Artiphon

@David Benton

I did sample on the Orba-2.

I did not use the mic though.

Just straight out from the synth and into the Orba via the PC.

I have a way to go over Bluetooth (CME WIDI Bud and WIDI Master) but I went over USB.

Actually, the Samson G Track Pro was between the synth and the PC.

I've tried doing the presets by hand and have not had much luck.

Or do you mean sampling by using a mic?

Actually, I think you mean sampling a "real" instrument with a mic.

I don't have any "real" instruments because I have zero musical training/talent.  ;)

I need to be able to do it in MIDI so I can go back and fix it :P

Here are 3 more presets. Don't forget to change the octave!

@David Benton

I think you will like the BearSax. Play it deep and low.

@gerald rolon

I woud suggest looking through the "Orba 2 Hacking Knowledge Base" thread here. I have only been using the information I gleaned from there and applying it for my own aims. Much of the groundwork for what we know about how presets work was done with the Orba 1 (before I was here) and can be found in the equivalent thread for the Orba 1. The changes with the Orba 2 just made it more accessible to us.

Personally I would prefer using synth based presets myself, but have resorted to samples because of it's limitations. My concern is always how much storage space gets used up with samples. Synth based presets are much more economical.

The basics are that the first part of the SynthPatch section of a preset relates to the settings you'll find in the Orbasynth app. The bottom part correrelates to the gestures section. Effectively it's about changing certain paramters on the fly while playing sounds using the gestures. (In Windows, because of the limitations of it's implementation of midi, you can only guess what you are doing there - but you can modify those settings later.) Always change the readOnly and factory parameters to "0" so that you can delete or modify your preset.

The seeker entries control how the gestures and key touch data is dealt with. You may not need to touch them. Artiphon presets use one set mostly, but sometimes one or two other versions. However, these can be modified for your own evil purposes to disable, or change what they do. (In a few instances you can add or remove some entries.) Their use with sample based presets is limited.

@David Benton

Good info.  

Thank you.

I am intending to spend some time now on creating a new version library of the presets I made for the Orba 2. They will all be taken from my own Orba, and working.

This time I will add in MP3 samples of the sounds to make it more useful! And there will be some of the old ones,  some slightly modified to make them a bit better to use (IMHO), and some newer versions. Also some new ones, including a couple of sample based presets made with the new Preset Creator.

Any feed back on the old one would be welcome, and I will try and take suggestions, if there are any, and I can do something about it.

"new Preset Creator"?

@Subskybox - ah, I think you've been away from things Orba for a while!

Artiphon have release an update of the Orbasynth called the Preset Creator. It's basically the same thing but adds the capability to use a single sample file to create a preset - rather as it does with recordings made on the Orba. It also adds the ability to export presets for Orba 1 and 2 and also for the Chorda when it comes out.

The are a few things in the Orba 2 presets it makes that hint at what Chorda presets may be like and possibly adds one or two small other extra features to Orba 2 presets, though I've not tried them out. (There are panning parameters added in the synthpatch - though I suppose that might be just for the Chorda.) 

It's listed on the downloads page, but I think some have had trouble getting the download.

I tried making a preset to emulate the Chinese Zheng or Japanese Koto type instruments. Oddly, the Koto samples already on the Orba 2 didn't work so well, so I tried some other things. Here is one of the two best (the other one uses my own samples - this one uses the classical guitar samples - go figure!)

You only need the artipreset file - the rest is already on your Orba. Play close to the centre and move to the outer to bend the notes. (A slightly circular motion works best, I find.) It's pentatonic - not  quite the right scale for these instruments but ........ You can just about play it as diatonic if you're smart and your pitch bend is set to 100%!

Two HangDrum presets. I think they are about as good as you'll get on the Orba 2. As good as I'm going to do, anyway.

V2 has damping when a finger is held on the pad. V1 lets the notes ring either way.

There are soft and hard hit sounds for both.

If you choose to load only one version you will still need both of the two sample folders.

The scale and pad layout is, I think, a Japanese Akebono one -  but I may not have got that correct.

@David Benton

Thanks for the Hang Deep preset.  I like it.

Ditto for Zen Cheng.

Keep making presets.  I can sample those sounds into my PO-33 and Ableton.  So...., your preset sounds will lead a triple life in in another environment ;)

@gerald rolon

Thanks for the kind comments, it's appreciated. Although I'm not sure I'm keen on the idea of using them in other ways (I don't actually mind you doing it though). The idea of making the HangDeep presets was to take advantage of the similarities between the layout of the Hangdrums with the Orba's - which the drum mode allows. It's something others have wanted from the Orba.

By the way, your understanding of 4x4 devices is not right - the "grid" is just a set of buttons which can trigger various notes, samples or control messages to the DAW (or software). The patterns themselves are really just virtual sets of data about when events should happen, which can be visualised by the the software on the devices screen (if it has one) or on the computer screen. Usually, I think the only way the pattern might represented on the 4x4 grid  is to show  a row of buttons flashing to indicating which beat of a bar it is on. 

(For me, the biggest consideration is whether the buttons can be customised to work in a way I would like to use, which they mostly probably don't! The product descriptions rarely seem to tell me enough of what I want to know.)

@David Benton

What you described (with flashing lights, etc.) is exactly what I'm talking about.  See how a Pocket Operator (PO) from Teenage Engineering works.  That's exactly what they do.

A little light tells you which bar *and* which beat in that bar you're in.  The faster the tempo, the faster the light cycles through the buttons.

Orba does the same thing.  As you record, the light goes from pad to pad, showing you which beat you're in (but you have to keep track of the bar yourself).  The faster the tempo, the faster the light cycles through the pads.

I wonder if Orba allows me to select a slow tempo, record, and then speed up the tempo during play back.  The idea is to slow down the tempo so I can hit the right pad at the right time *and* keep track of which bar I'm in.  Then playback the recording at the intended speed.  I can do this with the PO.

@gerald rolon - ah now you're getting beyond my experience. I think you can record a "song" on the orba and play it at a different speed, but I confess I hardly ever try recording anything on the Orba. (Actually, I find it can be even harder to keep a beat when it's too slow. But keeping a beat is not my strong suite, as my friends have told me frequently and at length.)

@David

I have a feeling that Hangdeep samples could benefit from some eq, like  high-pass filter to cut the low side - seems like built-in speaker clips on the bass and gets dirty.

Thank you for your labor, by the way. you the only source of the interesting Orba related stuff  to read recently.

@Ignis32

Thanks for that - I stayed with the samples as I was given (that's also why they are in that tuning). I probably won't revisit these for a long while - I'm almost sick of the sound of Hangdrum sounds ringing in my head at the moment! I made a few attempts before I got to this good one.

The Orba software seems to do various things of dubious value - the Drum Kit sampling in the Connect app for example is heavy handed on cropping "silence" when a sound is fading out, it also seems to "normalise" the volumes in a set of samples, which destroys the dynamics, and anyway nothing sounds quite the same once the Orba has got it. (Still like it though!)