Most synthesizers ask you to think in oscillators, filters and envelopes. Dawesome Abyss never did. Instead of a signal path, it hands you a palette of colors, each one representing a tone extracted from spectral analysis of a sample, and lets you browse and morph through them visually. It was one of the more genuinely unusual instruments of recent years, and it has just received a full sequel.
Dawesome Abyss 2 is available now, and for MPE players the headline is simple: the new version supports MPE fully, with mappings across all the standard expression dimensions.
What Abyss Actually Does
Abyss's engine slices incoming samples into many short frames and extracts spectral data from each one. From that data it derives a model, and then machine learning assigns each model a color and places it on a two-dimensional palette so that similar-sounding tones sit near each other.
Developer Peter Vogelaar is careful about the terminology here, describing the approach as "the sweet little sister of AI" — no training on scraped material, no data centres, just mathematics applied to the samples you give it. The practical result is that sound design becomes navigation. You move across a gradient and hear the timbre shift, rather than tweaking a filter cutoff and hoping.
That model happens to fit expressive control unusually well. If your instrument's core parameter is position on a color field, then a continuous controller dimension — slide, pressure, per-note pitch — has somewhere meaningful to go.
The MPE Implementation
Abyss 2 supports MPE with all possible mappings to your controller's dimensions, which in practice means the five-dimensional gestures from a Seaboard, Osmose, LinnStrument, Continuum or ERAE surface can be routed into the color engine rather than just into a generic filter.
Dawesome has also been sensible about the non-MPE case. The instrument works normally with standard keyboards and controllers, so the MPE routing is an additional layer rather than a requirement. That matters more than it sounds: several otherwise excellent MPE-first instruments become awkward when you sit down at a plain 61-key controller, and this one doesn't.
Everything Else in the Update
The MPE addition arrives inside a substantial rework:
- Drag-and-drop sample import. You can now drop samples straight onto the gradient to convert them into tone colors, or onto the palettes themselves to extract colors and build custom palettes.
- Mono mode. Abyss 2 remains polyphonic but adds a mono option for basses and leads.
- Three macro controls — brute, velvet and syntify — sitting on top of the engine.
- Expanded modulation, with a larger LFO area, a slow mode for the ADSR envelopes, and the ability to modulate the envelopes themselves.
- A new multi-FX processor with 16 new effect types plus custom presets, and an improved limiter.
- A polyrhythmic sequencer for building more complex melodic material.
- A rebuilt preset browser with tags, filters and pack support, plus undo/redo, a randomizer, simple MIDI controller mapping, and a high-contrast mode for accessibility.
The library ships with 400+ presets from professional sound designers: over 200 new patches and over 200 reworked classics from the first version. Abyss 1 presets load directly in Abyss 2, and user presets transfer with a single click — a small detail that saves anyone with an invested patch library a lot of irritation.
Pricing
Abyss 2 is available at an introductory $89/89€ instead of $149/149€, with upgrades from the original at $45/45€ instead of $75/75€. Anyone who bought the original Abyss during 2026 gets the upgrade for free. It's also listed at Plugin Boutique.
Why It's Worth a Look
The MPE plugin market has been filling out quickly, but a lot of that growth has been in familiar categories — physical modeling, wavetable, additive, virtual analog. Abyss 2 is doing something structurally different, and expressive controllers suit it. Sliding along a key to walk through a color palette is a very different musical gesture from sliding along a key to open a filter, and it produces results that are harder to get any other way.
If you already own an MPE controller and your patch library has started to feel same-shaped, this is one of the more interesting places to point it right now.
Sources: Synth Anatomy, Dawesome