The Usual Suspects Nodal Red 2x is a free Nord Lead 1 / 2 Synthesizer emulation using the DSP56300 plugin (in development).
In the previous article, I reported on Xenia, the latest emulation from The Usual Suspects team. Like the other synths, it’s based on an emulation of the Motorola 56000 chips.
Now, a video surprisingly teases the developers’ following plugin. This time, they will take us to a famous Swedish red Synthesizer.
The Usual Suspects Nodal Red 2x
Nodal Red 2x is a free cross-platform plugin that emulates the Nord Lead 1 from 1995 and the Nord Lead 2 from 1998. So, almost thirty years after the release of the first Nord Lead, an emulation is on the horizon.
It is important to note that this plugin does not emulate the engines of both synths, only the Motorola 56300 chip. It must be added that the legality of this project is questionable.
The Nord Lead/Rack 2x uses two Motorola DSP56362 at 120 MHz and a Motorola MC68331 at 25 MHz. The synthesis engine is identical to the Nord Lead 2 and it can load Nord Lead 1 presets, too. This demo was created with multiple instances of Nodal Red 2x in a development state (version 1.3.18) and external Delay & Reverb FX
You’ll have to be patient to try out the Nodal Red 2x plugin. This is just a teaser/preview; it’s still in development.
First Impression
What I’ve heard so far in the demo sounds pretty damn good. I’m excited about the first beta versions.
The Usual Suspects Nodal Red 2x release TBA. Join their Discord server to stay up to date. It will run as a VST, VST3, AU, CLAP, and LV2 plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel), Linux, and Windows.
More information will follow here: DSP56300
Sounds great! Amazed that these clever developers can make this…and for free.
Awesome. They’ve done a tremendous job.It does sound fantastic. Now can they emulate the Ensoniq DP4 plus. There is a chip emulation.
Can anybody please share some information about performance of this? Isn’t the emulator a big CPU hog? I guess we can run 10x more native free synths than with this?
as I wrote: the Nord emulation is not yet for testing. So not test results yet. I can speak of the Xenia or the Virus emulations, both consume almost nothing on my basic Macbook Air M2 with 8GB. like 2-3% in Ableton Live
I’ve run the TI2 ROM, which I also have in hardware, and it uses very little CPU. It can be used as a patch editor and you can send your patches to the hardware which is very slick.
As for the sound, it sounds exactly the same as the hardware TI. I’m running a Ryzen 7800x with Linux.
@Synth Anatomy @Peter Those emulator plugins will only show the correct cpu usage, if you switch it to latency to 0 in the context menu. It is indeed a heavy cpu hog, and I assume, the cpu usage amount with this nord lead dsp emulation will be doubled, since there are two dsps running instead one.
I wanna a NOVA!
hopefully they’ll release it by 2026. TheUsualSuspects are scummy devs, they lie. like when they kept saying virus TI was “coming soon” for over a year while they “squashed bugs” and then when it got leaked the bugs were all miraculously fixed a week later. They could at least admit they’re just in it for the money.