My Five Favorite Soft Synths
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

2. Spectrasonics Stylus RMX

The latest addition to my collection, Stylus RMX is rapidly making itself indispensable. RMX is all about rhythm: it’s a workstation plugin designed specifically for playing, editing, and creating beats. The RMX concept starts off with a truly massive 7GB sound library designed under the guidance of Eric Persing, perhaps the leading sound designer in the music industry. For many songs, a factory RMX beat will provide all the necessary inspiration. If more is needed, you can layer (for instance) the hi-hat pattern from one groove with the kick from a second, a djembe rhythm from a third, and a noise bed from a fourth.

Stylus is eight-channel multitimbral, but that doesn’t mean you’re limited to eight loops at a time. Put a channel in Groove Menu mode, hold down six or eight MIDI keys, and you’ll hear six or eight beats at once on a single channel. (Typically, each channel will control a unique drum kit.)

In Slice Menu mode, RMX lets you retune, pan, and apply filters and envelopes to your own defined “edit groups” of drum hits within the beat. With just a minute or two of work, you can radically alter the sound of a factory pattern. A handy rack of built-in effects can be applied to edit groups as well.

Not satisfied with a beat that sounds the same every time it loops? Switch on RMX’s Chaos Designer, and you can introduce subtle (or radical) randomization. The random functions can be applied intelligently to specific subdivisions within the bar, and can affect pitch, push/drag, or the choice of which sound will be played. The output of the Chaos Designer can be captured as a new MIDI file, so once RMX has improvised a beat you like, you can save it for later use.

The Stylus RMX edit page doesn’t look fancy, but these parameters can be applied separately to each drum hit in a pattern if desired.

In the RMX effects rack you can apply three insert effects to any drum pattern or even to a subset of drum hits within the pattern. You can also use four aux sends and master effects, if your CPU is up to it.