Artiphon releases Orbasynth: A Powerful Preset Creator for Orba's Internal MPE Synth

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 for free at artiphon.com/downloads.

Since releasing Orba, “I want to create my own presets” has been a request we’ve received over and over. Orba is a gesture-based, MIDI polyphonic expression (MPE) synth and controller with multiple playing modes and complex routing. So until now, presets had to be carefully designed and curated by just a handful of sound engineers. But now, we’re pleased to finally offer this fun, interactive feature for Orba players to explore.

With the Orbasynth app, you can now connect your Orba and quickly see how expansive your instrument becomes. Tweak sounds or completely reinvent instruments to your liking. Orba has nine simultaneous playing gestures, more than any other MPE controller on the market. With Orbasynth you’ll be able to map Velocity, Press, Radiate, Tilt, and Move to control multiple synth parameters at once. Because Orba is an MPE controller and Orbasynth is an MPE synth, 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, send it to your own Orba, or share it with a friend. 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 at Artiphon.com/downloads. Though you can play with and hear Orbasynth using any MIDI controller, it’s been designed to create presets specifically for Orba (in stock and available at Artiphon.com). Happy playing!