Review: Dawesome MYTH from Tracktion

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The most compelling myths are the ones that make us want to believe.

Whether Zeus flinging lightning bolts at upstart mortals, Nessie backstroking around a loch or (spoiler alert) “Santa Claus” delivering three billion presents in one night, the best myths bring color, variety and wonder to our world.

Among virtual synths, Dawesome plugins generally bring color, variety and wonder in spades. But does the new Dawesome MYTH from Tracktion make you believe? Will MYTH inspire you to scuba into its depths, eager to uncover its mysteries — or make you cry “humbug” as a skeptic? Let’s find out.

MYTH was built to create the joy and inspiration we feel when playing with hardware… The sound is rich and organic, and the entire system acts like one organism.

Give the Drama a Myth (for Now)

Dawesome’s MYTH is a synth with many moving parts. So it makes sense to charge right in and explain things from the top down, step by step.

I’m… not going to do that. Because the most prominent feature of MYTH is also the most difficult to get one’s head around, may not behave as you’d expect and has caused a buzz of confusion, consternation and lack of combobulation among users since the synth’s release.

It’s also quite creative and versatile – but too easy to get bogged down with it right off the bat. So I’m saving that for the very end. Why wade waist-deep into hardening cement before you have to, eh?

(But keep the cement in mind – that’ll be important when we get to the end. Also, a Star Wars droid and a Hollywood starlet’s footwear. The usual stuff.)

A Myth of Many Modules

Let’s start with the bottom half of the MYTH interface, which looks like this:

In the central section are all the controls and components of a powerful near-fully modular synth. I say “near-fully” because the main sections along the right side – Arp, Osc1, Osc2, Filter, FX1 and FX2 — can’t be rearranged (though they can be turned off). Otherwise, the rules are all yours.

The workflow here starts with one or more Wave modules added to Osc1 or Osc2 to generate waveforms or noise as sound sources. The Osc sections also feature an arsenal of available modules, with multiple distortion, filter, modulation and resonator options.

These modules support a huge number of synthesis strategies, with modules dedicated to AM and FM synthesis, ring modulation (RM) and various filters and a Resonator suitable for physical modeling.  More esoteric effects include an emulation of the DIY Atari Punk Console and Glurp — which, according to the impressively thorough online manual, is modeled on Glurpy-Glorp. Because obviously.

Each section works, per the manual, as a “classical pedal board” – drag ‘n’ drop and mix ‘n’ match in whatever order you like. If the six available slots per Osc section are too limiting, the main effects are also available in the Filter section. The two FX sections also support some of those, in addition to various reverbs, a Grains granular delay and the parallel micro-looping Loophole, among others. Collectively, the possibilities are combinatorially boggling.

Mythical Modulation (and More)

The modulation options in MYTH are likewise numerous, varied and relatively bonkers. Looking at the whole interface now (but ignoring those two central rings for just a bit longer!), we see the user-definable modulation sources on the right:

With the Mod section selected, a modulation matrix is shown bottom centre. Modulation sources are assigned by adjusting the “pie chart” slider for a mod source with a specific parameter selected. Mod effects can be adjusted anywhere the modulation sources are displayed, whether user-defined LFOs, envelopes, MIDI, keytrack and math sources on the right or pre-defined factors and macros on the left.

MYTH ships with 700+ presets, available via the bar at the top or the Browse button near the bottom. The latter is a little more organized, displaying the presets at the right, with selectors by author, type, tone and timbre at the bottom.

Randomization and “happy accidents” are emphasized in MYTH. Near the bottom-right you’ll find a dice icon to randomize everything that hasn’t been “frozen”. Activate the Freeze button near the dice and a snowflake will appear beside every synth section, allowing you to lock certain aspects in place. Hold the dice a moment for modest randomization; press and hold to seriously scramble the sounds.

Beside the dice is an icon representing a newborn chick emerging from an egg. That’s the symbol for MYTH’s Breed function, usable when a subset of presets is displayed in Browse mode. Click the chick and MYTH will create a new “Frankenstein” patch, using aspects of the selected presets. Think of it as targeted randomization – or selective preset breeding, if you like. Gregor Mendel would totally rock this.

The Irises Have It

There are plenty more features in MYTH, from the handy tooltip display to the built-in limiter, note-taking section, undo/redo functions, export to WAV and more – but it’s time to address the twin looming elephants in the room:

These circles are MYTH’s Iris1 and Iris2. Each represents the profile of an audio sample in a loop – in the example above, the Iris on the left was generated from multiple sounds with gaps between; the iris on the right came from a more continuous sound, like a pad.

In MYTH, the irises are used as sound sources. Rather than (or in addition to) simple waveforms or noise, the myriad of effects in MYTH can be brought to bear on sonic profiles in irises that are richer and more nuanced, as they’re based on loops, sound effects, vocals, braams, claps, snaps, the snorts of twin looming elephants or whatever else your heart and ears desire.

These profiles are produced from any sound file dropped onto an iris. MYTH analyses the source sample and maps the general shape and “temporal evolution” onto an iris, using four internal oscillators, based on MYTH’s particular approach to resynthesis.

Please, Be Resyn-able

That last word is where many questions about MYTH arise. When some people think of “resynthesis”, they envision keeping all aspects of the source sound, particularly tone and timbre. For better or worse, that’s not the intent of resynthesis in MYTH. The focus is on defining the profile of the sound over its length, ready to be layered with MYTH’s various modules and modulators.

I think of it like the famous sidewalk imprints of various celebrity appendages near Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, outside the Chinese Theater. When George Clooney’s palms – or R2-D2’s treads or Dolly Parton’s cleavage – are pressed into the wet cement, tourists visiting later don’t find the items that made the indentations. (One hopes!)

Instead, they see the shape and details of the source material described by the impressions – available to be filled or augmented with something new. I wouldn’t suggest flying to Hollywood to pour champagne into the imprints of Marilyn Monroe’s stiletto heels – I understand security’s fairly humourless around that neighbourhood – but that’s analogous to the central idea of MYTH’s irises.

Viewed this way, MYTH’s irises are as useful, flexible and configurable as most everything else in the synth. Two rows of Transformers below each iris provide controls for playhead position and movement, various FM params and waveform properties to push the sound toward more saw or square wave, string-like, brassy, noisy or Pure sounds, according to your whims. Once sculpted, the iris outputs feed into the main sections described above, for further freeform fiddling.

The Realities of Myth

How does MYTH sound? Not to cop out, but it very much depends on the approach. As befits Dawesome’s growing reputation, the effect modules are lovely – in particular, the various filters, delays and reverbs sound fantastic in a variety of contexts.

Past that, though, MYTH is both very wide and very deep, in that you have an awful lot of modules at your disposal – plus an effectively infinite number of sound sources to iris-ize – and an extremely flexible framework for squashing them together and tweaking relationships between them. You can also drop in your own samples as sources for the modal filter and resonator, so it’s just exponential possibilities all the way down.

Many of the included presets are “FM-ish”, as the iris transformers lean in that direction – but others don’t lean on those transformers and sound entirely different,  use the iris output in entirely different ways, or ignore the irises entirely – like the preset in the first screenshot above, for instance.

Don’t Myth the Forest for the Trees

Everything about MYTH encourages exploration and testing. There’s less of a “learning curve”, in the sense of figuring out what’s possible – the basics are fairly obvious after a few minutes of clicking. But anticipating how different iris-processed sources or the interplay of various effects will affect the overall sound often requires just getting stuck in and experimenting.

Dawesome’s website stresses that MYTH is meant to be used like a hardware synth, which is to say by twiddling and tweaking to discover how things sound. The results are not always expected or pleasant or tame – engaging the provided limiter during more ambitious fiddling is highly recommended – but the possibilities are vast and sometimes unique.

 All of this – the modularity, the eclectic effects, the unique take on resynthesis, the new-to-everyone “iris transformers” – make MYTH somewhat less straightforward than many synths. It may not be for everyone (those who dislike twiddling unfamiliar knobs, to start) and those who do want to believe may take a while to uncover MYTH’s unique strengths and capabilities.

For those who enjoy sonic explorations, new sound sculpting strategies and deep-diving into sound design, MYTH may be very much worth a look. Tracktion offers a fully functional 90-day trial – and for a synth that doesn’t quite sound, look or operate like many others, that time will come in handy. But if you “click” with MYTH, it may well become a legend in your toolkit.

Buy Dawesome MYTH from Plugin Boutique (affiliate link)

Find out more about Dawesome MYTH (manufacturer link)