- Product: Abyss 2
- Developer: Dawesome
- Version: 2.03
- Format: VST3, AAX
- Requirements: Windows 10 or later
- Source: dawesomemusic.com/plugins/abyss-2/
Abyss 2 is a huge update to Dawesome’s first official plugin, originally released in 2021. Abyss was already an incredible synth five years ago, but there’s a lot more here now.
For anyone unfamiliar: Abyss works with something called tone colors, laid out on a gradient. Instead of dealing with waveforms or wavetables directly, you browse tone colors by ear and drag them straight onto the gradient. That alone was remarkable five years ago, but one real limitation back then was being stuck with a single palette. Now you can build your own palettes — several of the factory palettes included in this update are ones built specifically for this release, on top of the original set. Being able to browse through years of accumulated sound design in one place changes what this plugin is for. It’s become something close to the ultimate pad and atmosphere synth.
You can also drag and drop samples directly onto the gradient, though it’s worth being clear about what’s actually happening there: these aren’t just samples sitting on the gradient. Abyss runs a resynthesis engine using FFT analysis that looks at a sample both spectrally and temporally — not just what’s present in the sound, but how it evolves over time — and turns that into a series of tones laid out across the gradient.
There’s a new sequencer too, with separate lanes for note on/off, velocity, gate length, pitch, and octaving, each with its own adjustable step count. Set mutually prime step counts across different lanes and you start getting genuinely interesting polymeters out of it. It’s a genuinely strong sequencer on its own.
A batch of new effects has been added, along with the ability to reorder effects in series — something the original version simply couldn’t do. Among the new reverbs is a plate reverb with a bit of a personal backstory: a Nuvo reverb built for Pure Data last year, later ported to Reaktor as “Standard Issue Plate,” ended up impressing Dawesome’s Peter enough that he asked to use it as the basis for a prototype. Getting to contribute a reverb that ended up in the plugin this way is something to be genuinely proud of.
Also new: Sentify and Brute, both distortion-style effects, and Velvet, a kind of diffuser that smooths and softens everything it touches — it pairs particularly well with Sentify. There’s also a stereo offset control on the tone gradient’s position parameter, which pulls tones apart across the stereo field; it shows up on a number of the included presets and sounds great.
The rest of the walkthrough is a run through a batch of new factory patches, using the mod wheel and aftertouch to move around inside each one. The range on display is wide — huge, slow-building atmospheres sit alongside genuinely musical, rhythmic sequences, including some non-rhythmic sequencer use and real-time modulation of the sequencer’s own tempo from any modulator, which opens up a different kind of movement entirely. One patch plays with a tonal sound passing over an atonal one and crossing into a second atonal sound, which turns out to be a genuinely interesting effect. The Sentify and Velvet combination gets a “chef’s kiss” moment on one patch in particular. There’s a patch built entirely on glassy FM textures, another that’s essentially the “cinematic banging of pots and pans,” and several huge, velocity-sensitive walls of sound that can sit quiet or get genuinely loud depending on how hard they’re played. The new tape effect — subtle wow, flutter, wear, and warmth — gets its own moment too, adding lo-fi character without much effort.
Overall, this isn’t just an atmospheric wall-of-sound synth anymore. It can be genuinely musical, fully atonal, sequenced, or all three within the same patch — very flexible, and a much broader instrument than the original release.
