ABYSS Review

Dawesome’s debut synthesizer Abyss was a pleasant arrival. An artistic design splashed with a colorful pointillist array of dots and hand drawn aquatic sliders, its UI instantly grabs your attention. Abyss hosts an incredibly intuitive and engaging method of sound design that can almost be described as painting with your ears.

Abyss is centered around a field of dots, each of which is contains a spectral signature that references an audio recording. These aren’t samples though, you can actually alter the playback tone with the various controls to the right of the field, changing their qualities. Sound colors are arranged by sonic quality colored to represent their general character, similar colors will sound the same.
As you click and drag through this field, you preview each tone color jumping through various timbres and textures. Where things get fun is when you drag one of these colors out of the field and onto a gradient strip that smoothly blends between each tone. Because this is spectral, and not simply samples, the transition between sounds is incredibly smooth and natural. You can put as many colors onto the strip as you’d like to create anything from simple transitions to complex arrays of sounds.

How I use Abyss: Abyss isn’t your bread and butter do everything synth, you don’t start with a saw wave and work your way down to a final patch. With Abyss, the goal is to pick and choose textures and tones that you feel would work well in following one another in motion. It’s about thinking on a larger scale, rather than making one sound at a time I like to think about what series of sounds will flow into one another in an interesting way. Where a typical pad might float around one static sound or morph between two states, with abyss you can really create a sonic landscape that evolves over time.

OSCILLATOR: As described, the oscillator is built up of various selected nodes from the array placed onto a gradient which you can modulate through. There is also a bit of FM you can apply, and dirt if you want a rougher texture, then filter and eq to give a final tonal contour. 
There are a few more controls when selecting your nodes however. You can shift the qualities of the array using 4 additional controls, but these become baked into the nodes and can’t be modulated afterwards.

Straighten: Removes the motion from each node creating a more static robotic array
Detail: Handles the spectral range of each node allowing for darker or brighter tones
Noise: Does what it says on the box, adds noise to each node
Organic: Adds motion to the nodes, though this motion is different from the motion present with low “straighten” values

This gradient and node system truly is the selling point of Abyss, it might not seem like much, but once you discover a zoomed out focus over longer scales this provides, it really becomes apparent how ingenious this concept is. Exploring different array settings and creating your own unique gradients becomes a matter of curation rather than creation, as though you are lighting a room with colors rather than painting the walls stroke by stroke. 
The effects are a nice touch afterwards, to give just a hint of motion and some vague ambience to your sounds, and the drawable LFOs can provide some natural organic motion with low settings. I find Abyss to be a tool with a purpose, it doesn’t do everything, but it does a specific job very well and opens up a new perspective for creativity not previously available.

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ABYSS: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth/8140-Dawesome-Abyss?a_aid=61c378ab215d5