by Mat Dirjish

Orba, the popular hand-held music synthesizer that’s suitable for novices and pros alike, is expanding it’s features and versatility with Orbasynth. Described as a powerful preset creator for Orba’s internal MPE Synth, Orbasynth is a gesture-mappable synthesizer that allows for extensive customization of Orba sounds.

Orba
Via the Orbasynth app, users can tweak sounds or completely reinvent instruments. Orba has nine simultaneous playing gestures. With Orbasynth, users will be able to map Velocity, Press, Radiate, Tilt, and Move to control multiple synth parameters simultaneously.

Orbasynth
As Orba is an MPE controller and Orbasynth is an MPE synth, every tap pad can independently control several MIDI CCs for any of Orba’s three melodic modes: Bass, Chord, and Lead. Once the player crafts a sound, he or she can save it to the Orba App and/or send it to another Orba.

Orbasynth features include:

Morphing oscillators that mix saw, triangle, and other harmonic-rich waveforms with variable-width pulse waveforms that change dynamically with dedicated envelopes.
Three ADSR dynamic envelopes that allow sculpting of synth tones 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 for physical modeling and 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.
Presently, Orbasynth is free and available for download on the Antiphon website.