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Nexus2 comes with four skins.

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• Review
• Manufacturer's Description

Nexus2 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.

Updates to the original Nexus brought many improvements, such as a new distortion effect, a polyphonic/chord arpeggiator mode with strum option, an internal limiter, and lock modes, so that sections retained settings when switching presets.

reFX claims that version 2 packs in more than 70 brand new features and refinements.

The sounds

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.

'Real' instrument sounds feature less heavily, and are of the slick, 'workstation' variety.

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.

There are many downloadable expansions available to buy at the reFX site, covering a variety of genres and priced at €70 each. The latest two are Dance Vol. 3 and the C64-themed SID pack.

If you really feel like flashing the cash, you can buy new GUI skins, too. That said, Nexus2 now comes with, ahem, four skins as standard.

Tweaking potential

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.