Artiphon Players can now download a free, fun, gesture-mappable synthesizer that allows for extensive customization of Orba's sounds.
Your favorite musical grapefruit just got a lot more customizable. Orba players now have access to the internal sound engine that creates Orba’s sonic palette. Orba’s synth was designed from the ground up with a focus on intuitively translating simple gestures directly into music. Orbasynth is a standalone desktop app for Mac & Windows available now for free at artiphon.com/downloads.
Since releasing Orba, one of our most requested features from the community has been creating and editing sounds.
Because Orba is a gesture-based, MIDI polyphonic expression (MPE) synth and controller with multiple playing modes and complex routing, designing presets was something that had to be carefully done and curated by just a handful of sound engineers. But now, we’re pleased to offer this fun, friendly, and easily re-designed interface for all Orba players to explore.
With Orbasynth, you can now wear the lab coat (becoming the sound engineer yourself) and quickly see how expansive and customizable your instrument becomes. As the mad scientist, you'll be able to Tweak sounds or completely reinvent instruments to your heart's content. And with Orba's nine simultaneous playing gestures (more than any MPE controller on the market), the level of personalization is astronomical, allowing Orba players to easily map Velocity, Press, Radiate, Tilt, and Move to control multiple synth parameters at once. Since Orbasynth was specifically designed to take advantage of Orba's MPE controller capabilities, every pad you tap can independently control several MIDI CCs for any of Orba’s three melodic modes: Bass, Chord, and Lead.
Once you’ve crafted a sound you love, you can easily save it to the Orba App, load it into your own Orba so you can play it wherever you are, and share and trade it with friends and others in the Artiphon community via Discord. It’s a fun new way to add your fingerprint to the music you create with Orba.
Orbasynth features:
-
Morphing oscillators that mix saw, triangle, and novel harmonic-rich waveforms, with variable-width pulse waveforms that change dynamically with dedicated envelopes.
-
Three ADSR dynamic envelopes allow the synth tones to be sculpted by the player’s continuous playing on Orba’s capacitive-sensitive playing surface and respond to note-on and note-off velocities. Two different envelopes can control the two oscillators, noise, and the ring modulator while the third one controls a resonant filter.
-
A waveguide allows for physical modeling, creating unique instruments that have an acoustic-like familiarity. Orbasynth has two modes that emulate string and pipe harmonic structures.
-
Reverb, Delay, and Chorus effects provide sounds that range from subtle ambient air to dense sonic textures.
-
Map Orba gestures to synth destinations like filter cutoff and resonance, oscillator level, vibrato, harmonic, saw/triangle mix, harmonic mix. noise level, and LFO rate.
- You can also just spin the knobs until it sounds cool.
Orbasynth is free (for now) and available on our downloads page. Though you can play with and hear Orbasynth using any MIDI controller, it’s been designed to create presets specifically for Orba. Happy playing!
And don't forget to join the Artiphon Discord so you can share, trade, and play presets with Orba players around the world!
