Demoing Dawesome’s next synth MYTH
I’ve had the privilege to participate in beta testing Dawesome’s next plugin Myth. Peter from Dawesome has given me permission to write a brief Beta report about Myth and discuss some of the features and unique things to expect. This will not be a full review, and I’m not aware of details such as release date, price, compatibility etc. I just want to talk about the sound design potential and why this is exciting news.
The Myth interface is both familiar and uncanny, you have all your classic modulations to the right, settings and macros to the left, a keyboard and more settings down below, and presets and menus up top. This all frames the center, where you’ll see two main sections, one with tabs showing traditional controls and labels, and the other alien and abstract, with weird shapes, colors and two “iris’s” looking back at you.
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What is an “iris”?
At the core of Myth is the pair of “Iris”, each iris is a unique four part spectral oscillator with an amplitude curve for each spectral layer. Importing a sample into an iris converts the audio into a series of bins that approximates the source material as closely as it can. These bins are different from wavetable harmonics, meaning you wont get the same results as a wavetable, but will be able to get some more atonal and inharmonic results. This unorthodox approach to resynthesis creates new tones for you to play with through the rest of the synth engine and is only the start.
What are those shapes and colors?
Below each iris is a set of shapes and “tone colors”, each one of these is a different control, from iris position, to FM depth, to layer blending and a variety of tonal shaping. These let you alter the iris using FM processes to create entirely new textures. The approach to using shapes and colors brings a lot of fun and life to sound design.
There’s MUCH more to it…
This center “iris” section is only the tip of the iceberg. Below you’ll notice tabs for different oscillator sections. If you recall in some previous Dawesome plugins you can stack up to six effects and a variety of modulation sources. This is still available in Myth, however there is now the added ability to add blocks to each section. The oscillators, filter, FX, and even arps all have various blocks you can add and rearrange to create all sorts of combinations. There’s a wide variety of blocks and Peter plans to add more over time. There’s even blocks you can add to the LFOs and some modulation sources. These really allow you to customize your sound and explore a variety of methods. In fact, even if you just leave the iris’s as plain sine waves, you’d have a powerful synthesizer worth exploring and creating sounds in.
Myth has been an incredible synthesizer to explore and design in, the sheer variety of modules and combinations gives you endless exploration. This is a huge step for Dawesome, not only creating another new synthesis method, but also incorporating it into a modular interface. There’s also a new browser for those who simply want to explore presets, and even the ability to freeze sections and make hybrid presets. You can even drag and drop the last played note into your daw timeline, or back into an iris for recursive sound design. I can’t wait to release the full review on this one and I’m grateful to have a chance to provide this preview. I’ll go into more detail on the various iris settings and processing blocks in the full review. Stay tuned for the official release coming soon.