Artiphon

Great job ,and video is very cute)

Two new synth based presets for the Orba 2. These are a Diatonic Major, and Pentatonic Major versions of a wooden pipe organ type sound. In the higher octave it becomes a bit more like a bamboo flute or whistle, and in the lower octave soft and smooth.  I deliberately chose to keep them clean. No gestures, minimal reverb etc.

Install by merging the Common folders as described above or copying the image and preset files into the  images and lead folders respectively. 

Hope you might enjoy them.

Thanks to the guys above in this thread - they're understanding help a lot.

As an after-thought to my discussion with Rusty Perez about chords it has occurred to me that with an Orba with 7, not eight keys, it would be possible to create a set of open chords (ie: no thirds) that would play chords in any key using the same fingering patterns wherever you started (and therefor in any key). The 8th key messes up that idea. 

It couldn't work in Lead or Bass presets unless you used samples (perfectly tuned) and could switch off the pitch adjustments the orba does with samples. (I guess it is not impossible that there is a way of doing it if there is a way to switch it which we have not discovered yet.)

Sadly just a thought experiment, no more.

@gerald rolon

Oh, another thought came to mind - how are you unzipping the files? I habitually use 7zip for any archives -  perhaps other software for it does strange things to them? (Or perhaps 7zip does!)

@gerald rolon

I read your post again and had missed your comments about the samples - that seems very strange to me unless you did something odd with the files - Windows could possibly have done unwanted things if they were opened and saved again. (Although that seems unlikely.)

It wouldn't surprise me if Android or Apple OS's do their own things with peoples files.

Rather than re-sample sounds I would suggest double checking the properties of them - Windows apparently assumes that no-one would want to use 16bit audio anymore. I use a portable version of Audacity set up to use specifically for Orba stuff.

I have also had a suspicion that updates to the app may have introduced extra checks to the format of presets which led me to try slightly adjusting a couple of artipresets - but having loaded a bunch of my older presets successfully to a new Orba 2 recently I'm less convinced about that thought.

The SynthPatch in a preset are the same in both Orba 1 and 2, however the rest is different mostly because much of it is encoded in base64(? - I'm not that technically savvy) on the Orba 1. (You probably know that!)

I use Orbasynth to work on the SynthPatch only. The rest is all taken and adjusted from existing Orba 2 presets.

@gerald rolon

Sorry you had problems with the presets - I hope you didn't try to load them all at once! I wouldn't recommend that.

I have only ever had an Orba 2 and all the presets in that collection were taken from my Orba 2 and were working. (I made a point of doing that to avoid accidently including any of my working attempts or other files that might have errors.)

I think you may have done something wrong. I can only give any suggestions based on using the app on Windows - I don't have experience of using Macs, ipads or android. It might help if we knew what system you are using.

First thing is -  it won't work if you just copied the whole lot into the Artiphon folder in one go.

In your Artiphon folder (in your User>Documents folder) the .artipreset files should go into the Common>Presets>Lead, Chords or Bass folder as appropriate (most are leads). The images (not actually vital, but the app uses them) should go into the Common>Images folder (although I have found sometimes they need to be copied into the C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\Artiphon\Common\Images folder as well - don't know why that happens!) 

If the preset uses samples, the folder containing the samples needs to go into the Common>SamplePools folder.

The suggested method for loading each preset or group of presets is to merge the common folders in each individual folder of the collection and the Common folder in the Artiphon folder, which will put them in the right place, although I have a stubborn habit of doing it by copying them by hand myself.

Once the files are copied to the right places they should show up in the app and can then be loaded onto the Orba 2 - where there are samples they will take a bit more time to load.

Hope this helps.

@SubSkyBox

Hi, does your python code work with Orba-2?

Thanks,

-j

@David Benton

Hey David,

I downloaded the zip file you shared with us (DavidsOrbaPreset.zip) and I think you have an Orba-1.  I have an Orba-2 and only 2 or 3 worked.  The ones with sound samples did not work at all.  But I was able to sample the sounds one at a time and created presets that did work.

The ones without sound samples looked like they were created using OrbaSynth (which is not compatible with Orba-2).  If only Artiphon would have created a users manual or fix it so that OrbaSynth would work.

I wonder what bugs people are going to find in Chorda ;)

The Grand Piano preset uses 96 samples, the Electric Piano 45. Recording with the Orba uses 1.

I would love a Kalimba preset as good as the piano ones.  Anyone think this is doable?  I tried the recording thing and it only produces the right sound on a computer so whats the point of the little ball lol?

I have just realised that my presets using pitch bend rely on pitch bend being set at 100%. If you have loaded any of these and found they don't work as expected that's probably the reason. Just go to the settings page and set pitch bend to 100%. Alternatively, if you don't want to reset your pitch bend then you could change the numbers in the seeker entry in the preset. Sorry, but I can't tell you what numbers you would need though.

I have found when using pitch for sliding from one note to the other a circular motion on the key gives a better sound than a straight up and down motion a subtle difference but it works. (I will shortly post a new preset with a Chinese Zheng like sound - this works well with this.)

And finally, if you have one of these presets set when you are using Orbasynth it will respond to the pitch bend (on Windows at least), however this won't be included in any resulting preset you save from the app. You would have to tinker with the preset if you wanted pitch bend in the preset.

Oh, and one last (hopefully) thought. If you can get all the chords you want from seven keys (with open chords you could get a full chromatic set) you could do worse than use the 8th to set a diminished triad (not the four note chords that guitarists, including me, refer to as diminished chords). With pitch bend you should get 2 chords that would substitute for 6 7th chords! Haven't worked out which to use - but that may depend on what keys you use most.

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 have just managed to create a synth based lead preset for my Orba 2. Not sure if anyone else has managed this so far.

Basically I used Subskybox's Clarinet artipreset file and created a template (in Windows Notepad) removing all the references to samples. Then created an orbapreset file in Orbasynth (in this case it was a modification of the tilt lead voice). I then transferred the information from that into the template adding an image and the meta type info. I was careful about the formatting of these entries. Then transferred ifles to the common folder

It's not entirely successful (apart from the fact is doesn't sound great!) in that I lost the pitch bend that was an important part of what I was aiming for - but at least I got a working preset. Whether I lost that in my modifications in Orbasynth or in the transfer of data I'm not sure.

The scale setting was for Major pentatonic but when I tried it it was playing in minor - but this may just have been inherited from the song I previously had on the Orba 2 I suppose.

It's not an elegant way of doing it, but didn't involve much in the way of skill. I hope this might be of use to others.

As an aside, I was concerned that the hash I used for the image was not made from the image file - just a random one - but that hasn't mattered.

At a later date I will share the template - but I want to see if there are improvements I can make for function and useability.