everything that s left and go into Chaos Designer and tweak its parameters to taste Oh while you re at it you may want to route the kick Downbeats and snare Backbeats to a separate output to your DAW for special mixing treatment on that end of things You can do that by changing the output assignment in the Edit Group section of any of the pages where the Edit Group section appears Of course this is just one quick example and there is lots more you can do with even this case depending on your musical tastes and what you want to achieve The key is that every Edit Group has its own set of parameters and you
74. ple it press Double twice As you might guess it s pretty easy to get into fairly ridiculous territory if you want to do so However this can be a very nice feature when you re trying to create unique grooves Also if you ve experienced what happens when you slow down ACID loops even to half their original tempo it is pretty amazing to hear a groove playing back at a quarter or an eighth of its original tempo and still sounding good Just below the rate buttons is an area that at first glance looks like just a fancy display of the name of the current groove However a closer look reveals the section heading MIDI FILE and engraved looking text that reads DRAG AND DROP The idea here is that when you drag and drop from the fancy looking groove name to another application it is the same as if you dragged and dropped a MIDI file containing whatever will trigger the current groove on playback to the second application Most likely that second application will be your DAW but it could also be for example Windows Explorer in which case you would be storing a MIDI file on your hard disk If you are in Slice Menu mode the MIDI information dragged is an upward chromatic scale with the timing of the elements in the current groove as the timing of note on messages Each note represents a slice in the groove and you play the groove back by playing the slices in sequence with their original timing Of course once it is in your DAW you can tweak the ti
75. r a bad thing depends on how good the drummer is but a good drummer will tend to inject musical variations and those variations will keep the beat sounding fresh much longer than an equivalent looped performance Various sequencers have in the past tried to address this area by providing humanize or randomize tools which inject a level of random timing and possibly dynamics and or some other attributes into a MIDI sequence By and large though those attempts at adding variation have come up relatively flat sounding more like say a drummer with bad timing than a drummer who consciously or subconsciously changes things up in musically useful ways Enter Chaos Designer The principle behind Chaos Designer is that of injecting musical chaos i e adding variations in musically useful ways A real drummer might do things like vary the rhythm from time to time rush or drag a bit accent notes or play ghost notes Of course there is a matter of degree A drummer who rushes or drags too much or is just all over the place timing wise is just plain sloppy Keeping things sounding good but fresh requires taste This seems like an opportune time for a drummer joke but I ll resist the urge Spectrasonics incorporates this notion into its concept basically providing controls to allow you to use your hopefully good taste to tailor the variations that Chaos Designer creates to your liking Let s take a closer look In the upper left hand corn
76. robably noticed a similar looking grille like area toward the bottom center of several pages Specifically you would have seen that curious graphic on the Edit page including the Easy Edit page the FX page and the Chaos Designer page What that graphic hides is a whole new set of controls and Aisne on the grille reveals them The screen shot to the left shows the Edit window with the Edit Group control revealed What are Edit Groups Essentially they are subsets of the main groove element to which you can apply various operations in a way that does not affect the remaining parts of the groove In particular any of the facilities on the Edit Chaos and FX pages can be applied separately to different Edit Groups and you can also solo the Edit Group mute it or assign its output differently than the rest of the groove element The diagram at right shows the pop up menu with preconfigured edit groups provided in Stylus RMX Particularly useful are such musical designations as Downbeats Backbeats Halftime Backbeats and Upbeats but you can assign any slice within a groove to an Edit Group So let s get practical How can you use Edit Groups Is this just a technically interesting capability that sounds sexy but doesn t have a lot of use in practice or is it the earth moving type of feature that can breathe new life into your grooves The answer of course is it all depends on how you use it However there certainly are some
77. roove Elements various sets of individual instrument based grooves such as for bongos kicks congas snares etc and more Below the directory level there will be multiple suites These also will be library and directory specific but the use would generally be to group sets of grooves that might be useful to review at the same time For example suite level groupings might be for a specific collection of instrumental components of a more complex groove or set of related grooves e g all components of the 60 BPM Volcano groove set a large set of unrelated grooves based on a single instrument or type of instrument e g grooves using bongos grooves using congas etc or something specified by the user e g a collection of User Favorites grouped together for a specific project Finally come the groove elements which are essentially equivalent to a single groove loop and are what you will ultimately be auditioning or playing in one of Stylus RMxX s groove oriented modes At this point you re basically just looking for grooves that may be useful to your project Depending on your working style and the nature of your project you may choose to simply use the grooves where they stand Alternately you may build up a project specific suite in the User Favorites to avoid having to remember the location of grooves that come from many different suites and directories or even from different libraries You will probably also be starting to
78. ropping of MIDI clips from other applications I could work around that by dragging the MIDI from Stylus RMX to Windows Explorer then using Project5 s MIDI Import capability to bring the MIDI files into the project but I decided I d give a try to the other modes of Stylus RMX instead Next up I thought I d revert to old habits using Stylus RMX like a plain old drum machine i e in Kit mode However here I ran into a Project5 related snag that was no fault of Stylus RMX In particular most all my MIDI loops are in standard MIDI file format and ProjectS doesn t directly allow previewing MIDI files in its Pattern Explorer I tried manually converting a few loops to Project5 s pattern format and verified that Stylus RMX worked very nicely with Project5 in this mode However the loops I d converted weren t happening for the song in question and I didn t relish the idea of manually converting a large number of loops so I decided to punt and try Stylus RMxX s Groove Menu mode instead I d love to say that things went smoothly from the start once I d wisely decided to go the Groove Menu mode route but my newness to using this sort of mode and my newness to Project5 came into play and decided I needed a bit more pain in my life Okay it wasn t all that bad but there definitely was an uphill learning curve for me First I decided I d try just recording live Groove mode performances However a combination of my not being real good at remembering w
79. s UVI based modules provided very sensible synth like sound editing Originally published on CakewalkNet com February 25 2005 Page 10 capabilities for those sample based instruments and Stylus RMX takes a similar approach at least at the surface level there is quite a bit more power available when you dig deeper We won t get into too much depth on the editing parameters themselves They are powerful but common enough to not be all that exciting in the sense of breaking new ground What is more exciting is the flexibility Stylus RMX gives you for using them by virtue of a feature that is initially hidden in this and other views I hope you don t mind a slight tease because for now all I will mention about this exciting feature is that you access it by clicking on the area in the bottom middle of the Edit page where it looks like there is an air vent or rack grille We ll talk more about the power hidden in this area below but for now here is a quick snapshot of more traditional controls available on the Edit page Starting near the top center of the Edit page you will see the name of the current channel s active groove element Clicking on the name of the groove or the folder icon to the right of it gets you to the Browser window Just to the left of the name of the groove element is a button labeled Easy Clicking toggles between the full Edit page and the Easy Edit page The Easy Edit page features a simplified set of controls
80. s RMX including the parameters within Chaos Designer can be automated and played live from a MIDI controller Thus it would be a simple matter to say keep the probability of variations low during parts of a groove while raising the chance of variations in other parts be it under manual control with a MIDI controller or automatic control via your DAW s automation envelopes Looking back at the other two of the sliders we ve already discussed the Repeat slider is another slider I find to be best kept in a low probability setting The Reverse slider is not applicable to all types of music e g it wouldn t work in most country mixes When it is appropriate it may be even more likely to be best used only at strategic points such as areas where you might normally consider having a minor fill but want to see what Chaos Designer can do for you Again this all comes down to taste i e yours and will be greatly influenced by your genre of music Moving on to the right of the three sliders we ve already covered lie three sets of more complex variation controls The first set is for affecting timing the next is for affecting pitch and the third is for affecting dynamics In each case there is a slider for controlling the probability of variations of that type a direction knob to influence the direction of the variations more on that below and a Range knob to set the overall range of variation allowable Let s look at them individually starti
81. s of that in all Some of the other effects I put into play on this particular project were the Power Filter Pro Phaser Retroplex and a couple instances of the Tube Limiter This represented a total of 8 Stylus RMX effects in all By this point my Athlon XP 1600 CPU was at a crawl and I was very thankful for the Freeze function Cakewalk introduced in SONAR 4 Spectrasonics indicates this is mainly because of the Power Filter alone it s very CPU heavy which is part of the reason it s called a Power Filter I d also been using Stylus RMX s multiple outputs with one Stylus RMX channel per output to SONAR so I could equally have used plug in effects on the SONAR side However the main reason for using the multiple outputs was to be able to deal with mixing balances on the SONAR side which I could do at the audio level i e after freezing the tracks to allow for holding off on balancing decisions until later on in the mix Had I wanted to submix the percussion parts using Stylus RMX s mixer I d have needed to get a faster CPU so I could keep it active in the track until later in the game While this particular project is still a work in progress due to some lyrical rewrites that came along after getting the Stylus RMX tracks and most of the rest of the arrangement together I have to say I was extremely pleased with the initial rough mix In particular I felt the Stylus RMX tracks helped achieve results that were significantly beyond what I d
82. s stored with the groove element I could access the new libraries It turned out that Stylus RMX doesn t like corrupt directories It also views both directories with partially converted loop collections i e due to the unfinished conversion when the SAGE Converter crashed and empty directories i e due to having moved the fully converted Song Set suites to my new Stylus RMX directory as being corrupt The ultimate solution is to delete the Converted REX Files directory once you are finished with your conversions and moving converted suites to their final destinations NOTE The empty directory confusion issue was resolved in V1 2 The empty directory does not appear in the list which makes sense but other directories will appear If you ve been following this far you might be thinking this conversion stuff sounds like a hassle Certainly it could be a bit smoother and the crashing issue needs to get resolved However keep in mind this is still an early stage product More importantly conversion is a one time thing and it goes pretty quickly I ended up converting three entire Drums On Demand libraries with over 650 MB of loops apiece in the space of an afternoon After you ve done the conversion once the loops are there for use in Stylus RMX You might however want to back up your converted loops directories to CD or DVD in order to avoid reconversion efforts should you ever have a disk crash and need to restore the converted loops
83. se one fill bar over another Sound quality of the BackBeat loops is excellent right out of the shoot However keep in mind you still have all the flexibility of Stylus RMX if you want to apply effects break out backbeats or downbeats or any other part of the groove for special processing using Edit Groups change things up with Chaos Designer and so on For example routing BackBeat grooves through the Tape Slammer effect is an easy way to make the already driving beats well slammin sending things more toward the rock end And you can just as easily break the backbeats out using Edit Groups and apply that effect just to the snare if you want a more slammin snare but don t want to beef up the rest of the drums in the process Besides the BackBeat grooves themselves the BackBeat Xpander also includes a directory called Bonus Spectrasonics which is included on all current Spectrasonics SAGE Xpanders Several of the suites in this directory are Groove Controlled samples from other Spectrasonics libraries such as Bizarre Guitar and Distorted Reality Among these are a number of suites of grooves from the Vocal Planet collection most notably seven suites of Vocal Planet mouth percussion grooves These are loops of the human drum machine variety and won t fit in all kinds of music but when they are right there is nothing like them I found the Vocal Planet mouth percussion grooves to be an absolute blast to the point where I may just have
84. software of which there were three during the period of roughly a month and a half I spent working on this review are more automatic I would like to see Spectrasonics work on this area in the future though as I imagine it must create a much heavier than optimal front end support load for a product as popular as this one whose users may not all be computer wizards Authorization is via a challenge response scheme that was as quick and painless as these types of authorization mechanisms come The primary testing environment for this review was a Windows XP SP2 PC with an Athlon XP 1600 processor and 1 GB of RAM running SONAR Producer Edition V4 0 1 Some additional testing was carried out in Cakewalk s Project5 V1 5 The Quick Tour When you start Stylus RMX for the first time after you click on the somewhat annoying hype screen that appears the first time you open the first instance of Stylus RMX in any given project session you are presented with Stylus RMxX s Edit page Note to Spectrasonics Can we get one of those click here to never see this screen again check boxes in a future update We ll talk about the Edit page and the various other pages in more detail later but first we need to cover some essentials for getting around in and understanding Stylus RMX What is important to know at this stage is what lies down in the bottom Tee portion of the Edit page and in fact all pages of Stylus RMX s multi page interface Spectrasonics
85. t these two modes can be used together on different multi timbral channels to address the sort of scenario I described above For example you might build the basic beats on one channel using Groove Menu mode perhaps from groove elements you ve grouped together for your project in a User Favorites suite You might then choose one of those groove elements for use on another channel in Slice Menu mode to play or program your fills The overlaid percussion and FX looped parts could come from using one or more additional channels in Groove Menu mode while one or more additional channels are used for playing additional percussive elements in Slice Menu mode Selecting the channel to work on at any given time is as easy as pressing the appropriate channel activator button in the top middle section of the footer At this point you may wish to modify the sounds for each channel for example by shifting the pitch applying envelopes or applying filters Just bop on over to the Edit page select the channel you want to modify and tweak away If you want to apply some of Stylus RMX s effects to individual channels you would use the FX page along with the channel activator buttons to choose the channel to work on the individual channel inserts You can also access aux bus effects and master output effects settings from the FX page Once you ve got the sounds the way you want them you would use Stylus RMX s Mixer page to modify the volume levels pan settings aux
86. t type e g bongos kicks djembes etc These groove elements are oriented toward letting you build your own grooves based on the components There are also Sound Menus which are not loops at all Rather these are sets of sounds related by instrument type for example there are two sets of claps and one set of snaps for playing your own parts via MIDI and map many different but related instrument sounds e g many different tambourines across the keyboard A final key component of the core library available only in Kit Mode see below are kit modules for building General MIDI compatible drum kits to play via MIDI For example there are 11 suites of hi hats and each suite contains a minimum of 7 hi hat modules some contain upwards of 50 modules The palette of Stylus RMX doesn t stop with its core library though Spectrasonics also provides separate S A G E Xpander modules see sidebar with additional groove libraries A SAGE converter is included to allow users who own Spectrasonics Groove Control CD ROM libraries as well as REX2 format loops to convert those loops for use with Stylus RMX Once converted these imported libraries can be manipulated in most of the same ways available for native Stylus RMX libraries There are way too many other high level features to mention at this point in the review but I ll just offer a teaser for now then we ll get into more detail below Stylus RMX is 8 part multi timbral and multi o
87. tch them as needed to arrange the patterns In Slice Menu mode you can also create copies of those patterns and mess with the copies for example to program a fill based on tweaking the slice order or to leave some slices out here and there If you inject Chaos Designer into the picture and I won t do that now in the interests of simplicity you can even get Stylus RMxX itself to program some variations for you There are a few minor idiosyncrasies with drag and drop between Stylus RMX and SONAR First is that SONAR doesn t maintain the name of a dropped MIDI clip so if you want the name of the clip in SONAR to be the name of the groove you ll have to manually rename it as such on the SONAR side Second when you drag from the first channel of Stylus RMX to a SONAR MIDI track the dropped MIDI clip goes exactly where you would intuitively expect it to go However if you drag from any other channel of Stylus RMX to a MIDI track in SONAR the destination for the dragged clip will be however many tracks down from the track you drag to in SONAR the channel in Stylus RMX was from channel 1 So for example if you drag from channel 2 in Stylus RMX the clip will drop one track beyond the track you drag to in SONAR This may seem confusing but I actually found it to be a useful bit of confusion once I got used to it In particular it meant that I could just drag to the top MIDI track associated with Stylus and not have to worry whether I m dragging to the c
88. trasonics indicates they are aware of this problem and plan to have a bug fix available in the next Windows update for the SAGE Converter A fix is already available for the Mac SAGE Converter Another minor issue encountered in using the SAGE Converter was that the converter did not keep track of the last directory used when specifying files to convert Thus each attempt to convert a new song set which would translate to a suite on the Stylus RMX side would result in the converter s looking in its default location and I d have to point it to the CD instead Converting off the CD actually helped in this case as I didn t have to traverse down a whole bunch of subdirectories each time to get to the content to be converted However it would be nice if future versions of the SAGE converter would remember the last used directory at least during a single conversion session Spectrasonics indicates that the next version of the SAGE Converter will include the ability to convert an entire REX Library in a single step This should be a much quicker way to go if you don t need to reorganize files ahead of conversion Once the files to convert are specified the SAGE Converter prompts you for a Suite name I recommend using a naming convention similar to the one used in Stylus RMX if your loops are organized by tempo and style like the ones in Stylus RMX are It then converts all loops selected into a single Stylus RMX suite The converted loops get placed in
89. uilding guru at this point the tutorials were way more than adequate to get me pointed in the right direction and Stylus RMX instantly seemed way more intuitive than it had just a few short hours before Based on my earlier playing around with the Core Library s sounds I picked a few song demo projects I thought would be particularly well suited for the types of sounds and grooves Stylus RMX provides and decided I d take two different approaches to working with the two projects In the first case I had an R amp B flavored pop song where I really wanted to get more urban than I ve ever achieved in the past in my productions The goal was to stay in R amp B territory but with a very heavily hip hop influenced vibe In the second case I had more of a pop dance number where I was going for more of an electronica influenced disco or is that disco influenced electronica thing The point being the first application was intended to get down and dirty on the production front while the second was going for a much smoother style I also decided the first project would be done in SONAR 4 Producer while I would do as much as I could of the second project in Project5 I added some additional projects as well as just trying out Stylus RMX in a few areas where I expected to use it on future projects later on and I ll get to those below and in the sidebars For now though let s talk about the first two projects On the initial hip hop leaning project I went
90. um loops that either fit directly into Stylus RMX i e Xpanders or could be converted and imported into Stylus RMX i e via the SAGE Converter Stylus RMX could very well add significant value to the loop collections At the same time the loop collections could add significant value to Stylus RMX Spectrasonics and Drums On Demand to the rescue To help answer the questions in this area Spectrasonics provided a copy of their BackBeat S A G E Xpander and Drums On Demand provided a copy of their Drums On Demand Vol 4 Country amp Crossover loops in REX2 format Detailed results of my experiences with those two products in the Stylus RMX environment can be found in the sidebars to this article However I will just say here that this notion proved to be right on the money In addition to adding groove collections which were right up the right alleys in terms of my more typical stylistic needs the combination of these loops with Stylus RMX went way beyond what you might initially think of by simply describing it as bringing new life to the loops Some of the capabilities brought to the table included being able to use Chaos Designer to vary the loops over time play the individual slices in grooves to put together a custom fill change a loop tempos far above or below what could have been successfully done using ACID loops and bring Edit Groups into play for example to add effects to individual slices or musical groupings of slices Perhaps the best w
91. utput What each of those parts corresponds to depends on the mode in which you are using Stylus RMX All of Stylus RMX s controls can be automated via MIDI and mapped to your MIDI controller via a MIDI Learn capability Integrated FX racks provide 24 processors and effects the V1 2 update adds an additional 3 FX modules for a total of 27 with accessibility at several levels A Chaos Designer allows tuning the level of random variation applied to the stock grooves thus allowing grooves to be used for longer periods without feeling stale due to rote repetition A built in mixer provides submixing capabilities aux sends and a master bus and you can also route Stylus RMX s individual outputs directly to your DAW for further processing Edit Groups allow processing individual or related slices of a groove separately using almost all the facilities available for groove level processing And we ve barely scratched the surface If this sounds daunting it is at least at first Thankfully Spectrasonics includes a CD full of introductory and tutorial videos all in QuickTime format to help get you started These provide a superb way to begin the process of finding your way around Stylus RMX and the videos are very well done Hint to DAW vendors and other providers of complex products Check out what Spectrasonics has done here as it should serve as a model to the industry for making complex products more accessible Unfortunately as of this writing
92. uty packages to review and I got an unexpected go for it The rest of the potential reviewers were also similarly backed up so here I am writing this review I don t mind telling you that panic set in very shortly after I let Spectrasonics know I d be the victim er reviewer Don t get me wrong it wasn t because I didn t think I d like what Stylus RMX had to offer In fact I was reasonably excited about some of its capabilities based on what I d read and otherwise seen Rather it was a combination of two factors The first was that over the course of the last year plus a little I ve reviewed a number of drum loops and drum track related products and also acquired a few others I hadn t reviewed Thus I felt like I was already swimming in drum related choices and sometimes too much choice is worse than too little choice and how would I differentiate when to use Stylus RMX versus all these other choices The second factor was that the more I looked at Stylus RMX the more I saw that it was a seriously deep instrument The thought of how to boil down what it does where it fits and so on in order to communicate that in even a relatively lengthy product review seemed pretty daunting and I really didn t want to end up writing a book length review At this juncture though after having had a fair amount of hands on time with Stylus RMX I m happy to report that I feel I ve come to reasonable grips with the former concern and will do my best
93. very useful capabilities here and they indeed can provide some powerful possibilities for customizing your grooves Let s say you ve got a nice but vanilla pop rock groove with snares on two and four kick on one and three and perhaps an 8th note high hat pattern The drumming was tight the sounds were clean and things were good But you don t want them good you want them bad in the modern slang sense of the word as opposed to the meaning that is a synonym for lousy Maybe you want the kick to be distorted the hi hat timing to be a bit less tight the snare to drag a bit and have some heavy reverb on it some dynamic variations all around etc But this is an audio loop how do you do that Announcer Voice We interrupted this review for a brief technical point Actually I lied The groove elements in Stylus RMX are not strictly audio loops They may have started life as audio loops or at least loopable audio However by the time the got into Stylus RMX they were processed in such a way that they took a form that includes audio and MIDI information The audio was divided up into smaller regions called slices and a MIDI sequence was created to reflect the timing at which those slices occur in the overall audio loop A key part of the magic that allows Stylus RMX to do things like play a loop back at most any tempo inject chaos and have Edit Groups is the notion that the slicing allows separating out the slices from the whole loo
94. you can later give it a meaningful name just saving it gives it a default name created by Stylus RMX or delete a selected suite from your Favorites area For example you may wish to save loops you are considering using for your current project This avoids having to keep jumping around to different libraries directories and suites if you want to use groove elements from various locations especially if you are building a virtual suite of grooves to use in Groove mode The idea is you can bop around Stylus RMX saving anything that catches your ear to the Favorites list Then once you ve finished auditioning raw grooves that might be candidates for the project you can jump to your Favorites area and just stay there while working on refining your sound selections for that project or using all of the grooves you ve selected Who Needs an Editor The raw sounds available in Stylus RMX s Core Library various Xpander packs and any libraries you may have imported for example from REX loops may be just what you re looking for in your project If not though or if you just like to tweak things for fun your next stop will likely be on the Stylus RMX Edit page where you can tweak away If you ve used the older Stylus Vinyl Groove Module or Spectrasonics Atmosphere and Trilogy virtual instruments for that matter all of which were based on the UVI engine rather than SAGE Stylus RMX s Edit page may look somewhat familiar In fact Spectrasonic

Review: Spectrasonics Stylus RMX™ V1.1&dagger; by Rick Paul

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Review: Spectrasonics Stylus RMX&trade; V1.1&dagger; by Rick Paul

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Review: Spectrasonics Stylus RMX™ V1.1&dagger; by Rick Paul