Artiphon

Anyone a Kalimba fan? would be OVER THE MOON if someone made something like that. I am unskilled in all things music, let alone the coding so i'm just hoping to spark someone's ich for a Kalimba lead.

@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.

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.

@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.

@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.

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.

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.)

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.

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