The long(ish) awaited Dawesome Myth was released a few days ago, conveniently after my album release. Despite a lot of words on the website about how easy and intuitive it is, it’s a synth you can go very deep with, which is reflected in its generous 90 day demo period.
Looking at the GUI and some of the hype, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the raison d’etre of the plugin is its resynthesis engine. But:
- you can leave this at a default sine wave, and using only a handful of “transformer” parameters, make several radical changes to the sound using FM and really intuitive waveshaping
- you can add modules to the oscillator, filter or FX sections of the synth which allow for multiple types of FM as well as ringmod, AM, subtractive, distortion synthesis and physical modeling
- you can entirely disable the “iris” and add an oscillator module with a choice of classic waveshapes and then use that for most of the other synthesis methods
It’s not a standard FFT analysis, additive resynthesis thing like Alchemy and many other predecessors, where it produces a similar-but-slightly-worse version of the input. It produces something that is kind of related to the input, but not always recognizable. Some people think “it’s crap” and give up right there. But as far as I can infer, the point isn’t to sound like other synths but to provide feed stock for those transformers.
On the one hand, different strokes synths for different folks. On the other, the people dismissing it because it isn’t the thing that they thought it should be are missing out.
I almost had talked myself out of getting Myth before digging very far into the demo myself, not because of anything about the synth itself, but because I looked over my gear usage for the last four releases and it was a bit surprising. The breakdown for voices (looking strictly at their origin, not effects/processing) is about like this:
50% Eurorack
20% software synths (VST/CLAP)
15% software modular (VCV Rack & Bitwig Grid)
5% Strega/Minibrute 2S
5% bass
5% other hardware / physical instruments
Within the softsynth category, usage was spread out between several different plugins. My absolute favorite softsynth, Aalto, got used 2.5% of the time. My second most used was, to my surprise, Manis Iteritas. I had a 5-way tie for third-most. There are plenty of excellent synths I like that got used just once or not at all… so does it make sense to get more softsynths?
After trying the demo of Myth though… yes, it does. It’s almost closer to the VCV Rack category than any other synth I have.
Also, now I don’t feel so bad about not playing the bass more. That’s just how it goes for me, and that’s OK. (But this is something I’ll come back to think about with each potential new gear purchase…)
Also the new Mystic Circuits Ana 2 was released. I kind of thought about skipping it after all — I don’t really need the additional utility it provides after all — but the greatly expanded potential for fun modulation made me decide to go ahead and grab it.