PRISM is a multiband drum effect. It splits your drums into four bands — Sub, Body, Crack and Air — and gives each one its own colour, punch, tone, place in the stereo field, tempo-synced echo and send to a shared room. Then it puts them back together. The crossovers are phase-matched, so the four bands split and recombine cleanly; everything you hear on top of that comes from the band controls. A fresh instance starts with a light touch — a little glow, a short echo on the Air, a little room and glue — so you hear what it does straight away.
That means one instance can do things that would normally take a rack: widen the cymbals while the kick stays mono, throw a dotted-eighth echo off only the snare's crack, add tape warmth to the body of the kit and leave the top clean, or smear the air into a room while the low end stays tight.
It works on a drum loop, a drum bus or a single drum track, as an insert like any other effect. The standalone app has ten drum loops built in, and you can drop in your own.
| Mac | macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later · Intel and Apple Silicon (one universal download) · AU, VST3, AAX, standalone |
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| Windows | Coming soon — VST3, AAX and standalone for Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit) follow once they've been tested on real PCs. |
This link always gives you the newest release — it's safe to bookmark:
Prism.pkg and follow the installer. It installs the AU, VST3, AAX and standalone versions; you can deselect any of them on the Installation Type step. The installer is signed and notarized.| AU | /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/PRISM.component |
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| VST3 | /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/PRISM.vst3 |
| AAX | /Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/Plug-Ins/PRISM.aaxplugin |
| Standalone | /Applications/PRISM.app |
Click Demo · Activate at the left of the strip along the bottom of the window to open the licence panel. Two ways in:
PRSM-. The Paste button reads your clipboard, for DAWs where ⌘V doesn't reach the plug-in window.Activation needs the internet once; after that PRISM starts without it, and nothing is checked when your DAW loads a session. One licence or membership covers three machines. Click ✓ Active in the strip to see how you're activated or to free this machine; you can also free machines from Your Plug-Ins in your Vault account.
Without a licence PRISM runs fully — every preset, every page, every control — except that the output fades to silence for about a second every 45 seconds. Activating removes the mute. Saving your own presets also needs PRISM or a Vault membership; in demo mode the save button explains this and links to PRISM.
PRISM has two views, chosen at the top of the window or with the 1 and 2 keys: Overview for everything at a glance, and Band detail for one band at a time.
The band split across the top is a live spectrum of the output, coloured by band. The three handles with the frequency badges are the crossovers: drag them to move where Sub ends and Body begins, Body and Crack, and Crack and Air, or click a badge to type a frequency. The crossovers are 24 dB/octave Linkwitz–Riley filters, so moving them never makes the sum of the bands hollow. The small prism at the top right lights up with the bands — each ray glows as its band gets louder. Click anywhere in a band's region to open it in Band detail.
Below are the four band cards. Each has the band's frequency range, mute (M) and solo (S), the four main controls — Glow, Punch, Echo and Space — the saturation character, the echo time and the band's level. Click a band's name to open it in Band detail.
On any knob or slider: drag (Shift for fine), scroll, double-click to reset, or click the value to type one.
Band detail shows one band as a signal chain. Pick the band from the row under the spectrum (or click its region in the spectrum); the selected band is outlined there, and Mute and Solo on the right act on it.
The chain runs Glow → Punch → Echo → Space, left to right, and each section has its own switch — in the header row and on the section itself — so you can hear the band with any stage taken out. At the bottom, Band output is the band's level (0 dB at the small mark), and Reset band puts every control of that band back to its default.
| Glow | Drive is the amount of saturation, level-matched so turning it up doesn't just make it louder. The character is Warm (soft, round), Tape (compressed, slightly darker) or Fold (wavefolding — bright and metallic at high settings). The curve shows the transfer shape, with a dot riding it as the band plays. Tone tilts the band ±6 dB, brighter to the right. Switching Glow off bypasses both. |
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| Punch | Amount boosts the attack of each hit (to the right) or softens it (to the left). Attack sets how long that front edge is, from 2 to 50 ms: short for a click, long for a thump. Sustain brings up the ring after the hit, or tightens it. The picture compares a hit before and after. |
| Echo | A tempo-synced echo for this band alone. The time runs from 1/32 to 1/2 note, including triplets (T) and dotted values (D); the picture shows every repeat over two beats. Mix is how much goes into the echo, Feedback how many repeats, Damping how much darker each one gets, and Duck turns the echo down while the band is playing so busy parts stay clear. Ping-pong alternates repeats left and right. Drift is a slow tape-like wobble in the echo time, shared by all bands (marked ALL). |
| Space | All four bands share one room. Mix is how much of this band goes into it. Size, Decay and Tone (marked ROOM) shape the room itself, so they're the same on every band. Width (0–200 %) and Pan place the band in the stereo field — not on Sub, which stays mono and centred. The cloud shows where the band sits and how much of it is in the room. |
| Dispersion | Fans the bands across the stereo field — Body one way, Crack the other, Air widest. Sub always stays in the centre. |
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| Refract | Delays each band a little more than the one below it (up to 24 ms in total), so a single hit breaks into a short flam from low to high. Small amounts thicken; large amounts are an effect. |
| Glue | A gentle bus compressor after the bands, echoes and room that pulls them back into one kit. |
| Link bands | On the Overview. While it's on, moving a control on one band moves the same control on the other three by the same amount (switches are set to the same value). Mute and solo stay independent. |
| Preset | The name in the header opens the preset browser; the arrows either side step through the presets, the dice loads a random one (factory or yours, never the one you're on), and the save icon keeps the current sound as one of your own (see Presets). |
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| MIDI · A / B · Undo | MIDI starts MIDI learn (see MIDI). A / B keeps two complete settings to flip between (the first switch copies A into B). Undo and redo (⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z) step back through your edits, including preset changes. |
| ⋯ menu | Top right. Reset to default sound, Random preset, Clear MIDI mappings, Show user presets folder; Skin — Glass, Infrared or Ultraviolet (the band colours stay the same in all three); Window — S, M or L pins the window to a size; Show the tour (or press ?) — the seven-step walk-through PRISM shows on first launch; and links to this manual and to Questions / Comments. |
| Power | The power button bypasses PRISM to your dry signal; it turns amber while bypassed. When your DAW bypasses the plug-in, the footer says so. |
| Meters | Input and output, left and right, with peak hold and a clip lamp. |
| Mix · Output | The balance between the dry and the processed signal, and the output level (±12 dB). |
| Audition | Pick a drum loop and press play to hear PRISM without a DAW track — see Preview loops. The line under it shows your DAW's tempo and transport. |
PRISM ships with 200 presets in ten categories of twenty: Polish, Wide, Punch, Glow, Spectral Flam, Echo Trails, Dub, Space, Isolate and Lo-Fi. Click the preset name to browse them by category, type to search across all of them, or hit Random preset. The presets are level-matched, so stepping through them compares sounds rather than loudness.
Loading a preset glides the controls to their new settings rather than jumping; your Mix and Bypass stay where you put them. Once you change something, the name is marked as edited. Your edits are saved with your DAW session, along with the preset you started from.
Saving presets is for PRISM owners and Vault members (activated or signed in). Click the save icon next to the preset name (or Save preset… in the browser), name the sound and press Save. It appears under User at the bottom of the category list, and the arrows step through it after the factory presets. Saving under a name you already used asks before replacing it; when you're editing one of your own presets, its name is filled in so updating it is one click. A preset keeps the sound, not your Mix, bypass or solos.
To delete one, click its × in the User list, then Delete? to confirm; the file goes to the Trash (Recycle Bin on Windows). User presets are files in Documents/Yurt Rock/PRISM/Presets, one .prismpreset per sound, shared by every DAW and the standalone app on that computer. Show folder in the User list opens it. Copy the files to another computer, or send them to a friend, and they show up there too.
Every control is a host parameter, so your DAW's own MIDI mapping reaches all of PRISM: Logic's Controller Assignments, Ableton Live's MIDI Map mode, Cubase's Quick Controls, Pro Tools' plug-in mapping, Bitwig's and Reaper's parameter learn.
Where PRISM's window can see your MIDI devices directly (the Windows plug-in and the standalone app), there's also an in-plug-in MIDI learn — the MIDI button in the header: click it, click a control, then move a knob on your controller (assignments are shown on the controls while learning). Program Change messages select presets. Esc stops learning. On a Mac, use your DAW's mapping.
Click the loop name in the middle of the footer to open the loop menu:
my-groove-96.wav), PRISM uses it.Loops play at your DAW's tempo when there is one.
The standalone app never sends your audio interface's input through PRISM (it would feed back through a laptop mic) — its sound source is the audition loops.