Give Your Sound a RUSH!

Yes. The demo is the complete plugin: every band, every pattern, every preset, every effect. Nothing is grayed out and nothing expires.The one limitation is that the effect fades to silence for 2 seconds every 10 seconds. Your dry signal is never muted, so with MIX below 100% your track keeps playing through the gap.It installs alongside the full version under its own name, so you can keep working in your projects while you decide.

After purchase you receive a personal license code by email. Enter your email and code once inside the plugin; it verifies online one time and never needs an internet connection again.

No. Every hit is carved from the audio you feed it. That is the whole point: the groove inherits the sound and character of your source.

Sustained material naturally works best: pads, drones, strings, choirs, vocals, noise beds, ambiences, guitar swells. The richer and longer the source, the more character the groove carries.But don't stop there: Spectdrum is worth trying on anything, including rhythmic and percussive material already in motion. Some of the most surprising results come from experimenting outside the obvious choices.The preset video plays the factory presets across ten different sources, so you can hear how each kind of material behaves before you try your own.

Spectdrum is a multiband gate sequencer for Windows and macOS, in VST3 and AU. It splits any incoming sound into four frequency bands and plays each band as its own rhythmic voice, so a pad, a drone or a vocal turns into a groove built entirely from that sound. Nothing is sampled and nothing is synthesized: every hit is carved from the audio you feed it.

Spectdrum is an effect plugin, not an instrument. You put it on a track that already has audio on it, press play in your DAW, and it carves the rhythm out of that signal in real time. There is nothing to import: no dragging in a wave file and no loading MIDI. It follows your project tempo, or you can set its own BPM inside the plugin for polyrhythms against the session. MIDI is there for hands-on control: use MIDI Learn to map any knob or fader on your hardware, and jump between the 8 stored patterns from your keyboard while you play.Prefer to see it instead of reading about it? The full walkthrough takes you through every band, every envelope and every effect on real tracks, start to finish.

A trance gate is the closest thing most people already know, and it is a fair place to start. The difference is how many of them you get. A trance gate opens and closes the whole sound at once. Spectdrum splits the sound into four frequency bands and gives each one its own gate and its own pattern, so the lows can play one rhythm while the highs play another. A transient shaper works on hits that are already there. Spectdrum makes the hits.

Yes, with no extra license and no clearance. Spectdrum adds no samples and no synthesis of its own, so every hit you hear is your own audio reshaped. Whatever you make with it is yours to release, sell or license, exactly like any other processing on your track.

Spectdrum installs as VST3 on Windows and macOS, and as AU on macOS. That covers Cubase, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Fender Studio and REAPER through VST3, and Logic Pro and GarageBand through AU. The macOS build is universal, so it runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel.

Write to hagai@hagaid.com. Spectdrum is built and supported by one person, so your email reaches the developer and not a ticket queue. If the plugin does not work as described, we will fix it, and if we cannot, you get a full refund.

Yes. Since version 2.60, Spectdrum has a two-way OSC server built into the plugin itself. It listens for OSC directly, with no MIDI mapping and no bridge app in between, and it answers back, so a touch surface always shows the plugin's real state. By default it accepts OSC from the same computer only. Turn on "OSC from a tablet or phone" in Preferences to control it from another device on your network.

Very few. Most plugins can be reached over OSC only through a bridge that translates it into MIDI or host automation. Expert Sleepers' Silent Way plugins have built-in OSC for modular and CV work. Spectdrum brings native OSC to rhythmic gating and sequencing, and it ships with a ready-made TouchOSC surface.

MIDI mapping reaches only what your DAW exposes as automation parameters, usually in 128 steps, and it rarely sends anything back. Spectdrum's OSC link reaches much more: every step (on/off, velocity and gate length), the envelope shapes, the pattern slots, the dice, presets and transport. Values travel at full resolution, and the link works in both directions, so whatever you change in the plugin window shows up on the surface right away. There is nothing to map.

Install TouchOSC by Hexler (sold separately) on your computer, tablet or phone. Open Spectdrum once. It saves the surface to Documents > Spectdrum > TouchOSC. In Spectdrum, open Preferences and click "TouchOSC surface" to open that folder. Open the surface in TouchOSC. If TouchOSC asks for a connection, choose OSC over UDP to 127.0.0.1, send port 9030, receive port 9020. For a tablet or phone, turn on "OSC from a tablet or phone" in Spectdrum's Preferences, copy the surface to the device, and enter your computer's IP address instead of 127.0.0.1.With several Spectdrum instances open, the surface follows the one you clicked last.

Yes, and that is where most of the groove comes from. Every band runs its own pattern, from 1 to 32 steps, with its own length, velocity and step length per step, and its own swing. Give the Sub 7 steps and the Air 16, and the two drift against each other and line up again only every few bars.

Yes. Every preset holds 8 pattern slots. Click a slot to jump to it, or play the slots from your MIDI keyboard, so you can switch the groove live or record the changes into your DAW. To copy a pattern, drag its slot onto another slot and change the copy from there.

The steps decide when a band plays. The envelopes decide what each hit does. Every band has four of them, drawn by hand as free curves: volume, filter, pan and pitch. Draw a slow rise on the volume and a hit swells in instead of snapping. Draw a drop on the pitch and every hit dives.

Yes, in two ways. The dice roll a new pattern, or new settings for a band, and dragging up before you release makes the roll wilder. GENERATIVE goes further: each band invents its next pass on its own cycle, so the groove keeps changing while you play.