What do people think of Tone2 Nemesis 3?

[Korg Supporter]

I have tried the demos, but I am not sure which one to get first. I have not seen many discussions about Nemesis. Nemesis 3 has an amazing harmonic sound and a variety of algorithms, but Bazille is more flexible and has a cool modular setup. Bazille also has CLAP support. I may get Nemesis first because I find working with patch cables to be time-consuming, but Bazille still seems to hold its own as a polyphonic modular FM synth. Both have stronger FM harmonic outputs or richness than OPS7 and Opsix (I used a spectrogram to compare their FM). What do you think?

[Winstontaneous]

I think Nemesis cool as a streamlined FM synth, but I tend to gravitate a little more to the ones that let you get under the hood like OPS7 and Bazille.

[Hyperbole]

Nemesis is my favorite Tone 2 synth. Creating new sounds is fast and easy for an FM synth. While the sounds are recognizably FM in character, they don't sound like one more boring 6-operator DX7-style patch. They remind me a bit of the FM-type sounds I would create on my Nord Lead 3. That synth offers the easiest way to get cool FM/VA hybrid sounds, IMO. Nemesis is a bit more advanced than the Nord. But those additional features allow for a broader range of interesting FM sounds.

[Hyperbole]

I may get Nemesis first because I find working with patch cables to be time-consuming

This will no doubt be taken as a provocative statement. But software modulars don't make any sense to me. Why recreate a cumbersome hardware paradigm in software that was mostly obviated by the arrival of semi-modular synths like the Oberheim Xpander as far back as the 1980s? Just give me an extensive mod matrix (with the ability to assign other mod routings as destinations in the matrix) and I'm set. That type of architecture provides enough flexibility to meet the sound design needs of 99% of people.

So if I were you, I would steer clear of Bazille. The results just aren't worth the effort, IMO. I say this as someone who owns and likes Diva, Hive, Repro, and Zebra.

[Examigan]

I may get Nemesis first because I find working with patch cables to be time-consuming

This will no doubt be taken as a provocative statement. But software modulars don't make any sense to me. Why recreate a cumbersome hardware paradigm in software that was mostly obviated by the arrival of semi-modular synths like the Oberheim Xpander as far back as the 1980s? Just give me an extensive mod matrix (with the ability to assign other mod routings as destinations in the matrix) and I'm set. That type of architecture provides enough flexibility to meet the sound design needs of 99% of people.

For the most part, I agree. As long as there are enough matrix slots to use for whatever I want, it's better than seeing a million cables like a spaghetti dinner on my screen.

[Korg Supporter]

I may get Nemesis first because I find working with patch cables to be time-consuming

This will no doubt be taken as a provocative statement. But software modulars don't make any sense to me. Why recreate a cumbersome hardware paradigm in software that was mostly obviated by the arrival of semi-modular synths like the Oberheim Xpander as far back as the 1980s? Just give me an extensive mod matrix (with the ability to assign other mod routings as destinations in the matrix) and I'm set. That type of architecture provides enough flexibility to meet the sound design needs of 99% of people.

So if I were you, I would steer clear of Bazille. The results just aren't worth the effort, IMO. I say this as someone who owns and likes Diva, Hive, Repro, and Zebra.

I have Hive and Repro and like them a lot! Tone2 Icarus is also one of my most used synths.

[JO512]

I've come across a number of mentions of Nemesis and decided to check it out. I was struck by this claim on the website:

True high-end sound quality:
To reduce aliasing, some more advanced FM synthesizers from the competition use 2x or 4x oversampling. This increases CPU requirements but still doesn't make them completely alias-free. Nemesis, on the other hand, offers perfect sound quality, using 70000x oversampling!

I was immediately skeptical. How could this be true? 70,000 times oversampling? Really? Perfect sound quality? In a digital FM synth? Naturally, I decided to try a few patches and watch what happens on a spectrogram as I play a note and sweep the pitch up and down. Sure enough, as I increase the pitch and see lines of various overtones going up, I can see many fainter ones coming down, reflecting as is typical of aliasing. And I can hear the aliasing. I think I was right to be skeptical. In this test, I only used the first carrier with a simple saw and no modulation from the modulator. Sweeping a saw up and back down, even with a bit of LP filtering, this looks like aliasing to me! Am I wrong?

aliasing.jpg

[JO512]

And look at it here with some neoFM applied from a saw modulator of the same pitch and same sweep. That looks and sounds like a lot of aliasing to me. Am I missing something?

Screenshot 2025-06-30 000119.jpg

[Tone2 Synthesizers]

FM (=Phase modulation) with non Sine-Waveforms like sawtooths creates a immense amount aliasing. This is reduced drastically in Nemesis and only a very tiny amount of aliasing remains.
The achieve low CPU demand Nemesis uses a tricky combination of smart preprocessing (32768x oversampling in another CPU thread ) and realtime oversampling (2.176x @ 44100kHz).
32768 * 2.17 > 70000.

If you compare Nemesis to a conventional FM synth you can easily measure a huge difference and a drastically higher sound quality.
Unlike conventional synths FM in Nemesis works and sounds very good with any waveform and not only sine waves.

[JO512]

If you compare Nemesis to a conventional FM synth you can easily measure a huge difference and a drastically higher sound quality.

That might be true. But your website makes the claim of "perfect sound quality", which, in context, implies no aliasing whatsoever. This is clearly not the case. Reduced aliasing maybe. Vastly reduced compared to an old digital FM synth, maybe. But perfect? No.

[JO512]

I can see though by comparison that it gives more usable results with neoFM than, for example, Serum 2 with PM using saws.