Art doesn't care about the dance floor, and the dance floor doesn't care about art. A Vangelis piece won't make the 17-y-o girl shake her ass, an Avicii track will make you puke. Nexus is for a certain type of production aimed at a certain audience.

Except you're not creating your own thing entirely. You're still relying on the work of others, whether its the programmers writing the VST, the people designing and building instruments, etc.

Unless you crafted your own pan flute from the wood of a tree you grew yourself, you are are relying on someone else's effort at some point. All it comes down to is the level of reductionism you set for yourself as your own personal "cut off" point. For you, that's sound design. And that's fine. But you shouldn't begrudge others for different personal cutoffs.

The paint by numbers analogy doesn't really fit. If anything that analogy fits better with construction sets. Those are closer to paint-by-numbers than mere presets.

Presets vs sound design would be like buying tubes of paint. In theory, a painter can mix any colour they want from the three primaries, plus black & white. But I've never met a painter who didn't have a whole array of tubes of colour at their disposal. And I've never met painters who would look down at others for not mixing all their original colours.
Last edited by shponglefan on Sat May 05, 2012 8:24 pm; edited 1 time in total

That really resonated with me.

the issue is just that people for some reason have arbitrary lines along which they decide to abstract.

is the line drawn at the concept? the basic components? the assembly of these components (the software), the plan for the use of this assembly (preset design), the use of this assembly (throw in patterns, arpeggios, effects, pre-mixed collections of sounds), or the final product?

there are two perspectives once you draw your line.

are you an artist? generally there is an artist who produces a product, and a consumer who consumes it. for the artist there are many steps between. for example the ceo of mcdonalds isn't really on the same level as your on-the-assembly-line factory worker dipping french-fries and handing hamburgers out the window.

the artist will generally want to enjoy the process of creation and take satisfaction from the product in it's completed form.

the consumer will want to enjoy destroying the product and so is in a way the opposite of the artist. (although destruction can be an art-form as well.)

then you have the other perspective which is that the point of this all is nothing to do with art but rather to get dip-shits to hand you all their money.

these are both taken to an extreme and of course there will be variations and mixtures.

in any case taking all these factors into account there is no room for argument unless it's regarding the merits of a particular case taken from a particular line drawn with a particular perspective.

tubes of paint?

What kind of sonic picture can you paint with 200 different versions of supersaw leads, hoover pads/leads, "hands up" plucks, twenty trancebass presets?

This forum needs a *facepalm* emoticon...

so...you'd be unable to make music with those sounds? that's ok; someone else will come along and make something out of all those sounds.

you don't like nexus2, we get it. like ANY plugin, it will work for some people, and not for others.

simple.

I am not a nexus fan, but quite literally I am more of a synth geek more than anything. However, most musicians really only want something that has what they need. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is not right for me. I derive pleasure by taking the Oram way. Having as much creative control over the instruments themselves as possible, down to being able to create my own instruments (visual programming/modular synthesis), and yes even scripting.

Some of us are that geeky, the exploration and experimentation is extremely rewarding. Getting from the detailed aspect of a piece to a final composition.

However, there is nothing wrong with just wanting to create music.

How you make your art is up to you however. Nexus is for those who are not concerned with such details and just want to make music. There is nothing wrong with that. Just for many of us, that does not have much of an appeal. The beauty of electronic music comes from the process of making the sounds themselves. We are synthesists.

I don't own Nexus but wouldn't say no if I had the spare cash.
Writing music to me, is the one most important thing.
My own opinion is, I don't give two hoots if the sound I create my synth lead has been used before. Who care's anyway, Joe Bloggs listening to it won't.
The idea of sound designing is wonderful too but how many different sounds can you think off in your head that haven't been created yet? Seriously?
What ever you create, would be an off spin from another previous creation.

Dance orchestra, Hollywood, Total Piano, Guitars, FM, Analog, Bigtone's 3 banks, Crank 1+2, Vocoder, Vintage drumkits, Pop, SID, - again, it's like saying that because Massive has all those dubstep/trance banks that you *have* to make dubstep.
Or that because you're a f**king idiot that you *have* to come into this thread and post idiotic statements about how everyone using Nexus must be making trance.

i said no to a free version.

This is why I love Electronic Musicians.

When compared to Instrumentalists, or Vocalists, we really are whole different breed.

Instrumentalists and Vocalists argue about chord progression, musicality, the "feel", the "emotion", how the melody contrasts with the verse in the moonlight, etc.

Electronic Musicians will scream at each other because some of them don't want to tune their own instrument.

That is what you are doing. Tuning an instrument. A VST might as well be a guitar. Using presets is simply using a guitar that has already been tuned. How you play that guitar, and how you market yourself, is all that matters in reality.

Personally I enjoy tuning VSTs. Sometimes I use presets for inspiration, or a sampler if I just want a good sounding Bass sound without spending 10 minutes programming it, then sometimes I will spend two hours making a f**king Bell inside Prism, or a bad-ass delayed-arppegio-weird-thing in Adonis, or sometimes I just want to grab TAL NoiseMaker and see what f**king nutty sounds I can make come out of it.

Would I use Nexus? You bet. The sounds are usable and clean.

Can you make the sounds in Nexus with other cheaper synths? Absolutely.

Am I going to buy Nexus? probably not.

That's really as far as this topic ever needed to go.