Abyss II: Dawesome’s New Synth Wants You to Stop Thinking Like an Engineer
Feed It Any Sound, Pick a Color, and Shape Everything by Ear
Abyss II: Dawesome's New Synth Wants You to Stop Thinking Like an Engineer · Source: Dawesome
Dawesome just announced Abyss II, the next evolution of its cinematic synthesizer. The whole thing runs on a pretty simple idea: people describe sound the same way they describe color and texture. Warm, cold, dark, brilliant, silky, lush, that kind of language. Abyss II takes that idea and builds an entire instrument around it. Instead of digging through oscillator menus, formulas, and technical parameters, you pick tone colors, place them on a visual gradient, and shape sound entirely by ear. That sounds more than interesting!
Abyss II: Everything on Dawesome’s New Cinematic Synthesizer
Sound Design Driven by Taste, Not Math
Abyss II swaps out the traditional oscillator workflow for something it calls timbral exploration. You can feed the engine pretty much anything, a phone recording, a guitar snippet, whatever you’ve got lying around. Abyss II isn’t a sampler, but the engine still pulls out the timbral character of whatever you drop in, tunes it automatically, and builds a visual “Palette” of tone colors you can pull from afterward.
From there, you can layer multiple tone colors on a single gradient, or dig through thousands of built-in colors to build entirely original instruments. Three new performance controls, BRUTE, VELVET, and SYNTIFY, shape a sound’s character in a single move, which is a pretty fast way to push a patch somewhere new without touching a dozen knobs first.
Effects, Sequencing, and Everything Else New
Abyss II also brings a creative FX chain with four effect slots and 20 “pedals” for tone shaping, plus Kinetik, a poly-rhythmic sequencer with independent step lengths for pitch, octave, gate, and velocity, built for continuous, never-quite-repeating movement.
On the content side, you’re getting over 200 brand new presets plus more than 200 updated ones carried over from the original Abyss, so 400+ total. Workflow gets a solid pass too: mono-synth mode, a preset browser with tags and favorites, a preset name generator, undo/redo, the ability to drag recently played notes straight out as audio, and lower CPU usage across the board.
What Dawesome’s Founder Has to Say
Peter V, creator of Abyss and founder of Dawesome, put it pretty directly: “Stop asking ‘Am I doing this right?’ and start asking ‘Does this sound interesting to me?’ Your taste is your advantage. Abyss II isn’t built around synthesis theory, it’s built to expand what you can do musically.” That’s a genuinely refreshing pitch in a market full of plugins that lean hard into technical depth as a selling point.
Conclusion
A synth that deliberately hides synthesis theory behind color and texture is a bold move, and honestly, it’s one that plenty of musicians who’ve bounced off traditional wavetable or FM synths might actually appreciate. The ability to feed in literally any sound and get a usable, tuned palette out the other end is the kind of feature that turns into a genuine creative shortcut once you get used to it. Worth downloading the demo just to see how differently this thing wants you to think about sound design.
Price and Availability
Right now Dawesome Abyss II on sale for €88.26 (regularly €147.76), 40% off through September 10, available here at Plugin Boutique*. The plugin is running in VST3, AU, and AAX formats on macOS and Windows. A full-featured demo is available now, no registration required.
If you already own the original Abyss, the upgrade costs $45 / €45 (regular upgrade price: $75 / €75). Anyone who bought Abyss 1 sometime in 2026 gets the upgrade to Abyss II completely free. That’s a cool move!
More Information
*Note: This article contains affiliate links that help us keep Gearnews running. The price for you always stays the same! If you buy something through these links, we receive a small commission. Thanks for your support!
This might also interest you
