There's never been a better time to put together drum tracks in your computer. Plugins and self-contained applications from dozens of manufacturers offer amazing levels of percussion power. But Spectrasonics' Stylus RMX stands apart from the crowd for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, its creative sound design—masterminded by Spectrasonics founder Eric Persing—is consistently inspired. Second, the sound engine in Stylus RMX includes some unusual and useful features, such as the ability to process each drum hit in a beat individually with its own filters, envelopes, and effects.

In this article I'll reveal some ways you can get the most out of Stylus RMX. But the most important tip for anyone who wants to become proficient with the program is, watch the DVD! The tutorial DVD that ships with RMX provides almost nine hours of basic information in the form of QuickTime videos. And although the user interface is so well designed that the program hardly needs instructions, Spectrasonics has also included a 68,000-word online manual. Even so, RMX will do many things you may not have imagined. (Although Spectrasonics does not offer a downloadable demo for the plug-in, the company has an overview video and nearly 100 MP3s on its site.)

Mix It Up

The eight mixer slots in RMX (see Figure 1) may seem like overkill. Who would ever need to run eight drum loops at once? When you're first discovering RMX, you may be quite content to load one of RMX's more complex, full-sounding beats into mixer slot 1 and move on to some other aspect of your song.

But one way to take advantage of several mixer slots is to load the stripped-down versions of various beats, thereby mixing and matching them. The factory multis provide numerous examples illustrating the possibilities, so try loading some of them and give them a listen. Solo the various mixer channels to hear the components, and take a look at the Edit and FX pages to see how the sounds are being processed. Most often, you'll want to use only one beat that has kick and snare, putting "color" parts in the other mixer slots, but some of the factory multis combine two kick loops.

With over 7GB of core sounds, a dozen effects, synthesizer-level customization, and even an algorithmic variation generator, the Stylus RMX plugin is a different drummer.

After loading some components to create your own composite beat, you can adjust their level and panning and add effects to each of them as needed. I recommend exporting the MIDI data for the tracks in Slice Menu mode, because that gives you far more ways to edit the beats in your host sequencer.

For example, you may find that the separate groove components produce a more cohesive rhythm if you use one of them as a quantization template and apply it to the others. In Cubase SX 3 for Windows, for instance, right-click on a MIDI part in a track and select Advanced Quantize -> Part to Groove. That copies the timing of the part to the quantization menu, complete with the name of the part. Then select another MIDI part and hit Q to quantize it to the template.

Figure 1. The Stylus RMX mixer page. Each slot contains the audio for a separate loop.

A more twisted way to work with RMX beats is to play the sounds of one pattern using the MIDI data from another. If both patterns have a regular 16th-note rhythm, you'll only be changing the feel of the rhythm, not the structure. But if one pattern or the other has a few long notes or extra notes, the resulting rhythm will be staggered. You can hear this technique in action here:

• Sound Swapping and Fills (376KB MP3)

In bars 1–2 and 5–6, four RMX beats (57-Isle a, 52-Alice's Dream Wood Hits, 50-Timeless hats, and 68-Tower Zero Repeater) are heard in a layer without any alteration in their original rhythms. In bars 3–4, I dragged all four MIDI patterns onto different tracks so that they're playing the "wrong" sounds. In bars 7–8, a manually edited fill pattern alters the rhythms of the original beats. (I'll cover this technique later in the article.) I compressed the RMX signal with the Cubase Multi-Band Compressor; the bass sound is from Native Instruments' Reaktor.

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