reFX Nexus 5.5.21 — Mac version

A single patch in Nexus can carry up to four sample layers, each with its own arp, filter and modulation routing. That density shapes where it lands in a session: it rarely needs a chain of helpers around it. Here's where you'll spot it doing the heavy lifting.

• Lead melody bus. The unison overhaul gives you up to 16 voices per layer. Stack a couple of layers and you have a lead that cuts through without piling on extra widening plugins.
• Bass and sub group. The built-in Clipper FX and Ducker keyzone trigger let you tighten low end and carve space for the kick without leaving the instrument window.
• Drum and perc layers. You can load custom samples, then edit, slice, loop and crossfade them right on the waveform. Useful for reinforcing a drum bus with one-shots or layered transients.
• Chord and pad track. The arp pattern doubles as the initial seq pattern, so you can sketch a rhythmic pad part and tweak the modulation depth rings while the loop runs.
• Performance spot. The skin editor means you can strip the interface down to the controls you actually touch live, leaving everything else out of sight.

Nexus tends to sit on its own track rather than a shared bus because it's already a self-contained rack: oscillators, wrap modes, effects and mod routings all live inside the one window. The BPM readout and override on the SYS page help when a patch's internal timing needs to drift from the session tempo.

Unison jumps to 16 voices per layer

Version 5.5.12 tidied up a few things that used to need workarounds. The unison overhaul is the one you'll feel straight away — up to 16 voices per layer, where older builds capped it much lower. In practice that means a single layer can fill out a stereo field without you reaching for a chorus or doubler. Dial it back to four or six voices and the tone stays clean; push it higher and things start to thicken in a way that suits supersaw stacks and wide pad beds.

The Clipper effect slipped in quietly but it changes how you handle transients. Before, taming a pokey attack usually meant a separate plugin on the channel. Now you can clip right inside the patch, which keeps the signal path short and stops you chasing gain-staging gremlins between Nexus and your DAW. Drum layers and pluck sounds benefit most — shave a few dB off the peaks and the body of the sample comes forward without any extra compression.

Two smaller workflow tweaks add up fast. The Ducker keyzone trigger lets you specify a MIDI note that ducks the output, so a kick sample on C1 can automatically pull the bass layer down. No sidechain routing needed. And the BPM override on the SYS page means a patch with internal rhythmic modulation doesn't have to follow your host tempo — handy when you want a swirling pad to move at half-speed against a fast arrangement.

Active modulation source tracking now shows up in the depth rings and tooltips, so when you lean on the mod wheel or an LFO you see exactly how far it's pushing the destination. Less guessing, fewer trips back to the routing grid.

Runs native on Apple Silicon, no Rosetta needed

Nexus works as an AU or VST3 plugin, which covers Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Cubase and most other DAWs on macOS 10.15 and later. It runs natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon, so there's no Rosetta translation layer to sap CPU cycles.

Because the instrument already bundles oscillators, effects and modulation, it tends to reduce the number of helper plugins on a track. You might still route it to a shared reverb send for space, but compression and EQ often stay inside the patch. The Ducker keyzone trigger means you can skip sidechain routing in your DAW entirely for basic kick-and-bass relationships — set it once per patch and move on.

On the file management side, custom samples and expansions sit in user-accessible folders. That plays nicely with macOS tags and Spotlight if you label your sample folders, though most producers will browse from within the plugin or the reFX Cloud app. The cloud manager handles updates and expansion downloads without digging through Finder, which keeps library sprawl under control.

If you use multiple Macs, keeping your custom presets and skins in a synced folder (iCloud or a local NAS) gives you the same setup on both machines. The skin editor saves its files as straightforward bundles, so they back up cleanly alongside your project data.

Set BPM override so previews match your session tempo

Open a fresh instance and head to the SYS page. Set the BPM override to your usual session tempo if you audition a lot of tempo-synced presets — previews will match what you're working on rather than defaulting to 120. The preset preview tempo matching helps when you're scrolling through arp-heavy expansions.

Next, check the unison voice count on any layer you plan to stack. The default might sit lower than the new 16-voice ceiling. Bump it up gradually — four to eight voices usually gives you width without mush, especially on lead layers where note definition matters.

If you work with drum layers, drop the Clipper into the effects chain early rather than late. Placing it before any internal reverb or delay keeps transient shaving tight and stops echoes from carrying clipped artifacts. Set the Ducker keyzone trigger to match your kick's MIDI note while you're in the patch — it saves reconfiguring every time you open the project.

Finally, open the skin editor and hide any macro knobs you never touch. If you only tweak filter cutoff, resonance and envelope decay during a live set, make those three large and visible. Everything else can disappear. It takes two minutes and the saved skin follows the preset wherever it goes.

Version 5.5.21 tidies up the Skin Editor and fixes a few things that weren't quite right.

• The Skin Editor can now style dialogue boxes — background, title bar, text and buttons are all tweakable.
• Right-click a skin in the browser to open its file directly.
• Colour names in the Skin Editor now show without those clunky internal prefixes.
• The Impulse oscilloscope uses the same colour scheme as other effect displays.
• Skins with dots in the filename now load, save and show thumbnails properly.
• Knob colours no longer get lost when switching back from a light skin to the default.
• The oscilloscope in the Impulse import window looks correct again.
• Dialogue box text updates straight away when you change skin.
• Double-pressing Save As no longer reopens the window.

• macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or later
• Runs native on Apple Silicon and Intel 64-bit Macs