with all due respect, fuck nexus

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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!

[The Rai-Rai]

Excellent. Excellent. B]

[The Chemist]

If you feel the need to make every sound from scratch, more power to you, but if I can find something that gives me what I need with the simple click of a button and a tweak or two, you bet your fucking ass Im going with that. Why in the world am I going to put up with spending precious time making a sound if I can just find it in a library?

You have engineers for that, engineers who work on romplers like nexus, and while everyone on here can vouch that I talk shit about Nexus all the time, its a good fucking rompler, and I use its pads or leads in almost every single one of my productions

Originally Posted by visinin

i see nexus as being a product of an attitude mostly of laziness and imitation.

Lmfao this statement absolutely alarms me

[DM Ashura]

I personally love NeXuS.

I do agree however that the lack of ability to really fiddle around with the deep inner workings of it does greatly limit it. I love the sounds in it, but I wish I could get down and dirty with it and learn HOW they make those wonderful sounds, and see what I can tweak it to become. I know I've often wanted to be able to slightly tweak a sound in it . . . like a given trance synth sounds great, but fuck, I wish I could take out the lower octave of it. Or something of that nature.

If NeXuS ever did grant users that kind of malleability, I think it could be one of the best plugins out there.

Don't entirely knock presets. In my opinion they're the best way to learn. I'm learning how to deconstruct the countless presets on my Virus TI at the moment, and see what I can learn from that, so I can build my own sound.

NeXuS is a great tool when all you want to do is just compose music without worrying about having to create your own synths. There's nothing wrong with that. It's what I've done for maybe a little under a year now, and I've learned a lot along the way. However, I'm moving further now, and starting to tackle creating my own synths. It's just the way my sound has gone.

A comparison that I'd like to make, for reference... classical music, in a way, uses "presets." Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart all use violin, viola, cello, and contrabass in their music. But nobody claims that they are unoriginal for doing so. Rather, they use the tools of their choice - stringed instruments, among others (each composer has their own set of favorite intstruments after all) - and create their own unique, individual music.

On this same note - please don't turn your nose up at others' music because they use presets. There's plenty of room for creativity and originality even using them.

[helix eternal]

With all due respect, this "argument" gets brought up on EVERY music production board that exists.

It's not an issue of being lazy. Sound design is just one of the many parts of the electronic music scene. That's WHY there are ROMplers like Nexus. It is somebody's JOB to design the sounds. Does that AUTOMATICALLY make them a good producer? good composer? good DJ? good performer? No. And vice-versa to every other job in the industry.

If you think every musician in the industry makes their sounds from scratch, then you need to hit google a bit more. There are very few that design their own sounds from scratch (most use presets and tweak to their liking, many even use *gasp* ROMplers), and there are fewer yet that engineer their own songs (mixing, mastering).

If you get your creative satisfaction from designing sounds, that's completely cool. I respect that. I get my satisfaction from mixing & mastering. I'm trying to get better at composition. But frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn about designing my own sounds. I know how, I just choose not to because it's time-consuming. I have a family to care for, a job to go to, and other hobbies.

[Ryi]

Originally Posted by DM Ashura

A comparison that I'd like to make, for reference... classical music, in a way, uses "presets." Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart all use violin, viola, cello, and contrabass in their music. But nobody claims that they are unoriginal for doing so. Rather, they use the tools of their choice - stringed instruments, among others (each composer has their own set of favorite intstruments after all) - and create their own unique, individual music.

These are my thoughts exactly about presets. If I record a piano for one of my songs, am I lacking creativity because I didn't physically construct the piano? No. The creativity comes from the composition.

On top of that, some of the most accomplished music producers use instrumental presets in their work.

Personally, I can't remember the last time I used a preset. It's all a matter of preference, and I just like tooling around with the 3xOsc.

[Beatdrop]

This is really a pretty pointless argument, because the important thing is the music itself. I could understand what the issue would be if someone was getting famous worldwide for making songs entirely out of ACID loops, but people have used romplers/samplers for a long time. Getting pissed at someone for using Nexus or Hypersonic or whatever is like getting pissed at someone for owning a Korg Triton. Sure, Nexus disallows even more creativity than most other rom-based samplers out there by not allowing you to edit the patches AT ALL, but it's still a perfectly valid tool for creating music.

That said, I DO agree with you that musicians should try to synthesize their own sounds, but if you need a particular sound, why waste your time trying to create it yourself when it's already right there in front of you? I personally create roughly 90% of my own synths from scratch, so don't think that I'm trying to defend my own habits or anything silly like that.

[The Chemist]

Originally Posted by Beatdrop

...but if you need a particular sound, why waste your time trying to create it yourself when it's already right there in front of you?

Exactly

[PICASIO PICASIO]

Personally I'm kind of in a middle ground about this. I'll just say I'm a sort of purist when it comes to synths. If my synthesizer doesn't have the sound I want (and that's a hard feat, my synth has damn near everything) then obviously I'll just have to go find the sound in some other synth and buy it.

Though I guess I'm no one to talk because I abuse the shit out of Magical 8-Bit Plug-In and Little Sound DJ D:

[FFR4EVA_00]

I'd love Nexus if I thought most of the sounds were worth using. A good amount of the pads are certainly usable, but there's not much that I find useful outside of that. I would use more of the basses and leads if I could tweak them, even by a little.

[Eshmasesh]

Originally Posted by FFR4EVA_00

I'd love Nexus if I thought most of the sounds were worth using. A good amount of the pads are certainly usable, but there's not much that I find useful outside of that. I would use more of the basses and leads if I could tweak them, even by a little.

I agree. I hate most of the sounds it has. Most of them are perfect for cheesy trance diddles but I don't like to make cheesy trance diddles. Sometimes I find interesting ways to use them though.

[Draigun]

First off, a lot of the sounds in NeXuS are useable.. you just have to know how to work them to make them a bit more dynamic. A lot of them are your very basic sounds, but now you have the power of the rest of what NeXuS has to offer to extend those.

Not to mention there are endless expansions for NeXuS for pretty much every genre and style.


Oh.. and NeXuS 2. Hello.

[SaxxonPike]

Regardless, the client cares about the bottom line more than anything. As long as it sounds good...

[The Rai-Rai]

Originally Posted by SaxxonPike

Regardless, the client cares about the bottom line more than anything. As long as it sounds good...

Glad to see you're a true visionary artist.

[-Peacemaker-]

So uh... excuse me for pointing out the blatantly obvious here, but there are an exceedingly large number of ways to change a sound after it has been produced. Yes, it sucks a great deal that you can't change anything about the actual synthesis of the original sound, but whether you use a vsti bitcrusher, something like dBlue glitch, even something as elementary as the fx functions of slayer 2, you can create an exceedingly diverse array of sounds from just about any source. Furthermore, I've used several VST's that allow you to sample a sound and use that as a jumpoff point for synthesis- hell, for a simplistic version, just look at 3xOSC. For a more complex one, I think you'll find that Chameleon allows you to mix and match pretty effectively. Yes, it requires a little more work, but if you are actually concerned about the way your individual sounds... sound, you'll probably be willing to do the work anyways.

Fuck Nexus?
Why?
It's a useful starting point in the creation of unique and rich sounds, if it is used correctly.It should not, by itself, be the endpoint unless it is misused, but if you are angry at the fact that people use it as one, you should probably be saying "Fuck You, you lazy bastard."

Don't be so quick to blame the program when it is largely the lazy producers who are at fault.