The Clavia Nord Lead is one of the virtual analog synthesizers that I thought had a unique sound. I’m in the camp of people who feel synths should not have built-in effects and the original Nord kept with that recipe. My original Nord Lead was built like a tank and I couldn’t help but smile when touching it’s stone mod wheel and wooden pitch bender. When the late 90′s turned into the early 2000s, I as with many of you sold off any hardware that wasn’t working overtime. I always regretted selling my Nord and as a Mac user never found a real replacement. I always had an eye on Discodsp’s Nord emulator+ called Discovery and the Pro version is finally available for Macintosh.
“12 oscillators Virtual Analog VSTi and Audio Units Synthesizer featuring 4 layers, WAV and SoundFont (SF2) support, 2X oversampling/undersampling, built-in arpeggiator, sync, FM, 12 filter types, panning modulation, stereo delay and gate effects, graphic envelope modulation. Imports Nord Lead 2 SysEx data.” – discodsp.com
Discovery pro is 149€/$199, there is a free demo and the manual is online available for download: discodsp.com
Still want the real thing? Visit: nordkeyboards.com
This entry was written by , posted on January 3, 2009 at 7:50 am, filed under hardware, plug-ins, synthesizer and tagged Discodsp, Discovery Pro, Nord Lead, synthesizer, virtual analog. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
Nice , i think i had this on my PC before my mac switch . I didn’t have a chance to dive into it but i remember it had a great sound.
Gearwire does a shootout between the hardware and software. I watched it and if I remember correctly DiscoDSP got the presets perfect until you touch the filter. Discovery don’t even come close to representing the NL2′s filter. Still a great sounding softsynth.
Here’s the link to the comparison:
http://www.gearwire.com/discovery-v-nord.html
Thanks for the link. I don’t remember seeing that before… good one!
They were compering old DiscoDSP version. New version has very similar filters like original nord lead :]