Arturia Origin Review

Mar 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Marty Cutler

A HARDWARE SYNTH GOES RETRO—OR DOES IT?

Arturia has a well-earned reputation for delivering classic-synthesizer replications unbounded by the limitations of the instruments that inspired them. It isn't surprising that the Origin synthesizer — the French company's first hardware instrument — also draws from that legacy of classic instruments. The Origin adds new capabilities and builds on a user interface inspired by its virtual siblings.

If you're eagerly awaiting the entire Arturia virtual instrument collection embodied in hardware, you'll have to keep waiting; that isn't the driving force behind the Origin's design. But if you've ever contemplated (for instance) patching a Prophet VS wavetable to a Moog filter whose frequency is modulated by a Yamaha CS-80 envelope generator, your ship has come in. The Origin's greatest feature attraction is its ability to combine modules culled from Arturia's virtual instruments for fresh sounds previously impossible to obtain from any single source.

Rack on Tour

A surface studded with 54 knobs, 81 buttons, a jog wheel, and a joystick can be daunting. However, the Origin's neat, logically grouped control layout is easy to grasp, with light-gray stenciled backgrounds highlighting its main operational areas (see Fig. 1).

The rackmountable unit has no shortage of conduits for moving audio and data in and out. In addition to a ¼-inch headphone jack and balanced left and right master outputs, you also get eight balanced ¼-inch aux outs. Analog inputs include a stereo pair of balanced ¼-inch jacks for processing external audio.

Digital I/O comprises MIDI In, Out, and Thru jacks; MIDI input and output via USB 2.0; and a S/PDIF optical connector (see Fig. 2). For rackmounting, simply remove the wood side panels. Rackmounting aligns all jacks vertically, however, making access to I/O awkward; the Origin fares better as a desktop unit.

Parameters on Parade

Much of the Origin's ease of use hangs on its brilliant display. Practically every editing maneuver calls up a contextual graphic in vivid color. Color coding either reinforces context, helping to trace modulation routing, triggers, and audio signal flow, or highlights an active control. Selected modules immediately appear onscreen; modulation sources or destinations are clearly visible and accessible without the need to change pages. However deeply you delve into the Origin's architecture, you are never more than a single button push or two from the home page. For quick tweaks, the unit will simply display the parameter name and its values as they change at the bottom of the window.

Level controls sit at the unit's upper left, topped with left and right LED meters for the Input Level knob. Just below are separate knobs for master and headphone levels, and below those is an x-y joystick section. The Mixer and Effects sections are on the instrument's right side.

The Origin's so-called Analog section divides programming and real-time control areas into Oscillator, Filter, LFO, and Envelope sections. By default, turning any of the black knobs in one of the aforementioned areas activates a macro — a control assignment that groups multiple modules in a section under a single control (for example, detuning all or a selected group of modules in the Oscillator section, or changing the cutoff of multiple filters). Turning any section's Select knob to the far right and pressing downward selects the macro for editing.

To edit a single module, such as one of several filters or an LFO, the Select knob also scrolls through a patch's available modules. Pressing down on the knob selects and displays the module for onscreen editing. You then use the 4-way cursor buttons or the jog wheel for instant access to edit basic parameters or modulation sources and destinations, keyboard follow, and more. The jog wheel also serves as a selection button, so you can choose patches or Multis, navigate edit menus, enter or change values, and move on to the next edit without using another knob or button. One very welcome aspect of the Origin's user interface is that elements of the navigation and entry systems work in harmony. Intuitively, I could go from using a knob to a cursor button to a wheel without changing screens, so I never lost my place.

Original Spin

The joystick offers more than real-time mixing; you can assign several independent modulation destinations to each axis. Two additional sets of assignments are accessible using the Mode button, with an LED highlighting which mode is operational.