Create Scorching Grooves with Spectrasonics' Stylus RMX
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MIDI Jamming

If you're performing live with RMX, you may want to assign each mixer level fader to a separate hardware MIDI knob or slider so you can do real-time fades. RMX's MIDI Learn feature is not where you might expect. To activate it, you click the floppy disk icon in the lower right corner of the screen, select MIDI Learn from the pop-up menu (see Figure 2), and then click on a control and wiggle your MIDI slider. (Or wiggle the slider first and then click on the control.)

Fig. 2: MIDI Learn Command Figure 2. To access MIDI Learn mode, you click the floppy disk icon (hidden behind the right-hand menu), which pops up a utility menu.

Although RMX won't let you scale the amount of response to the MIDI data, you can use MIDI Learn Inverted to assign one physical slider to two of the RMX level faders (or four of them) so as to crossfade between two entirely separate beats with one physical movement, like this:

The example above, performed live, has four tracks and uses a MIDI knob to crossfade between two of them. The sustaining sound at the beginning is also from Native Instruments' Reaktor. You can see this technique demonstrated in detail in the Super Crossfader Trick tutorial video that comes with RMX.

The main limitation of this crossfading technique is that all of the RMX tracks will be playing all the time. You won't hear some of them if you've crossfaded them out of the mix, but they'll still be using CPU cycles, as will any effects you've assigned to them. However, the effect On/Off buttons can be assigned to a MIDI footswitch, as can the mixer channel mute buttons. If you have nothing better to do with your feet, you can shut off some of the effects when they're not being used.

Chaos Is Your Friend

Since the early days of electronic music, people have been fascinated by the idea of letting a computer choose which notes would be played. A random number generator is often used to make musical decisions, its output being constrained (limited) in various ways that the programmer or composer hopes will be musically interesting. Not only the choice of which notes to play but also their timings and timbres have often been fair game for random processes. (For more on the history of this concept, see the sidebar "Algorithm Rhythm.")

Stylus RMX's Chaos Designer (see Figure 3) borrows some concepts from earlier computer composition programs, and applies them in a way that makes sense for percussion tracks. You can apply randomness to several aspects of an RMX beat in ways that will sometimes produce musically evocative results.

Fig. 3: Chaos Designer Figure 3. Chaos Designer varies aspects of a groove algorithmically to keep it fresh; sliders control how often each parameter is changed. The Buzz feature, added in version 1.5, retriggers a drum hit so rapidly that it transforms into a buzzing sound.

Here are some suggestions on how to get the most out of Chaos Designer. Start by playing your selected beat using RMX's own playback engine, and find some chaos settings that you like. With most of the sliders, a little goes a long way. Pushing them up too high will most likely produce a mad beat that will give your listeners a headache. As with other forms of computer "intelligence," at least 75 percent of the things you try will be useless. Persevere until you find the 25 percent that sound interesting.

If there are sounds, such as a snare backbeat, that you don't want the chaos to affect, assign them to a separate edit group and switch off Chaos Designer for that group. That will give the overall beat more stability. (Watching the Edit Groups tutorial video will get you up to speed on this feature quickly.) Alternatively, you may want to assign a chaos effect to a single element in a groove, as shown in Figure 4. In the following example, the Buzz effect is applied only to the backbeat:

Fig. 4: Edit Group Figure 4. Clicking the Assign menu lets you select a specific groove element to modify. Here we're applying Chaos Designer's Buzz effect to only the backbeats in the groove.

As with the rest of RMX, you can use Chaos Designer in either Groove Menu or Slice Menu mode. Groove Menu is easier in this case: the entire beat is gated by one long MIDI note, so Chaos Designer can do its thing using RMX's internal playback engine. The disadvantage of this approach is that the chaosified beat will be different every time it loops. You may prefer to use Chaos Designer to create a beat that can then be repeated in a deterministic fashion.

To do that, switch to Slice Menu mode, start RMX's playback engine, and then click the Capture button on the Chaos Designer page. That will produce a MIDI file that you can then drag into the appropriate RMX track in your host sequencer.

You need to be aware, however, that only some aspects of the chaos will be encoded in the MIDI file. Specifically, the results of the reverse and pitch sliders are not exported, since there is no convenient way of representing them in MIDI. However, those sliders will continue to operate (randomly) when the beat is played back from the MIDI data in the host sequencer track.

Conversely, other chaos sliders (timing, pattern, and repeat) are converted to MIDI data when a chaos pattern is captured and exported, but those sliders have no effect when external MIDI data is played back in Slice Menu mode. The dynamics slider is unique in that it will affect both the exported MIDI data and external MIDI playback, so after exporting the MIDI file, you'll probably want to remove the dynamics processing from the chaos. Either that, or leave it off when exporting the file, and then add it afterwards for playback purposes.

If you want to "freeze" the results of the reverse and pitch sliders so that they're the same each time the beat loops, there are two ways to do it: either render the entire RMX beat as a new audio file, or turn off Chaos Designer, go to the Edit page, create edit groups for whatever notes you like, and set these notes' pitch and/or reverse values as edits.

The pitch changes that Chaos Designer introduces are always in half-steps, which is odd for a percussion instrument, where microtonal changes would be more natural. But half-step changes are extremely useful for processing pitched material. If you have a copy of Propellerhead ReCycle, try converting some melodic material to .rx2 files. (A violinist playing a country hoedown might be ideal, but anything with lots of 16th-notes will do.) Then import the .rx2 files into RMX using the Stylus SAGE converter and apply pattern and pitch chaos to produce melodic variations. Here's an example, applying pitch change to a jew's-harp REX file from Sound Propulsion:

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