reFX Nexus 5.5.21

Shape a Lead with Unison Voices

NEXUS 5.5.12 overhauls its unison engine, giving you up to 16 detuned voices per oscillator. The new oscillator phase modulation destination lets you precisely shift the stereo onset of each voice, so a simple saw wave can be thickened into a massive, swirling lead without external chorus effects muddying the midrange.

Trigger a Ducking Keyzone

The Ducker now accepts a keyzone trigger, which means you can set a specific note range to activate gain reduction on a pad or bass whenever a kick drum sample hits. It keeps the low end clean by making sidechain-style pumping a playable, internal part of the patch rather than an afterthought in the mixer.

Build a Pattern from an Arp

When a programmed arpeggio feels close to what the track needs but lacks a human touch, you can push the arp pattern directly into the sequencer as an initial pattern. From there, slice and rearrange the steps, or use the BPM override on the SYS page to lock the tempo independently of the host, which stops complex sequences from drifting during live tempo changes.

What Changed Between 5.5.11 and Everyday Use

The unison overhaul is the change you feel most immediately. Where earlier builds topped out at fewer voices, 5.5.12 pushes to 16 and couples them with per-voice oscillator phase modulation. You hear it the moment you load a classic NEXUS pluck and widen the detune — the stereo field opens up without the phasing artefacts that used to creep in at extreme settings. The Clipper effect sits in the FX chain as a soft limiter with a hard edge, useful for taming transient spikes on a kick layer without resorting to a separate saturator plugin.

Two oscillator wrap modes appeared — they alter how a waveform repeats at the boundaries of its cycle — and they change the character of wavetable sweeps in a way that a filter alone cannot replicate. The skin editor is functional rather than cosmetic: you can dim the interface to a dark grey that sits easier in a studio with low lighting, or strip away unnecessary panel elements for a cleaner screen during long sound-design sessions. Active modulation source tracking now shows exactly which LFO or envelope is pushing a knob, with depth rings that fill in real time. It is a small change that saves you from guessing which modulator is causing a volume dip six layers deep.

The BPM readout and override on the SYS page solve a long-standing irritation. If your host sends a tempo automation ramp, you can force NEXUS to hold its internal BPM steady, so arpeggios and tempo-synced delays ignore the ramp entirely. Preset previews now match the host tempo — useful when you are auditioning a rhythmic pad at 128 bpm and the host is at 90. They lock together, and you hear the patch as the designer intended.

Building a Layered Bass Patch from Scratch

Open NEXUS and initialise a blank patch. On Oscillator 1, drop in a raw square wave sample from your library — something with a fast attack and little sustain. Set the sample start point tight to the transient and apply a short loop just after the initial click so the body holds steady. Switch Oscillator 2 to virtual analog mode, dial in a sine wave, and tune it down an octave. Blend the two at roughly 70% square to 30% sine for weight.

Route both oscillators into the Clipper, set the threshold to -6 dB and the drive to taste — just enough to round the square's top end without flattening the sine into a triangle. Add a Ducker with the keyzone trigger set to C1–B1, so any kick sample in that range pulls the bass down by 3 dB with a fast attack and 80 ms release. On the SYS page, set a BPM override of 140 if your track is running at that tempo; the arpeggiator will stay locked even if the bridge drops to half-time.

Assign a slow LFO to the sine oscillator's phase minimum, sweeping from 0° to 180° over two bars. The low end shifts subtly without wobbling, giving the bass a sense of motion that works under a static chord progression. Save the patch as a user preset, and you have a starting point that can be hardened with the Clipper or softened by dialling back the drive.

Your Older Expansions Still Load Without Conversion

Does it replace all the older NEXUS content I already have? No. Version 5.5.12 reads existing libraries and projects without conversion. Your expansion packs and custom presets open as they did before, and the new features sit on top — unison voices, the Clipper, wrap modes — so you add them when you want, not because a patch demands them.

Will it run on an M1 or M2 machine? The build is universal binary, ARM and x86-64. It loads natively on Apple Silicon, and the installer does not require Rosetta. If you have a Mac from 2018 onward, you are within the comfort zone; the minimum is macOS 10.15, but a recent version of Ventura or Sonoma keeps the graphics smooth when the skin editor redraws panels.

Is it just a rompler with extra steps? The sample-playback engine is the foundation, but the addition of virtual analog, wavetable, granular, and FM oscillators moves it well past a rompler. You can build a patch that layers a multisampled piano, a wavetable sweep, and a frequency-modulated bell, route each through its own effect chain, and modulate everything with a single LFO. The architecture is closer to a hybrid synth than a static sample player.

How large is the download, and does it need a constant internet connection? The plugin installer is compact; the bulk comes from the expansion libraries you choose to add. reFX Cloud handles those downloads, but once they are on disk, NEXUS runs offline. The cloud client is only needed when you want to fetch new expansions or apply updates.

Build a Late-Night Skin on Day One

Open the skin editor on day one and build a workspace you can tolerate for hours. The default skin is bright; a darker background with reduced panel clutter helps when you are editing modulation routings late at night. Save two or three skins — one for sound design, one for tracking sessions where you only need the main controls visible.

Go to the SYS page and note the BPM override switch. If you work across multiple projects with varying tempos, decide early whether you want NEXUS to follow the host or stay independent. Setting it to override at your most common tempo — say 120 bpm — prevents surprises when you open an old project and the arpeggiator runs at double speed.

Test the Ducker keyzone trigger with a simple kick sample on C1. Load a sustained pad, insert the Ducker, and set the trigger range. Play a few notes and listen to the release time. Adjust it until the pad breathes in time with the kick rather than pumping obviously. Once you save that as a template effect chain, you can drop it onto any patch that needs low-end space.

Finally, load a custom sample you know well — a vocal chop or a field recording — and run it through the two oscillator wrap modes. Listen for the point where the waveform folds back on itself; it is where the harmonic content shifts abruptly, and it tends to sit well in a verse transition or a breakdown fill.

• Skin Editor — dialog styling is now exposed: you can customise background, title bar, body text and button colours.
• Skin Browser — a new context-menu command lets you open a skin file directly from the browser.
• Skin Editor — colour names are displayed without internal prefixes, making the palette list cleaner to read.
• Impulse oscilloscope — the waveform now follows the same colour scheme as other effect displays.
• Skin thumbnails — fixed loading, saving and preview of skins that contain dots in their filenames.
• Knob colours — fixed a bug where knob colours would not restore correctly after switching from a light skin back to the default.
• Impulse import window — corrected the oscilloscope styling inside the import dialogue.
• Dialog text — open dialogue windows now refresh their text immediately when the skin is changed.
• Save As — double-pressing the Save As shortcut no longer re-opens the window.

• macOS 10.15 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit processor