SYNAPSE ORION PRO 3.03 (WIN)

Jan 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Len Sasso

Joining the likes of Image-Line Software FruityLoops, Propellerhead Reason, Arturia Storm, and VirSyn TERA, Synapse Audio Software's Orion is one of the newer contenders in the category of loop-oriented software workstations. Like the others, it provides a variety of synths, a step-sequencer built in to each synth, and an overall song-sequencer for arranging the step sequences. Orion's twist on the theme is to center its workspace around a virtual mixing desk rather than step-sequencers or sound generators, as is more common. Though the difference is largely stylistic, it does affect the way you work.

Orion comes in three flavors: Basic, Pro, and Platinum. All versions have a complement of sound generators with built-in pattern sequencers, a collection of effects processors, and the ability to host instrument and effects plug-ins in VST, DirectX, VSTi, and DXi formats. Pro adds ASIO support; additional and enhanced sound generators; a built-in beat slicer, groove templatizer, and arpeggiator; more effects; and audio-track playback. Platinum adds ReWire support, multitrack WAV export, multisample mapping, and more generators and effects. Basic and Pro are only available as downloads, whereas Platinum comes on CD-ROM with a printed getting-started manual. Orion Pro 3.03 was used for this review.

Not surprisingly, the more tracks and effects you use, the bigger the bite Orion takes out of your CPU. Six tracks and three effects pretty much pushed my Pentium III/700 MHz laptop to the limit. But when you start to run out of gas, you can bounce submixes to disk as WAV files and, in the Pro and Platinum versions, load them back into Orion as audio tracks. For audio I used an Emagic EMI 2|6 USB interface with the latest ASIO drivers and was able to get latency down to several milliseconds without audio breakup.

Example 1: "Ritard" was created entirely within Orion using built-in synths and effects. Orion's Tempo editor was used to create the ritardando at the end. Listen to Ritard MP3

THE SOUND STARTS HERE

Orion Pro comes with eight built-in sound generators — six synths and two sample players. You can have multiple instances of any generator, and each instance is represented by its own channel strip in Orion's Mixer. Fig. 1 shows the Mixer on the left and the control panels for three of the synth generators on the right. (Orion's main toolbar is shown at the top.)

In addition to the built-in generators, you can use anything in your kit of VSTi- and DXi-instrument plug-ins, and each gets its own channel strip as well. Finally, there are a built-in WAV-file player called AudioTrack and a MIDI output device called MidiOut that allow you to play back sound files (bounced tracks, for example) and control external MIDI devices with Orion's sequencers.

Orion's built-in synths cover all the bases, but you will most likely be reaching into your VSTi and DXi collection to go beyond the basics. Bazzline (shown at the top-right of Fig. 1) is a one-oscillator synth offering sawtooth and square waveforms. The oscillator is followed by a resonant lowpass filter and a decay envelope that controls filter cutoff and amplitude. One nice feature of Bazzline is that the envelope has alternate settings for normal and accented notes. (Accents are set in the pattern sequencer.) It also has a slide (portamento) feature that can be applied on a note-by-note basis. All that, of course, adds up to a synth designed for electronic bass lines.

Plucked String (shown at the middle-right of Fig. 1) is a physical-modeling synth for plucked-string sounds. Wasp (at the bottom-right of Fig. 1) is a straightforward subtractive synth (licensed to Image-Line Software for use in FruityLoops.) It features three oscillators, a multimode resonant filter, dual LFOs, ADSR envelopes for the filter and amp, an overdrive-distortion output stage, and provisions for frequency, pulse-width, and ring modulation. Wasp can produce all the usual analog lead, bass, and polysynth sounds.

WaveDream is another three-oscillator synth, but it uses wavetables as its sound source. Several wavetables are provided, and you can also create your own as simple text files. WaveDream features a multimode resonant filter and three LFOs that, between them, can modulate virtually every WaveDream parameter, including wavetable position. WaveDream is well suited for ambient and pad sounds and features a Double Dose mode that uses separate voices for the left and right stereo channels with optional detuning for rich six-oscillator textures.

Two drum synths round out the built-in collection. Tomcat is designed for kick and tom sounds. It has two oscillator-filter-amp sections, and each oscillator has a decay envelope for controlling pitch. XR-909 is a 10-track model of an analog drum machine. Eight of the tracks are dedicated to standard drum sounds, and two allow you to load your own samples. XR-909 comes in two models: the Stereo model mixes the 10 sounds to a stereo image, and the 10×Mono model provides separate channel strips in the Mixer for each drum sound. That means you can have individual insert effects and separate send amounts to global effects for each sound, making XR-909 a very flexible instrument.

When you can't synthesize your way to loop heaven, you can drop in Orion's two sample-based generators: Sampler and Drums. Sampler is primarily designed for playing individual samples and loops, although it will import sample maps in SoundFont 2.0 and Kurzweil formats. (You can't build your own sample maps in the Basic and Pro versions.) Its special features include a sidechain function (which is undocumented) for frequency modulating the sound by another generator's output and a built-in beat slicer for slicing up loops and generating pattern-sequencer patterns matching the slices. The beat slicer, called Groove View, is a welcome addition that makes it unnecessary to go to third-party software to regroove your beat loops (see Fig. 2). Oddly, however, although you can adjust the detected slice points, Groove View will not automatically regenerate a matching pattern sequence for you.

Drums is a 12-track drum-sample player. It has a limited number of controls, but it features automatic sample-reversing and time-stretching. The time-stretching is “classic style,” altering the loop time by changing the playback speed and, therefore, the pitch. Both Sampler and Drums come in Stereo and xMono models, which provide separate Mixer channel strips for two and four outputs, respectively.

Orion comes with a nice complement of effects processors divided into five categories: Delay/Echo, Reverb, Dynamics, Filter, and Misc. Like the synths, most are not out of the ordinary but will get the job done. (Platinum has a more complete set of effects and also provides more parameters for each.) Especially notable are the four effects — Compressor, Trance Gate, SC Filter, and SC RingMod — that provide sidechain inputs for modifying their effect according to the output of another generator. Of course, everything in your kit of VST and DirectX effects is also available.

Orion effects can be used in three ways. They can be inserted into any generator's channel strip in the Mixer, assigned to any of four send buses, and inserted into any of four slots in the Master Output section. Plug-in management is flexible and easy, and once a plug-in has been instantiated, it's no problem to move it from one location (for example, an insert or a bus) to another.

STEPPING UP TO THE PLATE

Each Orion generator (including MidiOut, but excluding AudioTrack) has a built-in pattern sequencer that can hold as many as 64 patterns (8 banks of 8 patterns). Each pattern can have 999 steps, and a step can be anything from a whole note to a 64th note. The number of steps and the step size apply to all patterns for a given generator, but can vary from generator to generator. Pattern-sequencer features differ slightly to accommodate the specific generator, but their basic operation is the same.

Each pattern sequencer has a piano-roll editor (see the bottom-left of Fig. 3) where notes can be entered with the mouse or in real-time using MIDI. (Unfortunately, there is no step-entry using MIDI.) A pencil tool makes it easy to enter, delete, move, and change the length of individual notes, and a lasso tool allows you to move and copy selections of notes. When the piano-roll editor was sized to fill the screen, I found the lasso tool almost unusable because for some reason, its screen-refresh rate was agonizingly slow on my machine. (The manufacturer claims that this is a very rare problem that has been noted by only a small number of users.) The drum-oriented synths also feature button-style entry for 16-step patterns. (Drum patterns that are entered using the buttons are always mirrored in the piano-roll editor.)

The piano-roll editors have a controller lane along the bottom that can be hidden or set to display Velocity or any generator parameter. Controller-lane events can be entered with the mouse or recorded in real time. Virtually any Mixer or generator parameter can be assigned to a MIDI controller by means of a flexible MIDI-learn function. As a consequence, control automation can be recorded in real time either by mousing the onscreen controls or using MIDI.

Each generator also has its own arpeggiator. The arpeggiators are very flexible, allowing for five predefined note-direction options as well as a user-definable option (which is undocumented). Timing from quarter to 128th notes is provided, the arpeggio can be extended over five octaves, and individual quarter-note positions can be toggled on and off. The arpeggiator includes a chord maker that will cycle through a maximum of eight chords, with each chord lasting the length of a full pattern. When both the arpeggiator and the chord maker are turned on, the chord is arpeggiated. Conveniently, the arpeggio (but not the chord-maker) output can be rendered to the piano-roll editor for further modification.

Orion's song sequencer, which is called the Song Playlist, has a track for each generator (see the top of Fig. 3). You create a song by activating patterns at various time positions on the tracks. The patterns do not have to be quantized to bar divisions, and when you insert a pattern, its length is automatically accounted for. The Song Playlist offers the same pencil and lasso tools as the pattern sequencers. Song creation is very easy except that changing the pattern number is a bit touchy, and the large, four-way cursor icon obscures the pattern number as it changes. A separate Tempo Editor allows you to easily draw in song-tempo changes. In Fig. 3, you can see the Song Playlist, the Tempo Editor, and the Bazzline pattern for the MP3 file Ritard, which is available at the EM Web site. The song was made entirely with Orion synthesizers and effects.

Orion allows you to automate any parameter on both the song and pattern level. You open controller lanes for specific controls by right-clicking the onscreen knobs and selecting whether to edit song or pattern events. As with the pattern sequencers, control changes can be moused in or recorded in real time using the onscreen controls or MIDI. In short, automation on the pattern or song level is a piece of cake in Orion.

MORE IN STORE

Orion has a number of nice features that I don't have space to cover in detail. A Groove Templatizer allows you to apply swing and shuffle grooves to your patterns. A number of templates are provided, and you can also create your own. Automatic pattern-editing options include humanize, quantize, transpose, and scale Velocity. You can import and export standard MIDI files, and you can save your songs bundled with all used sample files. Finally, there is unlimited Undo/Redo.

Orion's weakest point is probably its documentation. All documentation is contained in the help file, and some features are simply not documented or are explained in so little detail that you're left with no idea how to actually implement them. On top of that, no presets are supplied for many of the generators with only a minimal selection for the rest. (The Platinum CD contains a large collection of presets and samples.) These are not unusual problems for a small company with an evolving product, and the situation may significantly improve in the future. In any case, the beginners' tutorial and supplied example songs are enough to get you going.

Overall, Orion is a very nice software synth workstation suitable for making loops as well as entire songs. It has a few quirks to work around, and you'll definitely want to complement its generators and effects with your own plug-ins. At $99, the Pro version is priced in line with the competition and clearly has some standout features.

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Len Sasso can be contacted through his Web site at www.swiftkick.com.

Minimum System Requirements

Orion Pro 3.03
Pentium II/400 MHz; 64 MB RAM; Windows 95/98/2000/ME/NT/XP

PRODUCT SUMMARY

Synapse Audio Software
Orion Pro 3.03 (Win)
software synth workstation
$49 Basic (download)
$99 Pro (download)
$199 Platinum (CD-ROM)

FEATURES	4.0
EASE OF USE	3.5
DOCUMENTATION	2.5
VALUE	3.5
RATING PRODUCTS FROM 1 TO 5

PROS: Robust sequencer implementation. Full complement of basic synths and effects. Total automation with MIDI control and recording.

CONS: Weak documentation. Data entry and selection touchy in some cases. Few synth presets.

Manufacturer

Synapse Audio Software
e-mail info@synapse-audio.com
Web www.synapse-audio.com