Create Scorching Grooves with Spectrasonics' Stylus RMX
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Go Fly a Kit

The hundreds of beats included in Stylus RMX cover so much sonic and stylistic territory that you may never want to compose your own drum grooves. But RMX also can be used as a drum sound module. In this mode, the eight parts in the mixer respond to specific MIDI notes, which correspond more or less to the General MIDI drum kit layout. (See Figure 5.) The layout is fixed, which is unfortunate but understandable, given the eight-channel limitation of the mixer. Kicks are always assigned to the notes B0 and C1, and the two kicks are always selected as a matched pair. Likewise the assignment of the six toms to the white keys between F and D, and so on. There's no way to create an RMX kit that contains, for instance, seven kicks and nine snares.

Figure 5. When RMX is in kit mode, the browser window provides a list of samples grouped by type.

What the DVD tutorial doesn't mention is that Edit Groups can be used in kit mode. You can mess with the parameters of either or both kicks quite drastically, and pump them through different effects. Ditto for the two snares, the six toms, and so on.

If you're planning to create your own drum tracks, and if your sequencer can extract a quantization template from a MIDI track, don't overlook the possibility of exporting an RMX groove to the sequencer purely to use for quantization purposes. Just find a good-sounding groove (well, they're all good—find one that seems to fit the style you're going for), drag the MIDI data into a track in the sequencer, extract the groove, and you're ready to go.

Other Ways to Groove

The Core Library in Stylus RMX is all grooves—the program provides no fills. Spectrasonics sells add-on sound libraries called SAGE Xpanders that do contain fills, but it's easy to create unusual fills and breakdowns in your host sequencer. If you're working in a traditional rock or funk style, you'll need to know how the drummers in that style typically play. But in any case, RMX is not really oriented toward traditional styles out of the box. (You can add rock and pop grooves through one of the SAGE Xpanders, but Steinberg Groove Agent would be a better choice for a percussion plugin if you're looking for '50s rock or '60s Motown.)

After dragging one or more MIDI files to your DAW's track(s) in Slice Menu mode, start moving the MIDI notes around and see what you come up with. Every pattern in RMX starts life as an ascending chromatic scale, as seen in Figure 6a. Your fill might end up looking like Figure 6b.

Figure 6a. The MIDI data for Stylus RMX's "57-Isle a" pattern, shown in the Cubase window. Each MIDI notes triggers a slice of the groove.

Figure 6b. The data in Figure 6a has been reorganized to create a fill. (This is a multitrack fill, which is why beat 4 is empty.)

Rx for RMX

Spectrasonics has released several of their soundware packages in SAGE Xpander format, so don't forget to tell Santa you want them for Christmas. Having a larger sound library is always good, but personally, I feel I've hardly scratched the surface of what the basic RMX sound library can do. It will be a long, long time before I get tired of using this instrument.

Algorithm Rhythm

The Chaos Designer in Stylus RMX uses controlled random number processes to make changes in a beat while it plays. As fresh as the idea may seem, it's nothing new. From the late 1950s, when computers first began to appear on university campuses, composers have been using them to develop new musical ideas. One often-mentioned experiment is the Illiac Suite, a string quartet composed in 1957 by Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson using the Illiac mainframe computer at the University of Illinois to generate number tables. Composer Iannis Xenakis also worked with mainframe computers during this period, as did Milton Babbitt.

Computer-assisted composition got a big boost when MIDI appeared in 1983. For the first time, it was possible to generate streams of notes on a small home computer and hear them in real time. The term "algorithmic composition" was derived from a program called Algorithmic Composer, written by Jim Johnson for the Commodore 64 computer. There was a flurry of interest when Jan Hammer revealed, in an interview in Keyboard magazine, that he was using Algorithmic Composer to generate his underscore for the hugely successful Miami Vice TV show.

Johnson (Jim, not Don) later wrote a deeper program called Tunesmith for the Atari ST. Tunesmith is currently available as a free download, but sadly, it will only run on the Atari. During the same period, Emile Tobenfeld of Dr. T's Music Software released the Programmable Variations Generator (see Figure A), a module for his Keyboard Controlled Sequencer (KCS); and a self-contained program called Fingers. Both ran on the Atari ST. In retrospect, KCS also anticipated some of the interactive concepts used in Ableton Live, though it was a MIDI-only program.

Figure A. Dr. T's Programmable Variations Generator (PVG), a module within the Keyboard Controlled Sequencer, ran exclusively on the Atari ST computer. The PVG created controllable random variations vaguely like those produced by Stylus RMX's Chaos Designer.

Another early leader in bringing algorithmic concepts to the mainstream was the sadly departed Opcode Vision (Figure B). Amazingly, one program from that era, M, is not only still available but will run on current computers. Written by Joel Chadabe, M has been updated for OS X and can be purchased from Cycling '74. Unfortunately, most of the other algorithmic composition programs are long gone, victims of poor sales and obsolete operating systems. Today, those who want to experiment with computer-assisted composition are more likely to build their own algorithms using Cycling '74's Max/MSP or something similar.

Figure B. Opcode Vision could take a series of MIDI notes and play them back in fresh ways, including in random order, with random quantization between two values, and with random duration. (Image courtesy of Opcode/Spectrasonics' Paul de Benedictis.)

Jim Aikin writes about music technology for a variety of publications and websites. His most recent books are Power Tools for Synthesizer Programming and Chords & Harmony.

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