Arturia Origin review

My Origin desktop unit

I've had this great synth module since January 2011. It has became an essential tool on my live gigs and in my home studio. This is my personal view about pros and cons of Origin, but many of them are shared with other users as well. I will update this list every time when something worth noting comes up.

Origin pros:

(+) Marvellous virtual analog sound. This is of course the best part of it. I like the TAE (True Analog Emulation) which is a trademark of Arturia. With this algorithm they have managed to bring out some analog warmth which is quite often lacking in many VAs. In Origin you can adjust the exact amount of TAE which feature they don't have in their software emulations (V-series), if I am right.

(+) The revolutionary idea of having change to put together different modules from different classical synths like Minimoog, JP8, CS-80, ARP 2600, Prophet 5 and VS.

(+) Huge amount of features; those who prefer real analog would have to carry tons of stuff to get the same. Everything is customizable.

(+) Enough power to run complex things. You can play up to four different synths at the same time (of course it depends on those sounds. You can run out the polyphony (32 voices) with one or two sounds if they are complex.

(+) Very well thought GUI (Graphical User Interface). It was surprisingly easy to learn to use Origin.

(+) Enough knobs to tweak. This is very important for analog type synths: you have to have those knobs. Ok, there're are users who would like to have more, but this would of course make it bigger. For me this is a great compromise. Joystic is a great addition too. You can control almost anything with it.

(+) Templates. They are really fascinating creatures. At the moment we have Minimoog and Jupiter-8, but next one is probably going to be CS-80.

Jupiter-8 Template

Minimoog Template

(+) It's evolving, not very fast but still evolving. Arturia team is giving updates and new sound banks. So you'll get a feeling that it is developing.













Origin cons:

(-) It's emulating analog type sounds well, but it's not very good for producing modern sounds. For example, it has been a challenge to get a decent powerful supersaw synth which is very common in modern world. (It's has been mentioned in the forum many times that users want to have supersaw oscillator. Let's see if we finaly get it)

(-) Its effects are not very good quality. This is probably because better ones would take more CPU power. Origin's effects are good enough for my live gigs but in studio they won't be useful for many. This is related to former issue: modern sounds like supersaw synth need high quality effects.

(-) Color LCD is nice but still too small to handle complex synths like Jupiter8. In my opinion it would be crucial to get a computer editor software to work in big screen and with mouse. I have asked this many times from Arturia; let's see if we'll get it some day. (Some other users have complained that this screen isn't touch screen. I think Origin was developed little too early when touch screens were not there yet)

(-) Computer integration has still problems. (Personally I haven't used it that much in my Logic but I've read about problems from other users)