@BJG145
Thanks for the feedback. I like the idea of showing the notes, but the way the modifier actually works is a series of 4 relative offsets from the root note which comes from the scale notes (Major or Minor). For example, for Pad 1 in C Major the root note is C. Each chord has exactly 4 voices so the offsets for Chord/Pad 1 for the Major scale are [0,7,12,16] or [C,G,C,E]. For the C Minor chord they use [0,3,7,0] or [C,E♭,G,C]. Notice the 2 zeros in the Minor chord offsets. Two voices are playing the same note so it sounds like a 3 note chord.
I do have a dev version of the Chord Fiddler tool that allows to modify values outside of the Major/Minor character areas. I've messed with them and many of them cause the Orba to crash and have completely made the Chord Mode unusable. I elected not to release that since it could maybe brick someone's device. I was able to recover by loading a full song which appears to re-write all the required values back.
I would be careful with the Chord Fiddler that I've published. I've since learned that the way I change the characters is totally wrong. I am allowing the user to pick any ASCII values and this will lead to problems. Instead stick to the Base64 Character set which I now know is how it needs to be.
I'm planning to correct the Fiddler first as I think this might only need a few hours of work. But I have a good plan now for the Orba Virtual Piano which will include Chord buttons and will send the altered chord notes directly to the Orba so you can hear them as you adjust. This is going to take more work and may have to wait a bit.. My wife says I'm spending too much time with Orba :P
I also had another realization. If I change all the offsets to zeros (i.e. [0,0,0,0]), that will essentially play the same note four times. This could be used to set the scale of a regular sound like Bass or Lead. I tried this by dumping a Chord sound into the Bass Preset folder and it only plays one of the voices from the chords. Once I have the Fiddler updated, it could also work for regular voice scales! AND it would be able to be transposed not like the "percussion" hack that has been shared. I'll hopefully have some updates in the next week or two.
I don't know why I love Hall & Oates?! Here are the ManEater chords. Set Orba to B-minor then play Pads 3|2|4|1|6|7|5|8-7-8
Please make up your mind, Artiphon. Update your software or hand it over.
"Depending on the vendor, end-of-life may differ from end of service life, which has the added distinction that a vendor of systems or software will no longer provide maintenance, troubleshooting or other support. Such software which is abandoned service-wise by the original developers is also called abandonware. Sometimes, software vendors hand over software on end-of-life, end-of-sale or end-of-service to the user community, to allow them to provide service and further upgrades themselves." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-life_product)
So I've finally bit the bullet and got an Orba, immediately got annoyed by the lack of diatonic options for Lead voices, so I went ahead and copied every standard Lead voice and changed them to be diatonic. Archive with the .orbapreset files is attached, for anyone else interested (and those too lazy to do the work themselves :P)
Side Note; Did anyone else notice that the Lead voices respond to the bumping gesture with a 2-octaves-lowered D-note?
I don't know if someone has a use for this: Orba + Chill presets with fixed 32 bars instead of maximum 8 bars.
And I don't know if there is a maximum of fixed bars or if it hurts your Orba.
Open song in a texteditor. Search and replace the value after "nBars="
Interesting rewrite of the XML format. It looks more readable now, comparing eg the old Ambeeant Seeker Entry.
Then...
<SeekerEntry seekerData="AQEAAAgAgRQAAwEBAQEAAAAAAAD/fwAAfwAAAA==" seekerUuid="64358c1f-2ef5-4fd0-b3fd-ad8c4f93b839"
uuid="b827a749931a42a78351cbaf6948f5b4"/>
Now...
<SeekerEntry inputLength="Default" inMin="0" inMax="1" outMin="0" outMax="127"
seekerType="Controller" controller="Aftertouch" triggerSource="Default Note Source"
triggerRule="Source" metricSensor="Default Note Source" metricSelection="MPE Z"
maxRate="20"/>
"Orbacam is available for iOS from the Apple App Store."
I don't understand why Artiphon spends time on applications like "Orbacam" - iOS only(!) and ignores basic feature requests.
They should go open-source...
The new tools and discoveries by @Subskybox have inspired me to go digging around with other random changes to the code to see what else we might find. Eg a set of random changes within the "Uuid" strings has turned up a patch where "Lead" delivers the same set of chords as "Chord", but with the Lead voice, allowing you to switch between them live.
There's a problem in that the utility presets are based around CC output instead of synth output, because that's what I'm mainly interested in. So I'm not sure how useful this data will be in that respect. Maybe I should start again, referring to the Lead presets instead. :-(
Just received my Orba 2 this afternoon! I will see if the tools work with Orba 2 in the next week or so. We should probably start an Orba 2 Hacking forum.
>I also had another realization. If I change all the offsets to zeros (i.e. [0,0,0,0]), that will essentially play the same note four times. This could be used to set the scale of a regular sound like Bass or Lead. I tried this by dumping a Chord sound into the Bass Preset folder and it only plays one of the voices from the chords. Once I have the Fiddler updated, it could also work for regular voice scales! AND it would be able to be transposed not like the "percussion" hack that has been shared. I'll hopefully have some updates in the next week or two.
I've only just caught up with this idea. So...yes, this gives us a way to put something like a transposable Dorian scale on the "Lead" button. :-)
Here's an example:
Boy boy. No fun, just pity. It sounds a lot like what Artiphon did with the Orba 1. Put out an unfinished product and then engage the customers with false promises. Before you know it, you can participate in the beta team for free. Good luck!
More Presets!! 7th chords rule!
Couldn't believe it when I found the 7th chords option, but only for one patch... Those 7th chords sound nice! A quick diff between the 7th chords.orbapreset and others, shows that the only noticeable differences exist in the <ModifierList> and <SeekerList> entries - while I can't decipher any of the actual contents, simply swapping out the entire ModifierList and SeekerList from the 7th chords preset to other presets puts them into 7th chord mode!
Once again, an archive with all stock chord presets as 7th chords is attached. I've also included 'Normal Chords.orbapreset' which is the stock 7th chords preset, but modified to use the standard chord layout.
@BJG145
I like your ideas for the "Note Fiddler".. At this point I'm going to stop any development on the Chord Fiddler and start working on bringing this functionality into Orba Virtual Piano. If you noticed, the Virtual Piano can sense what mode you're in (Drum, Bass, Chord, Lead) so I imagine I'll have a section underneath that is the editor portion for that mode. I may never get to drums, especially now that Orba 2 is coming. Bass is monophonic so editing the scale is straightforward. I like the Dorian scale you shared above (this confirms it can be done). There are a few places where the mode can be set in the .orbapreset file and messing with those may correct the phasing effect you describe. As for the Lead mode (which is polyphonic), I can see why it accepts all 4 voices even if they are the same. Maybe the remaining characters in the ModifierData string control turning the voices on/off. Who knows. I can quite easily make a version of this that supports the whole string. More on this later. I'd love your help trying to see what they control. There are obvious indexes where there are values that seem deliberate. I think one might control the scale mode. That's a theory I have from messing with these values with the old Fiddler, but the new version will correctly target the values.
I just created a new Topic: Orba Utilities to continue this conversation.
Andrea Mannocci
This thread is intended to gather the feedback of Orba tinkerers.
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