[babbagamp shramp camp]

excuse my language in the subject, it's meant to be inflammatory to attract attention. if you're a nexus user, please don't take this as a personal attack.

(substitute "nexus" with your favorite rompler.)

i love music with a passion. it has gone from simply being something i do to pass the time to being a language in which I find myself speaking if emotions become too complex for words or otherwise leave me wanting an outlet. i love electronic music as well, because while songwriting or composition appeals to my creative side, the technical aspects of production allow me to obsess over details both macro- and micro-aural. it gives me opportunities to explore in ways that aren't possible in many other fields or genres, and i get a thrill every time an experiment reveals a new sound or a new technique. it is chiefly this latter reason, this mutability and morphism (or the lack thereof), that fuels my disgust of refx nexus.

i see nexus as being a product of an attitude mostly of laziness and imitation. i started my inroads into synthesis by reading many articles online about the various disciplines (subtractive, additive, etc), and then i would attempt to replicate the "lesson" in whatever modular synth i happened to have handy. in the rare case that authors would make patch files available, they would discourage their use for anything other than experimentation and reverse-engineering. "learn how it works," they said. "if you like how it sounds, learn to duplicate it. you might find something new and unexpected along the way."

it seems to me, then, that nexus at its core exists to satisfy the contradictory attitude: sound design is not part of the creative process of writing electronic music. it attempts to replace in-depth knowledge of synthesis techniques and experimentation with parameters with a library of essentially immutable presets. yes, i realize that the library is expandable, and, yes, I realize that there are parameters to adjust, but the fundamental pieces of the sound remain locked away. I realize that nexus 2.0 provides more facilities for sound control, but where is the modulation matrix? where are the LFOs? more importantly, if they're there, how can you control them?

additionally, this library of sounds also irks me to some degree. when you use the nexus libraries, you sound like everyone else who uses them, and this is the crux of my argument. electronic music is a wonderful, beautiful landsacpe, and it has nearly endless possibilities both musically and technically. the artists that the nexus sound libraries imitate didn't become influential by using presets, they explored until they found their own sound. nexus prevents this because it forces adoption of the nexus sound designers' styles. even small, discrete things like how obsessive you may get over the angle of knobs in your favorite softsynth can build a style because such habits become recognizable over a body of work. with nexus, you sound like everybody else, and, to me, that is unacceptable. the immutability of the sound ensures that you not only won't stray from the beaten path, you can't.

tl;dr:
electronic music affords you nearly endless amounts of open-ended creativity in production. there are always more sonic possibilities, some just out of reach, and if you take the time to find your way through the field of sound design, you might stumble onto something new and suddenly find you're the next deadmau5 or benassi. be not satisfied with pre-made sounds! go forth, musicians, and innovate!