Tracktion Corporation has introduced a new synthesizer with a fresh and unique approach to both sound design and music production.
Created by Peter V, a mathematician, AI veteran and musician by heart, Abyss immediately sets itself apart by representing timbres as colors. This distinctive concept, combined with powerful, intuitive modulation makes it easier than ever to create nuanced, expressive sounds and textures, especially when utilizing an MPE controller like the ROLI Seaboard.
Abyss’ tone color approach creates a virtual instrument that focuses on the ‘art’ rather than ‘numbers, providing an inspiring new way to create complex sounds. Abyss can tweak, mangle and modulate sound to sonic oblivion, it can build endlessly evolving cinematic textures or create detailed, nuanced MPE instruments.
With more than two thousand tone colors, users can define the basic timbral dimension of their sound by placing their chosen tints or shades on a central tone gradient.
This powerful sound engine offers all the flexibility of a classical synth combined with rich, textures and a natural rainbow of sounds. With it, musicians and producers can quickly and easily shape tone colors in new, unheard of ways, enabling them to explore fresh new sonic possibilities.
Abyss features
- Unique and inspiring workflow based on sound colors.
- More than 2000 sound colors as building blocks for patches.
- Unique “sound surfing” for selecting sound colors.
- Each sound color can be modified with spectral processing.
- Noise parameter adds “musical noise” – specifically based on and tuned to the selected sound color.
- Virtual analog filter with resonance.
- Four sound effects: Shimmer, Delay, Reverb and Phaser.
- Optional brick wall limiter.
- Arbitrary modulation with 13 sources and 23 destinations.
- 2 ADSRs, 3 LFOs.
- LFO supports free drawing of curve.
- Two of the LFOs can be used as step sequencer.
- Unique “stereo” modifier that allows to skew most parameters differently for left and right channel.
- Modulation parameters can be modulated themselves (eg LFO-speed).
- Easy pitch snap function to stay within scale.
- MPE support.
- Scalable, responsive UI.
- More than 130 carefully crafted patches.
Available in AU/VST3 formats for both Mac and Windows, Abyss is priced $129 USD at Tracktion Corporation and from distributor Plugin Boutique.
