ReFx Nexus 3

[Guy Rowland]

Nexus 3 will be released on November 29. More info is being drip fed, but here's the current list on the ReFx website https://refx.com

Price

Free upgrade if you buy NEXUS2 now
Free upgrade for customers who purchased NEXUS2 on August 1st 2019 or later
$49/€49 upgrade price for customers who purchased NEXUS2 on May 1st 2019 or later
$99/€99 upgrade price for customers who purchased NEXUS2 before May 1st 2019

Licensing

Our own online activation; no eLicenser or other 3rd party software required
Two activations at the same time per NEXUS3 license

Features

Fully backwards compatible with Nexus1 and Nexus2
All your expansions will continue to work
Completely new, flat, scaleable, vector-based UI
Faster, bigger, better in every way
Improved CPU performance by up to 94%
Improved preset loading times, up to 8x faster than NEXUS2
All arps and trance gates of all layers are fully accessible and editable
Arpeggiator has a new sequencer mode to play chords and other complex patterns
Arpeggiator has up to 256 steps

New Content

More than 350 new, custom-designed presets
More than 80 new impulse responses

reFX Cloud App

New app to easily download and manage your reFX plug-ins and content
reFX Cloud app available NOW to all NEXUS2 customers (more here)

Technical

VST2, VST3, AU and AAX support
64-bit only

Nexus 2 is still a useful low CPU workhorse for me doing genre pop stuff. The licensing change is quite a big deal, finally means I can put it on the laptop too. The one I'm really waiting for is the tag browser, if it finally has that this looks to be an excellent update.

[Guy Rowland]

Released today - https://refx.com/nexus/ . Looks promising, will wait til tomorrow before attempting a download.

[Guy Rowland]

Posted these first impressions on KVR which I realise is far more the target audience than here. (BTW - CPU use on a test of 16 instances seems about the same between N2 and N3).

First impressions are mixed. Install was a cinch, downloads very quick. Its probably true that it is superior in pretty much every way to Nexus 2, although there are still a fair few shortcomings.

1. Poor tagging. This was a draw for many of us that tags are now - finally - in this preset-machine. Initially none at all showed up, but after clicking around the colours for a while suddenly they showed (I realise I had to be in All... no idea what changed). However, its a pretty miserly bunch that we have to work with - just dark, bright, active, spikey, wide and dirty. That's it. And even then, only the new expansions and new ROM content are tagged. Apparently out of 403 pads, I only have 1 that is dark. 8 are "active" whatever that means... there wasn't any prominent motion in them. Sadly, this meagre selection is close to useless.

2. No genre search. This seems a staggering omission really. Nexus is really placed as a synth for genre-fans. Many expansions - certainly all the christmas ones, but not only this - straddle multiple genres. The text search only works for patch names, so typing hip hop in doesn't even result in any patches from hip hop 3.

3. No names for layers. If they're tagging expansions, they should also name the layers. The facility is there to name them yourself from a simple drop down list, but this should be pre-done really, as in Avenger.

4. The mixer is probably the weakest link. They've persisted with this odd horizontal layout, where it would seem much more intuitive to make it vertical. The graphical faders are pretty bad, there's no scale or no GUI at all in the case of anything set to zero or centre - it looks like there are no controls at all in these cases. The graphical layout is very odd, the tube-map style graphics are confusingly meaningless really, a simple vertical signal path flow would be much more useful, with the pan, volume etc below (and a proper volume fader). There's no user customisation of what effects can be applied within layers - you can switch off and on if they already exist, but that's it. A proper send / insert system would have been much better. Finally, no sep outs still, which is a very tiresome omission.

Overall, it feels about 50% of what could reasonably be expected of it. No-one was expecting full programability, but ReFx have failed to really see through most of the opening out of the interface and browser. The tagging we know will roll out across the range, but the options are so poor I honestly wonder if its worth the bother. I doubt many of the other shortcomings, such as the mixer, will get addressed.

And yet. Despite everything, it IS a lot quicker and simpler to work with than Nexus 2. And - the single biggest thing for me - I can run it on the desktop and a mobile, which is worth the upgrade price alone.

[Erik]

Thanx for the report, Guy.
Never bite the bullet though I could be the target in some way.
Just saw a travelog on the tiresome Mix Doctor on YT. Only one man is responsible for the code, a German living in Vancouver. Sound designer is living in Frankfurt. Both are huge Starwars fans and collect pricey toys and collectibles - think full size Terminator.
qu was surprised at the tag browser limited options and thought I didn’t get it. But hey, it’s just lazyness from their part, considering the zillion of genre presets Nexus offers.
And no sep out ? But then how do you mix your hit when pressing one key outputs a complete bas drum seq lick ???

[Guy Rowland]

Ha, yes I saw that video Erik. The programmer is an interesting chap based on past customer interactions... I do like Manuel though, who is responsible for Avenger.

As an overall proposition, Nexus made more sense in a pre-Avenger world. But since both were updated at more or less the same time, it's been interesting to compare and contrast. Although both use many of the same sound designers, IMO Nexus tends to sound richer, fuller, and more authentic to whatever genre they are covering. Very important caveat though, that this is a sweeping generalisation, not an across-the-board truism. And for Nexus, this has always been the selling point, that everything sounds genre-accurate with laser-like precision. Its totally unoriginal, but if you need THAT sound - whatever the particular THAT is - its right there. I find I reach for it in very particular circumstances - a dance / pop piano, a spikey dancey pluck, a chopped / pitched vocal etc - and in general on any variant on modern dance music, of which I have no great love generally, but often seems to come up (more often than orchestras in my world at times, sadly).

The whole one-note thing in their SQ patches is, I think, a great shopfront. A complete track that sounds immaculate, but of course the thrill vanishes after a bar or two usually as it won't go where you want it to. Relatively few are truly playable, there's nearly always some harmonic content in there that buggers up your chord progressions. So either you start editing and stripping out all that under the hood (made easier in N3), piling up multiple versions that are routed differently or don't bother using them at all for real. But I'd be lying if I didn't say its been brilliant as a base for getting some genre-accurate wallpaper out the door quickly. Stuff like Complextro has so many different layers that would take so long to build convincingly I welcome the help with open arms. If cared about making original Complextro records I'd despise it no doubt, but as a media whore that needs to sound vaguely convincing in these sorts of genres from time to time it delights me.

Avenger has stolen much of its thunder though its true by being is terrific and genuinely versatile synth to program in its own right, and is currently under half the price. Many have said its the death knell for Nexus, with the preset machine's only technical advantages being low CPU and better use of samples in general to be a realtively sophisticated sample player.

[Guy Rowland]

But I'd be lying if I didn't say its been brilliant as a base for getting some genre-accurate wallpaper out the door quickly. Stuff like Complextro has so many different layers that would take so long to build convincingly I welcome the help with open arms. If cared about making original Complextro records I'd despise it no doubt, but as a media whore that needs to sound vaguely convincing in these sorts of genres from time to time it delights me.

Just thought I'd add that this week Nexus has been invaluable for me. A client wanted a lot of dance beds that had to sound completely generic. I did a few that were just too damn funky if I do say so myself, and weren't sitting right as boring beds. But this is Nexus' bread and butter, and the SQ's were fantastic at sounding authentically tedious. It was far quicker to search for them in Nexus 3 than 2, I found a lot that didn't have harmonic progressions so I could play something I "composed", and added a couple of lead layers / chord riffs to make it, you know, "mine".

Often those SQs have 16 layers or so, they are incredibly well done. It's very useful to be able to tweak these, drop things out etc. A good trick is to duplicate the track and have two different custom versions.

Here's a confession - they were so quick to do that I would wait an hour or two before sending them on. One took literally 40 minutes from opening Cubase to having mastered it. I didn't want to let on that I could do it THAT fast. This is strictly between us you understand. The client was thrilled.

Clearly this is not art, but it gets a job done. I'll add my discarded funky ones which I actually quite like to the private library....

[Arcana]

I've considered getting Nexus 3 for a while.
But, the base model is £250, and from the YouTube video's I've looked at, the base content is not all that great.
The greatness comes from the huge amount of expansions. For example, the vocal expansion seems better than anything similar I've seen on the market. But once you start buying a handful of expansions you are essentially looking at £400+, which is an awful lot for a fancy rompler.

By now I've bought 2 x 5 expansion packs for Avenger, so consider myself quite heavily invested in that eco-system, and find it therefore even less intriguing to go down the Nexus route.
It does sound like a killer VSTi for a bang up date EDM sound, if only it was cheaper. Sorry, enough rant

[Guy Rowland]

Arcana - I agree. Unless there's a sale, I think you're better off with Avenger. They use the same sound designers, even.