When I reviewed the Orba again in late 2020, I used to be instructed there was no plan to open up the interior synth engine to customers; That due to the restricted assets accessible it might be tough to make it person pleasant. Artiphon simply didn’t appear to assume there’d be a lot curiosity. Well, I’m blissful to report that the corporate has lastly realized the error of its methods and constructed a (fairly) pleasant UI that lets you customized design patches for the Orba’s inner synth engine.

The core is a two oscillator engine with triangle, noticed and sq. wave choices, with pulse width modulation. There’s additionally a noise supply and a hoop modulator that you may combine in as nicely. There’s an LFO, three envelopes, a multimode resonant filter, a waveguide for bodily modeling, in addition to reverb and delay results. It’s not the deepest set of sound design instruments you’ll discover, however it would nonetheless mean you can craft a variety of sounds.

The engine appears to excel at glowing plucks, organ drones and digital howls. The one factor sadly you may’t do is construct drum kits, you’ll nonetheless must depend on prebuilt sound packs for these.

The app itself is free (“for now” within the phrases of Artiphon) for MacOS and Windows, and is laid out logically from left to proper, damaged up into modules that ought to be acquainted to anybody who has frolicked exploring a synth. The few considerably distinctive bits are the waveguide and gesture mapping controls.

The waveguide, which fashions the harmonic conduct of strings or pipes, relying on the setting, provides a formidable quantity of complexity and a few wealthy tones to what’s in any other case a reasonably easy synth core. You may even mix between the plain dry singal and that from the waveguide for extra depth.

The gesture controls is what actually makes Orbasynth particular, although. It is, quite clearly, constructed particularly to make use of with Artiphon’s Orba, so benefiting from its distinctive gesture controls ought to be a given. Here you may map tilts, shakes and outward glides to regulate every part from LFO pace, to filter cutoff to vibrato.

It could be good to see a number of extra choices added to Orbasynth to actually open it up. The LFO for example solely has a price management, no depth and you may’t assign it to customized parameters. Similarly some additional management over the results could be good, as would with the ability to management the waveguide with gestures.

Still, it’s arduous to complain an excessive amount of when that is one thing I and loads of different Orba customers have been clamoring for since day one. And, it’s free. Even when you don’t have an Orba you may go obtain the app from Artiphon’s web site and begin exploring.