Stylus RMX from Spectrasonics is a music production environment, or “real time groove module” as they call it. It looks good for putting together music quickly, in a GarageBand/Acid kind of way — the timestretching capabilities don’t look as advanced, but it does have some nice features (including a huge library). There’s an emphasis on realtime improvisation and performance. And as you look at the feature list below, notice the “Easy Edit page with Big Knobs”. The Big Knob concept is the way of the future for electronic instruments, both hardware and software.

The Spectrasonics website has all the details on Stylus RMX. Here are some of the highlights: Spectrasonics’ in-house development team created the new instrument from the ground up, with dozens of new features including the ground-breaking Chaos Designer, a completely redesigned multi-page user interface, a new core library of sounds, all with a focus on realtime groove creation and performance.

The massive new 7.4 gigabyte core-library in Stylus RMX has thousands of cutting-edge grooves and sounds that were created by Spectrasonics’ international sound design team, and produced by Eric Persing. The new core library contains nearly triple the amount of sounds originally offered in the original Stylus, and contains all the original material as well. The new sounds and grooves in Stylus RMX offer a much wider range of modern musical genres than the original Stylus. Mixes of grooves are broken down into individual tracks called Elements for flexibility and infinite combinations.

Also new in Stylus RMX are thousands of new Kit modules, as well as user Kit construction. The new sound menus have over 10,000 new single hits, all arranged in organized categories. Users can create their own customized multitrack remix grooves and kits, save them into the plug-in, and even share them with other Stylus RMX users on different platforms and hosts. It’s the ultimate Remix-oriented sound module for building grooves.

Of the many new capabilities in Stylus RMX, possibly the most innovative feature is the Chaos Designer. With simple controls, the user can introduce musical Chaos into the groove, which allows it to have constantly evolving variations — giving the impression that the audio grooves are improvising. The results can be subtle or extreme by setting the simple to use controls. A Capture feature allows the spontaneous audio chaos patterns to be made into a MIDI file, dragged and dropped into the host sequencer, and played back again for further editing by the user.

Some of the other interesting features are:

• Realtime auto-sync to the beat so grooves are always in time, even when performed live! Groove Control is always active for optimum sound quality at virtually any tempo.
• Expandable with Propellerheads REX files, which allow a user to import their own audio loops via ReCycle.
• New multipage user interface design with fully integrated Browser for easily auditioning & organizing grooves
• World-Class integrated FX Racks w/24 professional effects: Tube Limiter, Tape Slammer, Modern and Vintage Compressors, Wah-Wah, Power Filter, 6 different Vintage/Parametric/Graphic Equalizers, Flame Distortion, Valve Radio, EZ-Verb, Gate Expander, Stereo Imager, Flanger, 2 different Phasers, 3 BPM Delays, Retroplex Tape Delay
• 8-part Multitimbral, each part can have dozens of grooves and samples
• Edit Groups offer unique control of individual beats within an audio loop: add ambience to just the backbeat, control the pitch of the snare inside a stereo loop, reverse only specific slices in the loop … non-destructively
• Powerful sound design features include: New multi-mode Power Filter, 3 syncable LFOs, 3 AHDR envelopes, Reverse and more
• Easy Edit page with Big Knobs for simple, yet powerful control of key parameters

Stylus RMX operates as a virtual instrument software plug-in for Macintosh and Windows in all major hosts including Apple Logic, MOTU Digital Performer, Digidesign Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Steinberg Cubase SX, Nuendo, V-Stack, Apple Garage Band, Fruity Loops, Sony Acid Pro, Cakewalk Sonar, Project 5 and many other VST and Audio Unit host applications.

Buy Stylus RMX at SameDayMusic.com