Most delays treat a signal as a single object: they take it, hold it, and hand it back a moment later intact. Sage doesn't. It splits incoming audio into as many as 1024 frequency bands and delays each one on its own terms.
The result is a delay that hears your material in pieces. Highs scatter while lows hold. Overtones arrive late. Rhythms surface out of sound that never had one. Sage is our flagship spectral processor — drawing on the approach of Native Instruments' iconic, long-discontinued Spektral Delay, rebuilt as a focused modern plugin.
At a Glance:
- 1024 bands — FFT analysis splits the spectrum into as many as 1024 independent slices
- Per-band control — Delay time, feedback, and amplitude set individually for every band
- Modulation everywhere — Movement applied per band for shifting, morphing textures
- Visual band editor — Draw your edits directly onto a graphical display of the spectrum
- Live or offline — Process incoming audio in real time or run files straight from disk
Spectral Processing
A Fast Fourier Transform divides incoming audio into up to 1024 frequency bands. Each band becomes its own voice — delayed, modulated, and processed independently of everything around it. Where a conventional delay has one signal path, Sage has a thousand.
Frequency-Dependent Delays
Delay time, feedback, and amplitude are set per band. Hold the low end steady while the upper harmonics fall behind. Push feedback into one narrow region and leave the rest dry. This is where Sage builds its most intricate results: complex rhythmic patterns and spatial effects that emerge from the frequency content of the source itself rather than being imposed on top of it.
Advanced Modulation
Every band carries its own modulation options, applying continuous change to delay and filtering as the sound plays. Static settings become moving ones — textures that shift and morph rather than repeat, never quite landing in the same place twice.
Creative Sound Design
Sage goes well past what a delay is normally asked to do. Spectral smearing, rhythmic filtering, complex echoing textures — feed it a sustained chord and get a pattern back, feed it a drum loop and watch it dissolve into weather. It rewards experimentation with sounds you didn't know were hiding in the source.
The Band Editor
The interface puts a graphical display of the frequency spectrum in front of you, so setting delay and feedback for a specific region is a matter of drawing rather than guessing at numbers. The band matrix is where most of the work happens, and it's built to be worked on directly.
Plugin or File Processing
Sage runs as an effect plugin for real-time processing of incoming audio, or it can process audio files directly from disk — useful when you want to render a transformation rather than perform one.
Learn more and download the Sage User Guide.
Sage is a consolidated version of Puremagnetik's discontinued Lore plugin. Many of the extra features were cut to focus on an optimized spectral delay effect.
Minimum Requirements
• OSX 10.8 or Windows 10 x64 (Puremagnetik Plugins run as M1/2 Native)
• Audio Units or VST/VST3 compatible audio host