MusicRadar

The Origin interface is cluttered, but with so many features, it had to be.

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• Review

Announced back at the start of 2007, Origin is Arturia's first hardware synth.

Its overall look is somewhere between something you'd see monitoring heart rates in a hospital and a spaceship's control panel, with its clinical metal/plastic white case and light blue graphics and no fewer than 53 knobs, 81 red backlit buttons and even a handy XY joystick.

Origin does look very good, if a little cluttered. Trying to cram all the features of several complex software plug-ins into one hardware unit with limited space was always going to be a challenge; the interface doesn't flow as well as it perhaps could have, but Arturia has done a decent job nonetheless.

The screen gives you access to the heart of the beast and displays everything going on within the Origin in high-def, high-res full colour, though it's a shame that Arturia chose not to go with a touch screen to help navigation.

Page views

There are eight main pages for accessing all the major functions in the Origin. Page 1 (Home) is a general overview page outlining the type of sound, the sound's designer and the synth engine being used.

Page 2 (Preset) deals with preset/ multi-sound selection and searching for sounds (multis are four-way multi-timbral layered presets).

Page 3 (Program) gives a detailed overview of all the main sound-modifying parameters, such as poly and mono modes, glide/legato, TAE voice detuning (to emulate vintage analogue oscillator drift) an output mixer (that also has its own hardwired dials on the top-right of the front panel) and an FX leveller/mixer and panning controls for each output.

If that's not enough, also contained within Page 3 are tabs that lead to a 2D envelope, Galaxy Engine and LFOs. The 2D envelopes give four-stage complex looped modulations that can be driven by the joystick. The 'Galaxy' engine uses three assignable LFOs that can move along various axis and planes for cross modulating in new and unusual ways (and give continuously evolving sounds).

"Origin's overall look is somewhere between something you'd see monitoring heart rates in a hospital and a spaceship's control panel."

What's more, two continuously running mono and polyphonic LFOs can be assigned to an external controller such as a mod wheel or joystick. The LFO also includes five waves, sync, fade-in, onset delay, plus other assignable parameters such as AM/FM/PWM input and more. Complex enough for you?

Page 4 (Edit) provides access to the main nerve centre for Origin presets and this is where some very unique features are available. There are two main graphical views here – Rack and Patch.

Rack view makes it easy to see the building blocks of your sound as moveable rack modules. Patch View, meanwhile, displays the various modular components within a preset and the connections between them as colour coded patch leads. Modulation is shown green, audio red and trigger yellow.

This helps greatly in visualising the routing arrangements within a preset. Modules can be added, removed, moved or changed at the touch of a button in both Rack and Patch views.

The Origin also has a useful feature called Auto Connect that maintains all the vital connections between modules so that sound always appears at the outputs even when you aren't quite sure what's connected.