Arturia has had great success with their “V” line of soft synths that look and sound like the classic cars of the synth world: the Moog Modular and Minimoog, Yamaha CS-80, Roland Jupiter-8, Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and Prophet VS, and ARP 2600. What could be cooler than to bundle these together in a single hardware box with lots of knobs, a step sequencer, and some modern goodies?
by Jim Aikin
HANDS-ON (Click image for larger version).
1. Input for putting external audio through Origin’s synth engine and effects gets its own front panel knob with LED meters.
2. The joystick can access up to three pairs of settings for groovy realtime tweaking.
3. The white knob in each of these sections selects which oscillator, filter, LFO, or envelope in a patch is controlled by the gray knobs.
4. It’s not a touchscreen, but the hi-res color LCD provides plenty of detail.
5. Buttons below the LCD provide one-click access to the main pages.
6. The numeric keypad is strictly for calling up sounds, not for entering parameter values when programming sounds.
7. Press this wheel in (it’s also a button) to enter and exit data entry mode.
8. The mixer section gives you instant control over the layers in a patch or patches in a multi.
9. These knobs are effect returns when effects are routed in parallel, and wet/dry controls when the effects are in series. Bypass individual effects, and call them up for editing, with the buttons.
10. Using this row of 16 knobs and the backlit buttons below them, you can interact with a sequence seamlessly as it plays.
11. Wood side panels and curved lip at the bottom can be removed for rackmounting.
REAR PANEL (Click image for larger version.)
The long row of 1/4" jacks around back includes left and right audio inputs, main audio outs, eight aux audio outs, footswitch and sweep pedal inputs, and the headphone out, which has its own level knob on the front panel. You also get S/PDIF digital audio out and USB.
NEED TO KNOW
What is it? A hardware synth with high-quality digital models of the oscillators and filters from several classic analog synths.
What classic synths? Oscillator and filter models based on the Minimoog, Roland Jupiter-8, Yamaha CS-80, and ARP 2600.
How many notes will it play at once? As many as 32 notes with simple patches, about 12 with moderately complex patches, and as few as three or four in multi-patch layers.
How easy is it to program sounds on the built-in LCD? If you understand modular synthesis, it’s very easy. If you’re new to this type of programming, there’s a learning curve.
Can I use it on external audio? Yes. Stereo audio inputs on the rear panel can be routed through the filters and effect modules.
What are Arturia’s future plans for Origin? More pre-configured templates of classic instruments. MIDI transmission of knob and joystick moves. A data readout onscreen for the knobs. Multichannel USB audio output to computer.
PROS
Monstrously huge sound. Lots of knobs. Interactive step sequencer. Highly patchable, quite like a modular synth. Four-part multitimbral with aux outs. Numerous modules emulate vintage synth components.
CONS
Limited polyphony. Several important features not yet implemented. No compare button for patch edits. Manual contains some minor errors and could be clearer.
INFO
$3,200 list/approx. $2,500 street, arturia.com
Arturia has had great success with their “V” line of soft synths that look and sound like the classic cars of the synth world: the Moog Modular and Minimoog, Yamaha CS-80, Roland Jupiter-8, Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and Prophet VS, and ARP 2600. What could be cooler than to bundle these together in a single hardware box with lots of knobs, a step sequencer, and some modern goodies?
That’s Origin, but it isn’t just a hardware version of Arturia’s existing software. It’s a full-fledged modular synth in its own right. You can run Moog and Jupiter oscillators through ARP and CS-80 filters, for instance. Although it’s capable of some edgy, digital-era sounds, Origin is mainly about huge analog sound.
FACTORY SOUNDS
Can you say “big”? Can you say “monstrously big”? I knew you could. When it comes to amazing sounds, Origin gets full marks. You’ll find fat ’80s synth-pop pads like “City Lights,” analog strings and choir such as “JP Strings” and “Memory Voices,” greazy basses such as “Zyzz Bass,” and “Dancin in L.A.,” trancy arpeggio patterns like “Fluid Arpeggio” and “Arpturia”, light leads (“7tease”), cutting leads (“Feedback”), a Joe Zawinul-esque multi called “FerretKing,” meat-and-potatoes comping fodder from jazz guitar to synth strings to electric piano, and much more.
Stylistically, more of Origin’s factory patches lean toward a Euro-techno vibe than toward the warm, “natural” analog sounds you’d hear on mainstream tracks out of L.A. Having spent a few weeks with Origin himself, Executive Editor Stephen Fortner observed, “Factory sounds can have a lot of bells and whistles because the designers want to show off everything their new baby can do. With Origin, I found that getting more complex patches to sound ‘old-school’ was often a matter of dialing back the effects and removing a modulation or two.”
Factory sounds are in no particular order, but two category search fields at the top of the screen let you find what you need quickly. When saving your own patches, you can give them a project name, then search by project as well as by type (lead, keyboard, etc.), sound designer, and so on.
Click here for an audio example I did using Origin sounds exclusively. This quick sketch was captured in Steinberg Cubase 4. It uses nothing but stock single patches. Heard in order of appearance are 0012 Annoying Arp, 0009 Hard Seq, 0014 Artur Ld, 0022 Drum Thing Seq, 0038 Jupiter Brass, 0080 Music & Light, and 0058 Dual Filtr Ld. Note that these are not all running in an Origin multi at the same time: Each was tracked separately.
MULTI MODE
The truly massive sounds are found in multi mode. Factory multis like “The Score” layer brass with strings and a filter sweep, while “Dark Side 80s” and “Wavestation” combine a pad with a pulsing arpeggio. When I played the multis, the polyphony limits became apparent. Normally Origin is a 32-voice synth, but the actual number of notes will be smaller, and will depend on CPU usage in a way that you can only figure out by listening. With some of the thicker multis, Origin will play only three or four notes before running out of voices.
Origin provides 100 factory multi patches plus 156 empty locations for your own. A multi has four parts. Each part can be set to its own key zone, so you can do splits and layers, but you can’t do velocity- or knob-controlled splitting. Each part can be set to its own MIDI channel for sequencing, and the outputs of the four parts appear in stereo at the eight aux outputs — part 1 left, part 1 right, part 2 left, and so on. You can transpose each part up to two octaves higher or lower in half-step increments, but there’s no fine-tuning beyond the half-steps.
SOFT SYNTHS IN HARDWARE
There are two ways to design sounds in the Origin. You can call up a soft synth-like template or freely patch together modules based on Arturia’s well-known soft synths. At press time, the Minimoog (left) is the only full template, but components from Minimoog V, Jupiter-8V, ARP 2600V, and CS-80V are all onboard, so you can patch together, say, a virtual Jupiter-8.
HARDWARE CONTROLS
Thirteen of the 54 knobs (the 12 white ones plus the main data wheel) are also buttons — turning one selects something and pressing it brings that thing up for editing. The white knobs down either side of the screen are programmable per patch. You can assign a single parameter, but not several at once, to each of these by highlighting the thing you want and pressing the knob.
The other knobs are grouped according to synth section. In the envelope section, for instance, you turn the white knob until you see the envelope you want in a brief pop-up in the display. Now the gray knobs affect that envelope. Within a section, one knob can control multiple settings via a “macro” option. Spin the white filter knob to “macro filter,” for instance, and the cutoff and resonance knobs will sweep every filter in the patch at once. It’d be better still if you could handpick any parameters and assign your own macros to the screenside knobs, as in soft synths that do “scenes” or “patch morphing.” Put that on our wish list for a future OS update.
Not to diminish the coolness of multiple envelopes and filters per patch, but tweaking them isn’t as intuitive it could be, because a glance gives no clear indication of which oscillator, filter, LFO, or envelope a given bunch of knobs currently controls — you have to move a knob to get the pop-up that tells you what it does. However, Origin’s system is logical and easy enough to learn, and if you get in the habit of assigning the eight screenside knobs to things you’re going to use, you won’t have to fish for the right oscillator or filter when performing.
I also found it tough to get used to the data entry method. The large data wheel does two things besides the usual scrolling through patches: First, it moves the editing highlight (a black outline around the current module or parameter) onscreen; the four cursor buttons below it do the same thing. When you press the wheel (or Enter button), the black outline turns red to indicate that the wheel’s now changes the value of the highlighted thing — but the cursor diamond becomes inactive. I often meant to edit a parameter and wound up moving the editing highlight instead. My suggestion: Make the wheel strictly for data entry and the cursor diamond strictly for navigation. With most parameters, turning the wheel (or a knob) doesn’t display the current value. Arturia plans to add this amenity in a future OS update.
The first two units we evaluated were among the first to roll off the assembly line, and both had some hardware problems, such as the screen occasionally being dark on power-up. We alerted Arturia to the issues, and a third unit, which we received a couple of months later, tested out perfectly.
PATCHING THE MODULES
With 400 great factory sounds to choose from, it may be a while before you start programming your own to fill the 600 empty slots. When you do, you’ll find a very deep, flexible modular synth. Here’s a quick overview - the true synth geek's discussion is in the next section, "More on the Modules," below.
A patch can have up to 20 modules in any combination. The available modules include a two-dimensional vector envelope reminiscent of the original Prophet-VS, and a crazy triple LFO called Galaxy, which we first encountered in Jupiter-8V (reviewed Jun. ’07). The number of inputs and outputs available per module isn’t fixed — you can stack them as needed.
Oscillators and filters include Minimoog, Jupiter, CS-80, and ARP (but no Prophet) types, which emulate the character of each historic synth. Then there’s the “Origin” oscillator and filter, generic types that use less DSP power. Finally, the Wavetable oscillator produces the same glassy, gritty, digital waveforms as the Prophet-VS. Using Origin’s joystick, you can emulate how the VS’ joystick crossfaded between its digital oscillators — “Bode Pad” (patch 0193) is one example.
Arturia’s oscillators are free of aliasing, but when you send an oscillator through a filter, the filter adds some aliasing. It’s extremely low-level, if audible at all. Fortner commented, “If I octave-shift up and play in the top two octaves of a 61-key controller, I can hear just a little. Overall, though, Origin sounds as smooth as any virtual analog machine gets.”
There’s no Compare button for patch edits, and no undo. If you press any of the Sound Select buttons (on the numeric keypad) during an edit session, your edits will be lost, because there’s no “Are you sure?” before exiting edit mode.
Arturia plans to offer pre-patched templates for four classic synths (see “Soft Synths in Hardware” above). The only template in version 1.0, however, is the Minimoog V. It adds matrix modulation and an extra LFO to the original Mini configuration.
MORE ON THE MODULES
Up to 20 modules can be active per patch. Actually, the total number is 25, and that doesn’t include the three effects processors. But 20 of the modules will show up in a patch matrix, while the other five are in a sort of global area. Two of the latter are monophonic LFOs — they’re shared by all of the voices in a given preset, but are specific to that preset, unlike the patch LFOs, which are polyphonic. In a multi, each of the four active presets can have its own mono LFOs. Two more modules (a two-dimensional vector envelope and a rather odd triple-LFO setup called Galaxy; we’ll have more to say about these below) are global to the instrument, and will be shared by all of the presets in a multi. This may seem like a limitation, but it’s actually a good thing, because it allows you to set up certain kinds of sonic coordination between the patches in a multi. Rounding out the module list is an output mixer, which routes a patch’s output modules to the effects.
Oscillators. Origin provides five different types of oscillators, all of them basically modeled analog but each with a slightly different sound. Up to nine oscillators can be active in a single patch. All of them have pretty much the same features, with minor variations. For instance, only the generic Origin oscillator and the Jupiter oscillator have sync inputs. The CS80 oscillator’s “octave” switch includes organ-type foot settings (5-1/3 and 2-1/3), but this oscillator has no semitone coarse tuning slider, so it can’t be tuned to intervals other than octaves and fifths.
All of the oscillators apply pulse width modulation only to the square wave. The variable-shape sawtooth, triangle, and sine waves found on many modern digitalog synths are not implemented.
Filters. There are five filter types — four modeled on the vintage synths and the fifth a new Origin filter. You can have up to four filters in a patch. Audio mixer modules can be used on the inputs or outputs of the filters, so you’re not limited to standard series and parallel connections; you can pretty much do what you want.
On the Jupiter filter, the mode is selectable between 2-pole or 4-pole lowpass or 1-pole highpass. As on the original Jupiter-8 and other Roland synths, you can thin out the bottom end and create a bandpass effect by putting lowpass and highpass filters in series. The ARP filter is also selectable between 2-pole and 4-pole lowpass (not authentic, as the original ARP 2600 had only a 2-pole filter). The generic Origin filter has 2- and 4-pole rolloff slopes in lowpass, bandpass, and highpass modes, plus notch and 1-pole highpass.
Envelopes. Origin’s basic envelope generator is a DAHDSR — delay, attack, hold (with both time and level), decay, sustain, and release. Slope up and slope down parameters are also provided. Attack, decay, and release times can be separately modulated, which is a valuable feature. The envelopes are not individually switchable to mono vs. poly triggering, however.
The 2D vector envelope is mono; that is, there’s only one, and it’s active for all of the voices you’re playing on the keyboard. Times and X/Y positions can be edited, and any parameter can be modulated from either the X or the Y output. At present you can set the envelope to loop points 0 through 4 either forward (0 -> 4) or bidirectionally (0 <-> 4), but the manual illustrates this edit page with the parameter showing 1 -> 4, so it’s a reasonable guess that Arturia is planning to add to the envelope looping functionality in a future update. Let’s hope they also imlpement a “don’t loop” option.
Output Modules. Up to four output modules (which also function as VCAs: their level can be envelope-controlled) are available within a patch, each with its own panner. These modules have their own volume knobs and mute buttons on the front panel, which makes it easy to change the mix of your sound on the fly. If several of the oscillators are being played by sequencer patterns, you can gate portions of a complex pattern on or off.
Other Modules. The Galaxy module incorporates three LFOs. These are set up in an unusual way. Imagine an X/Y Cartesian grid (familiar from high-school geometry). Imagine a point somewhere on the plane. LFO 1 sweeps the point left and right, and LFO 2 sweeps it up and down. The outputs of Galaxy are the current X and Y values of the point. In the normal course of things, then, LFO 1 alters the X output and LFO 2 alters the Y output, while the point traces some sort of elliptical or figure-8-shaped path around the plane. What makes Galaxy unique is that the third LFO “tilts” the ellipse or figure-8. In effect, it tilts what the first two LFOs think are the X and Y axes. If LFO 3 has tilted the grid by 90 degrees, LFO 1 will be altering the Y output value instead of the X output value, while LFO 2 is now altering the X output value.
Another way of looking at it is that in Galaxy, LFO 3 crossfades between LFOs 1 and 2 on the X and Y outputs. If you imagine a patch with two filters running in parallel, for instance (perhaps panned left and right), with Galaxy’s X output modulating filter cutoff 1 while the Y output modulates filter cutoff 2, as LFO 3 goes through its cycle the two filters will gradually swap LFO modulation inputs, which could be quite interesting musically in a sustained sound.
The other modules include a standard LFO (polyphonic — one for each voice), a ring modulator, a Bode frequency shifter, and a CV processor. The CV (control voltage — though actual voltages aren’t used in a digital system) processor has signal inputs, amplitude modulation inputs, and a DC offset knob. This module is where you set up things like controlling the depth of an LFO from the mod wheel, but it’s capable of much more complex effects.
EFFECTS
Origin has three independent effects processors and five types: reverb, stereo delay, chorus, distortion, and dual phaser. Only one of each type can be active in a patch. The effects can run in series or parallel; in parallel, each of the four output modules in a patch has its own sends for the three effects, so you can do tricks like putting only delay on one oscillator/filter combo while putting only distortion on another. The effects parameters aren’t fancy, but I was very pleased to find that the distortion’s drive knob is gain-compensated: You can turn it up or down without altering the output volume.
ORIGIN'S SEQUENCER
Tech, trance, and house musicians, and fans of old-school synths, will love Origin’s step sequencer. Sequences can be up to 32 steps long, and you can set odd lengths such as 19 or 25 steps. You can store 128 of your own sequences, each of which contains three sub-sequences (rows) with accent and slide functions. Buttons let you select which sub-sequence Origin’s row of 16 knobs and lighted buttons controls; the buttons here can also choose different sequencer patterns.
Normally, you’d use sub-sequences to change the filter cutoff, panning, and/or loudness of steps, but it’s easy to make them do three-note chords. Playing your MIDI keyboard gates the sequencer, unless the Hold button is lit, which keeps it running when you let off the keys. The sequence transposes with your playing, and if you hold a chord, several instances run in parallel. Origin also has a standard arpeggiator.
COMPUTER CONNECTION
The manual mentions a capability that’s planned but not yet implemented: multi-channel USB audio between Origin and your computer. At present, USB is strictly for MIDI and for communicating with the included librarian software. That software isn’t an editor, but given the luxurious hardware controls, you hardly need one.
When I hooked Origin up to my PC and tried it with Steinberg Cubase, I found that its sequencer would sync to incoming MIDI clock — as long as I started the Cubase transport a few beats before the first note Cubase transmitted (to gate Origin’s sequencer). If I quantized a note to a bar line then started playback right on that note, Origin would take a fraction of a second to get going, which put it out of sync until it received another (quantized) note. Once it locked up to the second note-on, it stayed in sync.
At present, Origin can’t transmit MIDI from its own knobs or joystick, either via USB or the regular MIDI output jack. Arturia plans to add this in a future OS update. Parameters can receive MIDI control messages — so you can automate, say, a filter cutoff by drawing a curve in a MIDI track on your DAW — but it’d be nicer if you could record that automation by turning the knob on Origin itself.
CONCLUSIONS
Origin is an ambitious instrument. I’m bowled over by the sound, and excited because what we have here is effectively a virtual modular synth. I can live without the other vintage synth templates, because the oscillators and filters that would make them up are already in there. When they get here, though, they’ll be welcomed by anyone who wants ready-to-play, hardware-powered versions of Arturia soft synths. “Normally, either the ‘just like a classic’ or the ‘totally open-ended’ aspect dominates a synth,” adds Editor Stephen Fortner. “To get either of them, you’re usually talking software. Balancing both aspects, and doing it in standalone hardware, is pretty audacious. That Origin does it so well proves the audacity paid off.”
If you want powerhouse analog sound, the flexibility of soft synths, the zero latency and no-hassle factor of hardware, and a panel full of knobs to tweak, Origin just may be your dream machine.