Origin..

[Andrew Tarpinian]

It's the bomb diggity, I just posted a pic to facebook, managed to wrangle my 3 tier stand to hold it decent (with the aid of a folded up piece of paper to get it perfectly straight.) can't use the virus panel, but that's ok for now.

It's probably my favorite synth, ever. I'm not a big synth programming freak, I mean, I program most of my sounds, but I never get lost in it. But with this thing, the hours tick by without me even realizing it, even impeding the music making process :)

There are a few quirks that can show up:
The main parameter and 8 programable knobs can be quirky if you spin them too fast, also sometimes the main knob can get confused where to go (like fall into a 3 parameter loop) when parameters are not laid out in a linear fashion, like on the seq page, but you just have to then turn the knob in the other direction or you probably should just use the arrow keys for that. 

I did notice sometimes with the sequencer when you are working on say 1-16 of a 32 note pattern and you hit a trigger, every once in a while the triggers in the 17-32 section randomly change, you then have to switch over to edit that section, hit any trigger on and off and it fixes it. It's weird and random, might have something to do with the fact that I have live triggering the sequencer in those moments, have to dig deeper to see what causes it.

The colors for the programable knobs could be a lot bolder, sometimes hard to tell the pastel color, they said in a video they were going to fix this for production but I guess never got around to it.

When sequencing with say Live sometimes you get stuck notes, just have to hit the panic button, but it seems to occur more often than other synths I have used. Also when changing the arp settings while running you need to hit the panic sometimes.

Anyway not big deals and most things can get sorted out in updates.

The interface completely works though, completely. Sure there are things that you have to program with the main knob and screen nav but even that is pretty easy to work with. The sound is absolutely killer, I am all about classic sounds but you can do modern as well no problem. Though I guess retro is modern now a days, so you can do modern retro, retro modern, modern modern and retro retro. Not sure about future retro yet, oh wait I have one of those, still got to replace that battery.

It's like a big mad scientist laboratory synthesizer, it in combination with live is really cool. I quite often run it in multimode with Live doing the drums and sequencing duties. What's nice is all the parts are still very easy to program and tweek, I quite often like to program 4 parts at a time for a song this way. If you are running heavy patches you have to watch out for dropped notes of course but it's workable, once you get your parts down you can just record them separately after. 

I think Origin is the best thing out there right now, in terms of the sound and how you go about getting there. It's user friendly analog style digital modular, those words should not go together so beautifully but they do in this case.

On Oct 15, 2010, at 11:18 AM, Gert van Santen wrote:

> Op 15-10-2010 17:10, Tony Scharf schreef:
>> Just wondering if the love is still there...  How has it been going, Andy?
>> 
> 
> Hmm, yeah, I sort of forgot about it - good thing too, will save 
> me some money :-)