is stylus rmx still worth buying?

[quantum7]

I would have bet good money that when this thread started by 2018 Spectrasonics would have release a new improved Stylus, but I guess that it is not to be.

[noiseboyuk]

Sample start/ loop modulation, wave editor, scripting to effect both. There are lots of ways to do it.

I have literally no idea how that could work to simplify a loop, or time lock 8 different ones, but to be fair I don't delve too far into Kontakt's scripting innards. Are you talking about scripting a custom instrument that nobody has yet done? Maybe something for Kontakt exists out there that could do this, but I've personally never seen nor heard of it.

With Stylus, these things are a mouse click away, and that simplicity is a huge part of the draw for me. I've used this analogy before, but I think creating beats is akin to improvised cooking. You take a few ingredients, muck about with them, throw them together... its a very appealing way for working for me. Far from the only way to go of course, often I'll turn to Battery or something and do it the usual way.

Quantum - yeah I know. This elusive product is now 99 months pregnant.

[Echoes in the Attic]

Yeah I would surely have bet that a new version of Stylus would have been released before a major Omnisphere update that doubled the layers!

They must be working on something big for it. I just hope they get over their aversion to showing waveforms, which is extremely useful for drum loops. Would have also been very useful for the granular in Omnisphere as well to get an idea of the length and complexity of an audio file and see the playback position (like every other granular synth does) but they didn’t do that so I’m not hopeful.

[noiseboyuk]

With each passing year... decade... it does sort of unreasonably raise expectations. What could possibly be taking them so long with this? My hunch that, conceptually, this will be fusing the worlds of loops and one-shots is as good an explanation as any, cos I'd imagine this could get pretty tricksy under the hood.

I'm imagining both the audio content and groove information would be tagged. You might be able to swap all the audio with the groove of another. Kit elements would be known, so you'd easily be able to root the kick out of a sep output of a loop for example, without all the tedious setting up groups and slices etc.

Compared to synths, I find electronic drums still far from where they should be. For usability, Toontrack's EZD2 and SD3 are top of the tree, but conceptually they're based around analog kits and players. I'd love Stylus 2 to be the ultimate electronic and loop kit, expanding that improvised-cooking thing they've got going on. Also would love there to be a sound-generating engine in it too.

What would personally be a disappointment is if it ended up being another analogue drum engine. We're already over-saturated with those, and I find it difficult to imagine doing it better than SD3. Of course, a la Omnisphere there's a fair chance it might be all these things - Omnirhythm or something.

[Ah_Dziz]

Sample start/ loop modulation, wave editor, scripting to effect both. There are lots of ways to do it.

I have literally no idea how that could work to simplify a loop, or time lock 8 different ones, but to be fair I don't delve too far into Kontakt's scripting innards. Are you talking about scripting a custom instrument that nobody has yet done? Maybe something for Kontakt exists out there that could do this, but I've personally never seen nor heard of it.

With Stylus, these things are a mouse click away, and that simplicity is a huge part of the draw for me. I've used this analogy before, but I think creating beats is akin to improvised cooking. You take a few ingredients, muck about with them, throw them together... its a very appealing way for working for me. Far from the only way to go of course, often I'll turn to Battery or something and do it the usual way.

Quantum - yeah I know. This elusive product is now 99 months pregnant.

The simplicity of manipulating loops is why I still use Stylus all the time. There just isn’t much I’m missing at the moment that I would expect in an update. Re: Kontakt it’s worth digging into the scripting system or even scripts that are already out there for diddling loops. It’s not gonna be as straight forward as stylus but it’s doable. And it’s also a reasonably good platform to release a giant stylus style library. Just saying that stylus isn’t the only game in town for nifty loop trickery. It is the game I’m used to so it’s the one I use.

[Ah_Dziz]

Oops double

[greententacle]

nothing can beat geist2. its just insane how freaky you can go with it. have stylus aswell but don't use it anymore.

[Forgotten]

Not sure what it has to offer now that isn’t covered by other software. It was somewhat unique in its day, but now there are a lot of options, most of them cheaper.

[Gamma-UT]

With each passing year... decade... it does sort of unreasonably raise expectations. What could possibly be taking them so long with this?

It's either

a) A ground-up redesign, which brings its own problems - that it won't actually have much to do with Stylus, which results in much gnashing of teeth

b) it doesn't change much at all other than make it easier to import loops than the current futzing around with the idiosyncratic SAGE Converter and add some visualisation to the loop-editing tools (ie being able to highlight upbeats/downbeats etc and see it rather than fiddling around with keyswitches) - which is met with a huge chorus of "is that it?"

I'd actually quite like option (b), but I can see it being a bit of a commercial non-starter that means it never made it beyond the product-planning stage.

[sluggo]

I have Stylus and Guru (predates Geist). I use them both, I think they are both excellent. I've see a lot of videos of people building house/techno tracks and they usually seem to drag drum samples directly into an audio track. I don't get it when we have tools like Geist at out disposal. There's a reason drum machines are still popular. Anyways, Stylus is still very useful imo. I must have got it on sale because $400US is a lot of money.

[Gamma-UT]

I've see a lot of videos of people building house/techno tracks and they usually seem to drag drum samples directly into an audio track. I don't get it when we have tools like Geist at out disposal.

This might not apply to the videos you've seen, but some people are very fussy about the timing of drums - particularly in house and techno where you might have a lot of stacked samples offset by a few ticks - and regard the DAW as the final arbiter on what gets played when as they feel plugins etc add noticeable amounts of jitter.

[sluggo]

This might not apply to the videos you've seen, but some people are very fussy about the timing of drums - particularly in house and techno where you might have a lot of stacked samples offset by a few ticks - and regard the DAW as the final arbiter on what gets played when as they feel plugins etc add noticeable amounts of jitter.

I know, and this is one of the reasons why I really like Guru. In the example below, you can see the hats on 16th notes and then there is a graphic editor where you can drag/shift the timing of each hit. There are lanes for velocity, shift, filter, repeats, etc.

guru.JPG

[Gamma-UT]

That was also my favourite part of Guru. It's very easy to dial in a different feel that way.

[sluggo]

Gamma-UT, Do you have Geist, still use Guru ?

[Gamma-UT]

Gamma-UT, Do you have Geist, still use Guru ?

I have Geist2*, though it's not getting a lot of use. I'm finding piano roll in the DAW into a collection of samplers can be easier and more flexible to work with (I don't do the DAW timeline thing), though it's a decent tool for getting ideas off the ground. With Stylus, I'll tend to mess with one pattern a lot in the piano roll but leave the plugin to work with the others.

* I still have Guru lurking on an archive drive.