ReFX Nexus 2 Full version is the kind of instrument that you go to when you don’t want to spend time programming - it’s a ROMpler rammed full of inspirational, pro-quality sounds. Nexus is a next generation ROM synthesizer. Nexus delivers complex, ultra-fat, contemporary soundstorms. A powerful and flexible architecture is the foundation that supports the immediately useful and spontaneously engaging design of the instrument. Every aspect of Nexus was built to produce music of the highest quality, quickly, with the least amount of fuss. 

Nexus features a 32-step arpeggiator with note-transposition, a 32-step trance gate, reverb licensed from Arts Acoustic, and a sophisticated modulation-matrix that will help you sculpt the sound. Nexus includes a comprehensive 4GB library of over 880 sounds driven by a friendly internal librarian to find the exact sound you need in the heat of the creative moment. Features like search, favorites, and categorization are standard not only in the factory library but in all available expansions. Nexus offers an array of expansions covering a wide gamut of contemporary music styles and produced by the worlds top sound designers. 

The Library tab enables you to browse the 762 factory presets via the faux-LCD screen. These are split into 16 subcategories, including Arpeggios, Dance Leads, Piano, Fantasy and Dream, Epic Pads, Gated Pads, Classical and more. This amounts to 4GB of content created by Manuel Schleis, the golden-eared sound-wizard behind the acclaimed Vengeance series of dance sample discs. The manual says that “prohibitively expensive analogue hardware devices” have been sampled, and the kinds of synth patches that are tricky to recreate in software are much in evidence, such as Roland JP-8080 and Access Virus leads and pads.

Nexus2 remains a dance-music-focused product, and this is affirmed by the inclusion of an all-new expansion: Dance Vol. 2. This is in addition to the factory bank outlined above and adds 128 bang-up-to-date dance patches that are especially suited to trance, electro house and hard dance styles. 

You can’t create sounds from scratch using Nexus2, or import samples into it, but there are sound-shaping options aplenty. The front panel knobs and buttons are unchanged since v1, yet the LCD panel offers some neat new tricks. The Mod screen offers control over vibrato, portamento and pitchbend (now with a +/-48 semitone range), but the main point of interest is the spruced-up modulation matrix. This now has over 100 destinations, and all effects (except ensemble) have at least one modulatable parameter. 

Mod sources include the mod wheel, aftertouch, pitchbend, CC and host automation, and twin user LFOs. When we used the first version of Nexus we grumbled about the lack of those user LFOs (they eventually debuted in v1.2), so this time we’re going to suggest that since the mod matrix is more powerful, there should be user ADSRs too. 

Nexus2’s arpeggiator and Trancegate each have their own page and are among the best we’ve seen. As well as the usual arpeggiator modes for up, down, order, and so on, Nexus2’s has a mini-sequencer in which you can set the octave and – new for v2 – semitone transposition per step.

The Mix screen offers perhaps the most useful new features. Nexus patches are built from up to four layers, and you can now mute layers and set their volume, panning, transpose and detune parameters. This is most welcome, and by stacking Nexus2 instances, you can effectively combine layers from separate patches. As well as the front-panel delay and reverb, you now apply two global effects, rather than just one. They are: chorus, flanger, phaser, ensemble, degrader, distortion, phaser, and, new for v2, a stereo enhancer and an analogue phaser. A new preset librarian stores/recalls effects setups.

The stereo enhancer is handy and works on a given frequency range, but the analogue phaser is the real star. It’s licensed from ArtsAcoustic (who also supplied Nexus’s fantastic, pro-quality reverb) and gives a lush, smooth tone that distinguishes it from the existing phaser. It has more controls too, with adjustable upper/lower frequencies and up to 16 stages. With the Speed set to 0, the phaser’s position can be directly manipulated using the lower frequency value, which is a destination in the mod matrix. A proper parametric EQ has been added, with eight filter options for each of the four bands. Oddly, the values in the display don’t correspond to the frequencies affected – when we dialled in a 5kHz boost, the peak was actually at 1kHz.

For a huge bank of high-quality, ready-to-go synthetic tones for contemporary genres, it’s hard to beat Nexus2. Many of the sounds are instantly inspiring in themselves, and the slick interface and preset categorisation help to keep that inspiration flowing. We can’t say that about every virtual instrument and the majority of them don’t sound as good as Nexus2, either.