Full Interview: Peter V. from Dawesome (MYTH) (Patreon)

Full interview with Peter V. from Dawesome!

MYTH, the new synth from Dawesome is out and as most of you know, it's AWESOME! However, there was some confusion about MYTH when it was first released so I wanted to uncover the mystery of why that is and find out more. To help clear the air, I tracked down Peter V. the mastermind behind all of Dawesome's products to get his take on what MYTH is, what it can do, and the technology it's based on. The following interview is the companion piece to the video on my main channel which premiere's June 18th, 2024 at 8am PST.

Video Link: https://youtu.be/zrMwRa8Kf0g

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1.) What was your thought process behind MYTH? What drove you to create this style of synthesizer?

Normally in sound design you start with a "static" sounding waveform, and then you need to setup tons of LFOs, ADSRs, filters etc to bring life and organicity into the sound. I wanted to create a synth that exploits the organicity of samples - so that you can take a sample with an interesting temporal evolution or texture and then use this as your source for movement in your sound.

2.) Can you tell us what's actually happening with the samples when the become "resampled" ? How is machine learning incorporated?

The sound engine for the IRIS internally uses 4 spectral oscillators. Each of these can create any static timbre and has an envelope with 500 segments for the gain. When you drag and drop a sample the machine learning approximates the sample by finding the best spectra and envelopes for these 4 oscillators. As a consequence the resulting sound will always be "tonal", that is you can play it like a tuned instrument. At the same time this means that you will not get perfect reconstruction of the sample - but you will get a sound that follows the spectro-temporal evolution of the sound.

3.) What did you learn while creating MYTH? Was there an "Ah ha!" moment while you were coding it when things finally came together?

Initially I wanted to make a very simple FM synth. I had some innovations on FM and wanted to create something where you can get all the typical FM timbres, but without all the complicated "operators", "algorithms", "carriers" etc. Then I thought it would be nice to get rid of needing to setup so many envelopes. Then I thought it would be cool to have more "transformers" - that can expressively shape the sound like a filter sweep or a FM-ratio sweep, but with different timbres. Then I thought it would be nice to have modular approach, but without cables ... by chaining modules like you do in a guitar pedal board. In the end something that was supposed to be a tiny 3-4 months project ended up as an 18 months effort. My main learning was that there is always something left to be desired ...

My "aha-moment" happened when I gave Myth to sound designers - and they had a burst of creativity and fun and started to take all kind of garbage samples like toilet-flushing and turned it into expressive instruments.

4.) It's nice to see various parts of your previous synths make their way into MYTH! Do you think you'll go back and do any "Version 2" of anything in the Dawesome catalog?

Yes, actually for each of the instruments I want to make a "Version 2". I don't want to make just a little facelift, instead for each of the instruments I have something in mind that will really bring it to the next level. I have to balance the work on the updates with work on new plugins, so I can't promise specific dates.

5.) Now that MYTH is out in the wild, what would you like to say to anyone who hasn't tried it yet or might want to take a second look?

There is a fully functional 90 days free trial ... and it comes with 700 presets that can give you an overview of its capabilities. Myth is very intuitive and user friendly and approachable even for people with little or no experience in sound design. But it is an innovative instrument that requires a slightly different approach - so the best way to deal with Myth is to regard it as an adventurous playground that wants to be explored and will give you tons of "happy accidents".

GET MYTH: https://bit.ly/49TMbu6