I just bought Stylus RMX - Is it "cheating?" hehe

[npatton]

No guilt! Just remember it can't fully replace the real thing. I prefer it for doing what real people can't do so well. However, it's also a wonderful sketching tool. How many times have I lost inspiration while trying to lay down a MIDI drum track with my fingers? Now I pick a groove and start getting the changes down almost immediately.

A couple months ago a client wanted some African/ethnic percussion behind an a'cappella arrangement I did for her. In a few minutes I had shakers, djembe, car keys and cabassa plus some processed weirdness added underneath the vocals I'd done in DP, then brought it to the studio we were recording at.

Ended up it wasn't what she wanted (we ended up going in a traditional Irish direction instead), but when she left to get her coffee, the studio owner turned to me with his jaw hanging open to tell me how great it was. I love instant gratification...

[sndhse]

Have a look here James. http://www.xlnaudio.com/
Addictive drums is amazing. Similar to Stylus in regards to whipping up a groove ASAP when needed (drag and drop MIDI beats) , but easier to create your kits and play them as you always have (from scratch). I love Stylus and use in combination with AD. AD is great for classic rock and Metal.

Here are a couple of songs done with AD
All played by hand on the keyboard
All congas and shakers, tambourines are Stylus
http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21318
Hope this gives some food for thought.
John

[Gabe S.]

Hi James.

I'm glad you've discovered RMX!

Don't just limit yourself to just drums in RMX. You can really put anything in it. Record your own guitar licks, REX them and stick them in RMX.....bass lines, individual hits, fx, vocal things, piano, string lines.....they all are great to have in RMX because they can be pitch shifted, reversed and MUCH more very very quickly. And anything pitch shifted is done in real time on a slice by slice basis which is cool. Plus anything tempo based that you add to it will always lock to the tempo of your tune.

The Back Beat and Burning Grooves Xpanders would be a good starting point for rock stuff. And those grooves are particularly cool in RMX because you can use the Chaos Designer to subtly or not so subtly make the loops improvise. Also, I just bought that Total Rex from Zero G....wow.....so much stuff in there....your head will spin.

Anyway, I HIGHLY recommend watching all the videos you can find on RMX at the Spectra site. It's worth the time spent. Edit Groups are a little mysterious at first, but once you see them in action, you will find them VERY useful.

Cheers.
-gabe

(For the record, I have to mention I wrote the user's guide for RMX and beta test for Spectrasonics. I also wrote a short article for MIX mag regarding RMX....you might find it useful as you continue exploring the world of RMX: http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_spectras ... index.html )

[Tripi]

I've used Stylus for a while now, but I find that I'm more drawn to the Sound Menus. They are easy to overlook when you get wrapped up in all of the pre-made loops. Try pulling up some of the Cinematic sound menus, and they have great key mapped Boomers and Metal Hits. The Hi-Hats and cymbal menus are all very good for scoring work also (especially if you use a little of the chaos fx like buzzer and reverse on them).

If nothing else, I love how easy it is to drag a MIDI drum groove into a DP MIDI track, make a groove template from it, and quantize my other tracks to it. Then erase the stylus MIDI and act like I created the groove painstakingly myself.

[buzzsmith]

I love Stylus!

Also have Backbeat and Liquid Grooves...haven't (yet) found a lot of use for RetroFunk which I also have. Wish list includes tasty jazz brushes.

Cool thing is you can move the slices to change a kick drum pattern, for instance.

One producer I know uses something similar (if not Stylus) to set his basic groove, then has a "real" drummer come in to overdub the real thing.

Buzz

[bongo_x]

I'll also speak up for Addictive Drums. It's really easy to use, I've never even looked at any instructions. It sounds good and is very versatile.

bb

[twistedtom]

Drum tracks are what I do program and it is the most difficult part of doing songs; maybe Stylus is what I want. I will be looking in to it; Christmas is coming. Thanks people.

[singtou]

hey james...STYLUS is an absolutely necessary to my writing and development of my song structure. I think thats the biggest thing I keep hearing when I look at some of the videos on the site and videos included on the install. They wanted to give writers and producers something that would integrate seamless with theyre writing style and production..I have a perfect ex. of a song that uses stylus up on my pro website when I wrote it I just started with a stylus loop and used a combo of bfd and real drums to complete everything all within a digital env. as far as im concerned stylus is a total life saver in time and money* time=money as far as you feeling its cheating I think when you notice that your production is much much more streamlined that whole guilt thing will pass...lol
check out the track its called skywind
http://www.myspace.com/silverlakepro

without stylus I would have been a lot less inspired to write this track..
hope that helps
peace[/url]

[James Steele]

Thanks everyone for the replies! I'm going to take some time to read over everyone's post more carefully and digest it! I like Stylus, but I really do want to get some more organic drum sounds for it... or I suppose use it in conjunction with either EZ Drummer, DFHS, etc. I may check out Addictive Drums as I want a really slammin', in your face sounding kit.

This caused me to wonder? Do I need to buy Recycle if I want to slice audio of my own to make Rex files to use the Sage converter and bring into Stylus. I just now noticed I have this old drum loops CD I bought years ago (no doubt it's 16 bit) and I wonder if I could slice it up and get it into Stylus. Does DP's audio editor let you create Rex files? Just wondering how hard this is and how much MORE stuff one has to buy to bring their own audio into Stylus RMX?

[blue]

This caused me to wonder? Do I need to buy Recycle if I want to slice audio of my own to make Rex files to use the Sage converter and bring into Stylus.

Yes, and it's a bit of a hoop dance. I've done it for some of my own handmade loops and they work well in Stylus once rexed, but prepare yourself for some serious tedium. If you are willing to buy Recycle and go through the process, I would say you would at least be happy with the results. RMX is a much more sophisticated rex file player than Dr. Rex, and you can play around with your loops to your heart's content. Or at least your patience's limit.

[GWJ]

chrispick,
That Mr.Burns !!
I thought it was from an Irish poet or sociologist, then again, maybe he/it is. The quote is very "Greed is Good" from "Wall street".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greed_Is_Good

thanks for the link

Scottish poet.

[philbrown]

As said, you do need Recycle to bring loops into Stylus - unless they are REX files. Sliced loops vs whole loops - there's no comparison as far as versatility goes. I found it was worth it to me to Recycle some of my favorite loops (like Clyde Stubblefield) bought pre-REX, and some of my home-grown ones (I've got a decent sized modular synth I generate loops with too). It's tedious but I got really fast at it after a couple of hours. Recycle is a great pgm that is really easy and does what it claims. After that you just use Stylus' import utility - the Sage converter.

Phil

[dogBoy]

Oh, that Mr. Burns, the Scottish poet.

[npatton]

Regarding this thread:

http://www.unicornation.com/phpBB2/view ... hp?t=24976

This Ilio sale includes the Ilio SAGE expanders ($79 till Dec 31).

FYI...

[SixStringGeek]

BFD 2 will be out in a week .. huge improvements and includes very powerful groove library / sequencer section

http://fxpansion.com/index.php?page=53&tab=148

I look forward to that. I have BFD and find the provided patterns uninspiring and quirky. As a sound module - cool. As a beat machine for composing over, well I've got an old TR-505 with patterns I find more inspiring or at least more vanilla so as not to get in the way.