The follow-up to the visual synth Abyss builds patches from tone colours on a gradient, and can pull raw material out of any sound you feed it.
Dawesome has launched Abyss II, a synth that builds sounds out of colour rather than oscillators. It’s a follow-up to Dawsome’s first visual synth Abyss, and lets you pick tone colours, place them on a gradient and shape the result by ear, rather than working through the menus, formulas and technical parameters most soft synths lead with.
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The idea behind it is the way people describe sound, and how similar it is to how we describe colour and texture – warm, dark and silky, for example. Abyss II turns that into the way you build a patch. You can also feed it your own material by dropping in any sound, from a phone recording to a guitar snippet, and the engine will pull out its timbral character, tune it automatically and add it to a visual Palette of colours to draw from. It’s not a sampler, but more a way of turning found sound into raw material.
From there you can layer several tone colours on one gradient or pull from thousands of built-in ones to build an instrument. Three new performance controls, BRUTE, VELVET and SYNTIFY, each reshape a sound’s character in a single move, and a four-slot effects chain with 20 “pedals” covers further tone shaping.
Its movement comes from Kinetik, a poly-rhythmic sequencer with independent step lengths for pitch, octave, gate and velocity, so parts keep shifting rather than looping in lockstep. The update also brings more than 400 presets, roughly half new and half reworked from the original, plus a mono-synth mode, a tag-and-favourites preset browser, a preset name generator, undo/redo, low CPU use and the option to drag recently played notes straight out as audio.
“Your taste is your advantage,” says Peter V, creator of Abyss and founder of Dawesome. “Abyss II isn’t built around synthesis theory, it’s built to expand what you can do musically.”
Abyss II runs as a VST3, AU or AAX plugin through Dawesome and Tracktion, and a full-featured demo is available now with no account or registration required.
For more information on Abyss II, head here.
