Artiphon

Hey folks, As I am interested in the orba2 as a songwriting companion, and since it is so cumbersome to change keys, I've come up with an idea for a multi-chord preset.I was inspired to think about this when I saw Floyd Steinberg's video on youtube about making presets.So, instead of having all chords for one key, what about a subset of chords from several keys? Taking inspiration from a button accordion, The chords are arranged in the circle of fifths, (I IV V) played with the middle, index, and ring finger respectively, and the minor VI played with the thumb placed on the opposite side of the circle. For the following example, the chords (allowing the keys of G, D and A,) are arranged (pad 1 G, pad 2 D, pad 3 A pad 4 E, pad 5 Em, pad 6 Bm, pad 7 F#m, pad 8 C) These chords are arranged in such a way for the key of G, the middle finger hits the tonic chord (G) The index finger chord IV (C) the ring finger chord V (d) and the thumb VI (Em) Turn the orba to your right, put middle finger on pad 2 (d) and your pattern is repeated in the key of D.One more turn to the right, middle finger on pad 3 note (A) and the pattern is repeated in the key of A. Additionally in some keys there will be a few other related chords. What are your thoughts?Has this been done already?Any suggestions for improvement or any problems I'm missing?:)Rusty

I was going to hold back posting these synth based presets until I could get round to making a collection of my recent experiments. But these presets are, I think, the best and most beautiful I have made. You don't even have to use them in a song to get a lot of pleasure from them. You might even find your Orba 2 seems incomplete without them.

Try versions 3 or 4 of the chord presets using key 1 to keep the beat with and the others for a bit of melody. There is a gentle percussive hit to the notes that makes this work well.

The Oct Lead preset is particularly good to play simple two part contrapuntal with the lower part played on keys close to the centre and the higher on the outer rim parts of the keys. It takes some practice, but it's well worth the effort. You can get results you wouldn't have thought possible.

Please note the Chromatic and Octave capable versions probably won't play well with external midi the devices and software. I don't do that myself so I haven't tested it but the way these are made means they may not pass the right midi messages to do it.

As ever, thanks to those whose efforts in finding and sharing how presets work enabled me to make these.

I have done a quick clean up of the Artiphon Hand Pan preset. In my opinion the use of pitch bend on it makes in unusable holding the Orba in hand. So I removed that. I also made a chromatic version using my preferred version of @Subskyboxs' trick,  I don't think it works well - but someone might like it. It would be easy to modify that to use tilt for this rather than position of touch on the keys as I have done here.

Artiphon used a small sample set (a good thing) but I feel using a larger set would have allowed using velocity to give different sounds which would be more like a real instrument. One or two of the samples seem to make my Orba make scratchy noises -  this happens sometimes, I 've abandoned one or two sample sets I made for this reason. That could be just my Orba playing up though.

As long as you have the Hand Pan preset (Lead) loaded, all you need to do is load the artipreset file(s).

(You can delete them if you want to - you won't lose the Hand Pan samples and preset if you still want them.)

Hey, people let's keep it friendly here, please. It's been a nice place to be so far, let's not spoil that.

This thread was intended for sharing the things we have done with presets. We should keep it to that. 

When I get my thoughts in order I'll create a thread where you can discuss what you want from the Orba 2 but bear in mind that what we want may not fit in with Artiphon's vision of what the Orba should be.

@meow

>>  tell me more about this sf2 converter you made? sounds amazing. does it work on drums? 

 >> really want to create my own drumkits.

All code that I wrote on that topic so far  is located here:

https://github.com/ignis32/Sf2toOrba2

It is a bunch of python scripts, which utilizes sf2 parsing library, and my own code to parse orba2 artipreset files  and append it with converted  samples from sf2. It works for some extent for some sf2 stuff, and I'd made some orba presets with this tool, but due to lack of documentation is unlikely to be used by somebody who is not a developer, as  it is in an alpha-state mess.

Amount of the edge cases with sf2 and orba2 format exceeded my enthusiasm at some point, especially considering that I see no progress with the orba itself and it's buggy software. Artiphon does not fix reported bugs, does not communicate,  app is still unstable, only thing signs of life that I see is marketing stems stuff which I do not find entertaining or useful. Right now it feels like working on  these scripts is investing time into a dead product, so I am applying myself to other project and do not plan to improve anything for now.  ( If they would release OrbaSynth2 it probably would be interesting again for me)

Therefore if you are a python developer, I hope you can find some inspiration in my spaghetti code, otherwise I am afraid it is too far from being ready for primetime for you to benefit from it.

@meow

There's a lot of questions there which would probably be better to deal with in seperate threads.

However:

First - the missing files. They should be there in the zip file. There are two types of preset, those that use the built in synth and others that use samples. (Drum presets can actually use both - but that's a different story.) For synth based preset two files are required, for sample based there are also the samples (in their own folder) are required. The images and samples get loaded into "This PC > Documents > Artiphon > Common > Images" and the samples in the "SamplePools > User" folder. Check that the files from each preset required are in their proper place - if not, just copy them over from my collection.

(Images and Samples can be shared and used by different presets - so once they have been put in place they don't need to be reloaded, and they may not have the same name as the preset.) If there really are any missing I will upload those here.

I have found that sometimes Images don't show up in the app (they don't get saved on the Orba itself). Sometimes they magically appear later, occassionally not. However you could try putting them in "This PC > OS(C:) > Users > Public > Public Documents > Artiphon > Common > Images" - It usually cures this issue for Images. Doesn't work for samples.

Second - Artiphon aimed the Orbas to be instruments that could be used to create music with little or no musiscal knowledge. I feel this is well-meaning but a flawed and short-sighted philosophy - it's a too common type of thinking in the music tech industry and the tech industry in general in my opinion. It does mean that it has been rather locked down in some respects and which we have not found ways past. That is rather frustrating but I sort of enjoy doing what I can.

I only opted to buy an Orba when I had learnt that I could bend the rules as it were so I got what I expected largely.

One thing that has been frustrating people is that it is locked down to Major and Minor scales. There is a very compromised and limited workaound to create different scales - but it involves making a chord preset which plays two octaves of a note instead of a chord which can be forced into the required scale in the chord modifier section of the preset.

Changing octaves wasn't something I did - that's built into the Orba already!

Although the presets are in xml it's not really like xml as it's normally used, I think, otherwise I'd find it too painful!

I was going to say that with the chromatic type presets you can play the other types of scales - but you have to practice! And that goes back to my comment about the philosophy - the arts in general require learning and effort to be really good!

(While writing this I've seen you're other posts, and see you've been looking through previous posts here - so I won't try and regurgitate any more of what has already been said.)

@Subskybox

Which editor are you using? I think it would be a pretty cool thing if there was a vscode (or whatever) extension. It could make all the really annoying things ok to deal with.

im a noob at this and ive not read all the documentation to feel free to get annoyed at my dumb questions, but i was wondering. there is this guy who made cool orbapreset files for tunings and scales. is it possible to get them to work in orba2? i know orba2 uses artipreset files.

could you kinda explain to me how orba1 and 2 are different? is the sound engine different? the hardware and software honestly confuses me :) is orba1 actually not using samples at all and running a percussion synth? thats silly.

@Ignis32

 tell me more about this sf2 converter you made? sounds amazing. does it work on drums? i really want to create my own drumkits.

ok nevermind, so if anyone else has the issue i had, my solution was to move the files to the public user documents folder (on windorks).

now it looks all pretty.

I am looking into the documents you suggested, I need a 6th diminished scale or the ability to diminish or augment with a gesture or something. pentatonic jazz gets boring real quick unless you have miles davis type skills which i dont.

@HisMajestyBentonAkaTheOracleOfOrba

So, wait, I bought this thing to make music without having to deal with a bunch of steps inbetween, you know, just keep this weird ball in my pocket and just do lets say 80s feature set of samping. I was not expecting much. But man is this thing software wise made really oddly.

Like why cant I manually change the midi notes to what i want? it even has a plus and minus button. just so many things i dont understand.

So anyway, now im sad, and ontop of this you want me to work?

haha btw the presets you made are really fun. playing around with them sometimes generates sound that makes no sense but thats kind of why i got it to begin with, so thanks for allowing the device to make new sound due to the octave up and down gestures and chromatic scale.

chromatic scale was really all i needed. i can loop and layer over what i need and pitch the octave up properly or via gesture for spotanious fun. im not joking when i say you made this thing useful.

so im not going to lie, i was pretty stoned and the zip you have says some files are missing when i import them. pretty sure i did what it says in your documentation but im gonna guess i did something wrong?

there are no pictures of your instruments. 

Artiphone>Common>Presets>Bass>Bluecello

Artiphone>Common>Presets>Chord>Bladechords

Artiphone>Common>Presets>Lead>Brazil

This is what it looks like.

Also am I understanding it correctly that its not possible to revert/factory reset? (that would be funny)

I do know html and xml, and the xml part is exactly why i am so happy you have done, what you have done. xml makes me cry.

The Orba1 and Orba2 being so different is so weird. and Orba2 not being backwards compatible is just a strong sign to me that these devices are not really for me. Because i promise you they will change some api at some point and all your presets will require a converter or something. (Murphys Law)

Could you outline for me what the possibilities I would have if I was to sit down and read the spec for the device? I have worked with supercollider3 and other sound synths and I kind know my way around midi, so a high level outline is fine. I just wanna know what I can expect.

What is the company actually doing? Those stem things are useless because the audio is copyrighted... Just terrible use of time unless they are getting something for it.

Ok I might add these forums to my WC-Reading-List and get up to date and maybe become helpful.

But again! Thank for your work (and everybody else who have contributed), im still so confused why somebody creates a sampler and does not include a microphone. how does that even make sense. is that not the first thing you need to sample? i am so disapointed.

@meow

What we could really do with is an Orbasynth app that works with the Orba 2. It won't help much with gestures  when working on a Windows pc  though - for that, we at least need a bit more information on the seeker entries in the presets.

(By the way, if you have even a basic knowledge of Html you can get to grips with xml - the format used for the presets - quite easily. The other things to watch out for  are a few simple things that need to be done and it is not too hard to start making or modifying presets. Much of that is discussed in the hacking thread - looking at the Orba 1 hacking thread is also useful.)

I think it may be possible to do more and better with the drum presets (in ways that might suit you) but I can't quite work all that out yet.