Published on March 12th, 2005.
Author: Kevin.Rossiter
Category: Virtual Instruments.

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Spectrasonics – Stylus RMX Review

Traxmusic Gold Award:

Overview

Stylus RMX is a drum loop machine developed by Spectrasonics, who many of you will know from Atmosphere and Trilogy. RMX is Spectrasonics next generation product developed from the original Stylus v1. But as it turns out, it’s a whole extra dimension beyond Stylus 1.

To date RMX has won KvR Audio’s Instrument of the Year, Keyboard Magazine’s KeyBuy award and EQ magazine’s Exceptional Quality award, plus a shedload of other must-buy ratings. Not bad for a drum loop machine.

Taking a look at Stylus RMX, I’d like to examine it from the point of view of the home studio user who’s after great drum loops, and from the point of view of the semi-pro to full-blown studio pro who depend on their talent for a living.

The Home Studio Angle

RMX gets you lots and lots of stuff for your money. Here’s the full rack opened out:

It looks impressive, doesn’t it. Let’s quickly go through what it does.

Using the RMX Browser you select a loop from a very large selection of groove bundles, all in different styles.

Click the loop and immediately it’s playing in sync.

Quickly and easily, you can play with the filter or other synth-like controls such as lfo or mod envelope and alter the sound, for example, repitch it to match the pitch of your bass loop.

You can then add any of 24 effects such as Tube Limiter, Tape Slammer, Vintage Compressor, Delay, various Eqs and so on.

Then you can take your loop into the Chaos Designer, and by moving a slider or two you can add user-controllable variation to the groove so it never sounds the same twice.

Last but not least you send it to the mixer and out through any one of 8 stereo outs.

And because RMX is multitimbral, you can do all this up to eight times, though you’ll need a good computer to get 8 channels, as all this processing can eat your machine.

There you go … 8 grooves all dancing in sync, selected from a choice of 7.4 gbs worth of data, all with fx and synth manipulation, and randomisation wherever you see fit, and all ready to be mixed to taste.

You can make simple to complex drum tracks that sound great.

If there was a weakness it’s that the core RMX loops don’t include many Fill loops, though I believe the SAGE Expander series of add-on loops supplies more fills.

But RMX also plays like a drum machine, so you can dedicate a channel to a kit, as in hit a key and trigger the snare, hit another key and trigger a hat and so on, allowing you to make up your own fills.

Used in the way I’ve just described, RMX will add groove flair to any setup, and for this reason alone it’s worth the money.

What’s it sound like?

Top sounds from Stylus RMX. No question. Highly produced pro grooves ready to roll.

I suspect it’s only 16 bit because if it were 24 bit there’d be signs all over it saying such. But it’s hard to tell. The sound is good and the need to distinguish between 16 and 24 bit seems artificial.

RMX definitely has an American flavour. If you’re dedicated to Euro Trance or Rock you have to dig deeper, as RMX is not House-in-a-Box. But there’s such a wide variety of interesting sounds, and the choices are very good. And neither is RMX it just a hip-hop box, which was one of the accusations levelled at the original Stylus 1.

I feel all the grooves are musical and usable in a contemporary context. Actually this is what I’ve come to expect from the Spectrasonics brand – quality. Of course, there are a few novelty grooves and showboat grooves that you’d never actually use in a real tune, but there’s no rubbish. Everything is good of its type. No rubbish.

It’s possible to spot bits of repetition with some of the conga and bongo grooves, but this is not obvious unless you’ve been playing it a while. Grooves that sound similar is not a major issue with RMX. I’ve had my own copy for three months now, and still feel I’ve only begun to get started with it.

For the sheer quantity of loops you get, 7.4 gbs worth, and taking into account the manipulation, variance and multitimbral possibilities it’s easy say RMX delivers a big bang for its buck.

So let’s dig deeper.

The Studio Pro Angle

There isn’t enough space in this review to say everything RMX can do so I’ll have to stick the parts I like personally.

Favourites is a massive feature.

Let’s say you’re clicking through different loops in different groove bundles …. Hey I like that … mmm that one too … but that one’s too verby .. okay yes.

Each time you hear a groove you like, click it and it’ll go onto a Favourites box. Once you’ve finished auditioning as many grooves as you want, go to the Favourites and see all your choices sitting there.

Each groove is automatically mapped from C3 upwards. So play D#3 for one loop, then F4 for another, and so on. You can fill the keyboard with loops if you like. Play the keyboard, play your selection, play 10 notes at once if you like!

You can’t custom map your grooves to the keyboard. RMX does this automatically for you, and that’s it. But I don’t feel this is a serious limitation, so much as a small weakness.

But you can name and save each Favourites bundle for later, building a super-world-dominating-awe-inspiring groove bundle to grace any occasion. Very pro.

Intakt does this kind of thing too, but it’s nowhere near in the same class as RMX.

Now so far, we’ve had all the grooves playing on midi channel 1. There’s nothing to stop you playing the same Favourites, or building a new pack of Favourites, and playing these on channel 2. Or have bongos on channel 3!

Live record your key presses, grooving on the fly, then play back, and all the grooves sound in tempo sync in your sequencer. Instant high quality drum tracks, up to 8 channels worth of grooves.

If you prefer you can export your grooves as midi files and place these in a sequencer track, and trigger RMX this way. Choices.

Of course, if you have ready-made midi drum loops, or you want to play your own patterns, then RMX becomes a drum kit sample player at the click of a button.

So for example channel 4 could be a drum kit you can play, note at a time, and record, or jam with. And there’s a huge choice of drum kits to choose from. And you can import Rex files.

What sings through loud and clear in all these operations is the ease with which it everything can be carried out.

Phatmatic Pro, for example, gives you great loop processing power, and lots of slice-dice. But it’s fiddly. I never enjoyed using it, as it felt like an unmusical process.

But with RMX you’ll really enjoy building drum tracks as the technology never gets in the way.

This technology-to-fit-the-musician is a seriously big plus in my book. It’s like the ergonomics are dumbed-down like Friends, yet the script comes out like Brando. It’s almost impossible to get bogged down in RMX and forget the music of what you were doing – something that other plug designers should note.

The Chaos Designer

Each of the sliders in the picture allows you to manipulate some element of randomness in the channel that’s playing.

That’s 12 different ways to add variety, from subtle to gross. I prefer subtle as it keeps the loops interesting without careening away from the song. But gross could be cool too, I’m sure.

And there’s more…

Say you want variety only on 16th beat upbeats, while the kicks stay rock solid in time. With RMX you can select this. You can select exactly where you want to apply the variance, whether across the whole groove, or just on the off beat 8ths. You choose.

Stepping aside for a moment, let me add that I’ve played guitar and keys for years, and I rarely play the same thing twice in quite the same way. A note will change, or a little vibrato will be added, or a slight beat change. It’s this never-the-same-way twice that gives music its feel.

RMX has to be getting close to this with the Chaos Designer. It’s not trying to emulate a real drummer’s variance, but it’s adding variance all the same, and the amount and type of variance you choose.

The same facility that lets you add Chaos to selected slices of loops also lets you add FX to selected slices of the loops. So crush your kicks, ambiate your crashes and tube drive your snares.

This is not the same as having aux sends on a multitrack drum submix, ie, kick on track one, snare on track two, and so on. But within the context of one midi channel it gives a lot of creative options.

And of course you can do this up to 8 times, with 8 aux out track strips sent to 8 stereo outs – like a real drum submix!

This is a lot of mix flexibility. But you may have to alter the way you’re used to working a little bit to get it the way you want it.

Live Synth Options

You’ve got a midi controller keyboard, haven’t you? You have …

Use Midi Learn and hook your controller up to the synth section in RMX.

           

You get all the usual synth sliders to connect to.

Now set RMX playing some grooves on channel 1 and 2.

Trigger a groove on channel 3 and start moving those synth sliders for a truly live sound. Twiddle those knobs, slide those sliders. It’s all coming out live – on the beat, on the bar, or at whatever point you select. Precise!

What else yah got!

3 hours of video tutorial comes free with each RMX.

These videos are very good and their value should not be underestimated. Eric Persing himself (RMX’s designer) takes you through all the RMX features in great detail. When you think that Steinberg are charging £25 each for a series of three Cubase SX 3 tutorial videos then RMX has to be great value (shame, Steinberg)

RMX is also expandable. Although RMX includes all the original Stylus grooves, plus all the RMX grooves to the tune of 7.4gb, sooner or later you’ll need more ammo. This comes in the form of 5 SAGE Expander packs, reasonably priced at $99 each.

You can also use Rex files, which offers even more expandability

RMX runs on Macs and PCs, and works in Sonar as well as Cubase, so nobody need be disappointed.

Summary

We’re talking creativity here. Your creativity.

8 channels of drum loops with effects, synths, and Chaos-style variety, and lots of extra features make a well thought-out offering. RMX will fill your head full of ideas.

To my mind, RMX is way ahead of Intakt and Phatmatic Pro. The product cut its teeth with version one. The RMX version 2 is a hugely improved and mature offering that can grace any studio anywhere in the world.

But like all today’s best goodies you need a big machine to run it. I had a 2.4 P4 and could never get more than 2 channels running. Now my hyper threading 3.4 ghz mega machine trundles through Stylus beautifully. I’ve not had one crash, and I haven’t heard of stability problems from anyone else.

Stylus costs $299 but there are deals for those who shop around.

It deserves more than 4 on 4 as it does so much and does it so beautifully.

I give it the TraxMusic Gold Award:

Bags of info here spectrasonics.net.

Review brought to you by Kevin Rossiter.

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