Orra Collider User Manual

Orra Collider is a spectral collision synthesizer. Two oscillator sources, A and B, are not mixed. They are analyzed into their individual partials and then collided bin-for-bin inside a spectral chamber, by one of eight collision modes, before the result is resynthesized into audio. Sum-and-difference clangour, one source eating holes in the other, two spectra fused into a single voice, or a spectrum torn into fragments and re-ordered, none of it is available from a mixer.

The second idea is just as important: you do not build patches here, you roll them. The console across the top is a generator. You pick an IDEA, the kind of sound you want, PLUCK, PAD, 808, TEXTURE, press GENERATE, and Collider writes a complete patch: sources, collision mode, filter, effects, envelopes, modulation routing, voicing. Then you keep what you like. Padlock the sections that are already right, pull DRIFT down so the next roll is a variation rather than a stranger, and press GENERATE again. Six BIAS dials steer the odds, darker, harder, longer, busier, wetter, so the generator rolls in your direction rather than at random.

Everything you would expect from a full synthesizer is underneath and fully editable: two sources with twelve oscillator types including a 256-frame wavetable engine with its own editor, a sub oscillator, per-source envelopes, a filter, wavefolder, distortion, delay, plate reverb, stereo width, output EQ, a limiter, a note-level arpeggiator, and a modulation system of eighteen sources you drag straight onto any control. But the fastest way to a sound you would not have thought of is still GENERATE.

The collision chamber is the center of the window, and the display in it is the honest picture: source A in red, source B in cyan, and the collided output over the top. Hold a legend chip and it solos that layer, so you can hear exactly what each source is bringing before the collision and exactly what the collision made of it.

This manual runs front to back. Start with Quick Start for a sound in sixty seconds, read The Generator Console because it is the workflow the whole instrument is built around, then dip into the chapters for whichever part you are editing.

Presets, your saved patches, and the default-patch file live in a single folder in your user application data. MENU ▸ Open Presets Folder opens it. Preset files are plain, shareable JSON. Uninstalling never touches your presets folder, so updating never costs you a patch you saved.

Your first sound in about sixty seconds. Everything here happens on the console strip across the top of the window.

1. Say what kind of sound you want. Click the IDEA button at the far left. Pick something you actually need, PLUCK, BASS, PAD, 808. This does not load a patch; it tells the generator which way to lean.
2. Press GENERATE. You get a complete, playable patch, built from scratch. Play it. Do not like it? Press GENERATE again. Each press is a fresh roll.
3. Audition what it is made of. Press and hold the legend chips under the big display, A, B, OUT, COLLISION, while a note sounds. They are momentary solos: source A alone, source B alone, the finished output, or the collision without the dry sources.
4. Lock what you love. Click a padlock to freeze a part of the patch. Anything locked survives every future GENERATE untouched.
5. Drift the rest. Turn DRIFT down from 100% to around 25 to 40%. Now GENERATE varies instead of starting over, so you audition cousins of the sound you liked. Use the arrows in the header to step back and forward through generations.
6. Save it. Press SAVE in the header. The category is already filled in from the IDEA you rolled.

Collider's patches are rolled, not built. The console is where you tell the generator what to aim for, how hard to throw, and what it is forbidden to touch. Nothing on it is a sound parameter, these are the odds, not the patch.

IDEA, the kind of sound you want

The IDEA button opens a list of eleven archetypes. An archetype does not pick a preset; it reweights every decision the generator is about to make, envelope shapes, which oscillator types and wavetables are likely, which collision modes suit it, stereo width, whether there is a sub, how much reverb, and whether the patch is mono or polyphonic. The archetypes are ANY, PLUCK, KEYS, BASS, 808, LEAD, PAD, BRASS, STRINGS, TEXTURE, and HIT. The IDEA you rolled also becomes the suggested category when you save, so a library built by generating sorts itself.

GENERATE

GENERATE rolls a patch. Each press draws a fresh random seed, so no two presses agree. Right-click GENERATE to re-roll the same seed, the same dice, thrown again through whatever you have changed since. Use it after nudging a BIAS dial or closing a padlock: it shows exactly what that one change did, with everything else held still.

DRIFT, how far a roll travels

At 100%, GENERATE is a clean sheet: every unlocked control jumps to its new value and every switch, mode and oscillator type is re-chosen. Below 100%, each continuous control moves only part of the way toward the rolled value, and each categorical choice is only re-rolled with that probability. 100% is a brand new patch; 40 to 70% is a relative; 10 to 30% is a variation of the patch you have; 0% moves nothing.

The BIAS dials

Six dials that bend the odds. None changes the current sound, they change what the next GENERATE is likely to produce.

• DRIFT — how far a generation moves from the current patch. Defaults to 100%.
• SPACE — how wet generated patches are. At 0% every roll comes out dry, which is what you want when the track already has its own reverb bus.
• DARKNESS — tone. Low is open and bright; high pulls cutoffs down and damps the reverb harder.
• AGGRESSION — how hard the patch is driven. High opens up collision depth, filter drive, the folder and distortion, and unlocks noise and the more violent source types.
• DECAY — length. It stretches or compresses every decay and release window at once. Low is short and percussive; high rings on.
• MOVEMENT — how alive the patch is. High fills the modulation matrix with more routes at greater depth and speeds the LFOs up. Low leaves a still, static patch.

Section locks

Five padlocks carve the patch into sections. A closed padlock means GENERATE may not touch it. They cover: both source wings and the sub; the Collision Chamber (mode and all its settings, plus MIX, DRIVE, TILT and STEREO, locking this is how you keep a mode); the SIGNAL PATH; the MOD drawer page (all envelopes, LFOs, the sequencer, and every route); and the VOICE card. There is also a TUNE LOCK on the console, on by default, that holds pitch and fine tuning for both sources and the sub, so generated patches stay in tune with your track.

History and A / B

Every GENERATE pushes the patch you had onto a 32-deep history stack. The arrow buttons in the header walk back and forward through it, so generating past a keeper costs you nothing. Two slots, A and B, plus a swap, let you store two candidates and click between them while the part plays. History and the slots deliberately never touch your hand-drawn LFO curves or a wavetable you loaded or edited, those are your work, not a roll of the dice.

Two wings flank the chamber: SOURCE A on the left in red, SOURCE B on the right in cyan. They are identical in capability. What they produce is never heard directly, it is analyzed and thrown into the collision. The unlabelled selector at the top of each wing chooses the oscillator, twelve types:

• Saw — the full harmonic series. The richest thing to throw into a collision, because there is a partial at every harmonic for the other source to act on.
• Square — odd harmonics only. Hollow and woody, collides very differently from a saw.
• Triangle — odd harmonics falling away fast. A gentle partner that lets the other source dominate.
• Sine — one partial. The cleanest possible collision modulator.
• Wavetable — the 256-frame engine. Plays a factory table, an imported file, or a table you drew. WT POS scans across the frames.
• Noise (White, Pink, Metallic) — energy in every bin (White), weighted to the low end (Pink), or tuned and resonant (Metallic). Devastating in Absorb and Annihilate.
• FM — two-operator FM inside the source. FM RATIO sets the modulator frequency; FM DEPTH is the index. Whole-number ratios stay harmonic, fractional ratios go bell-like.
• Supersaw — seven detuned saws in one source. DETUNE spreads them. Enormous once it collides.
• Sync — hard-sync oscillator. SYNC sets the slave-to-master ratio; sweep it for the classic tearing sync lead.
• Additive — a stack of harmonic partials whose brightness is one control. The most predictable, most controllable collision partner.

Each wing has six horizontal control rows, some relabel or go dark depending on the source type: PITCH (±48 st), FINE (±100 ct), WT POS (or BRIGHT on Additive), FM RATIO (or SYNC), FM DEPTH (or DETUNE on Supersaw), and GAIN. A greyed row is honest: that control genuinely does nothing for the type you have chosen. GAIN is always live, and one of the most musical controls in the instrument, the balance between A and B changes what most collision modes do, not just how loud they are. Under the rows, a live single-cycle preview shows what the source is currently producing.

ENV, SUB and VOICE

The button at the bottom of either wing opens the OSC & VOICE drawer page. Each source has its own ATK / DEC / SUS / REL envelope that sits on top of the main amp envelope and ships fully open, so they are the fastest way to make a collision move: give source A an instant attack and source B a slow swell, and the collision becomes another sound while the note is held. The SUB is a clean sub oscillator that bypasses the collision entirely and is added afterward, time-aligned, so nothing the chamber does can eat it. VOICE carries the voicing controls: Mono / Poly 4 / Poly 8, the mod retrigger mode (Phrase, Legato, Note), GLIDE and its curve, UNISON (1 to 7 detuned copies with detune and spread), analog DRIFT, and the pitch-bend range.

Set a source to Wavetable and a load slot appears in its wing. Each of the two sources has its own independent wavetable slot, so you can collide two completely different tables. Click the slot to load from the factory bank, Load File, or Init a blank table, or drag an audio file straight onto the wing, WAV, AIFF or FLAC. Collider slices it into single-cycle frames automatically.

The factory bank has 26 tables in three groups: Basic (classic waveforms and simple sweeps), Morph (continuous journeys between two shapes), and Complex (formants, inharmonic bells, comb structures, digital artefacts, the ones that make a collision sound like nothing else).

The wavetable editor

The EDIT key opens the WAVETABLE drawer page. A waterfall shows every frame; the panel on the right shows the selected frame full size. Tools include UNDO / REDO, DUP / DEL / INSERT (to change a table's length), MOVE, REVERSE, NORM and NORM ALL, SMOOTH, GENERATE (build a frame, a whole table, or Morph between two frames), RE-SLICE (re-cut imported audio at 256, 512, 1024 or 2048 samples, 2048 is the Serum convention and the usual fix if a dragged-in file came out as noise), DRAW (redraw a waveform by hand), and SPECTRUM (draw harmonics directly). A table you have edited becomes yours: it is stored in full inside the preset, survives every GENERATE, and undo/redo and A/B never take it away.

This is the part of Collider that is not a subtractive synth. Both sources are broken down continuously into their individual frequency components, a few hundred bins, each with a level and a phase. The collision mode works on those bins in pairs: bin 40 of source A against bin 40 of source B, all the way up. What comes out is turned back into audio.

That is why a collision is not a mix and not a filter. Source B is not being added to source A; it is being used as a map of what to do to source A, frequency by frequency. Change B's waveform and you change the shape of the operation, not just the tone underneath it. Hence the two habits worth forming: a rich source A gives the collision something to work on, and a simple source B gives it a clean instruction.

The display and the solo chips

The big well is a live spectrum with three curves overlaid: source A in red, source B in cyan, and the collided output over the top. The chips in the legend are momentary audition solos: press and hold A, B, COLLISION, or OUT and the chamber changes what it sends to the output for as long as you hold it. Release and you are back to normal. Solos are for listening only, they change nothing about the patch.

The four global controls

• MIX — how much of the collision you hear against the two untouched sources. Pull it back to keep the fundamental of a bass or the body of a pad while the collision works on top.
• DRIVE — level into the collision, up to 24 dB. Most modes get more violent the harder they are hit, and Collider re-matches the output level afterwards, so it is a character control, not just gain.
• TILT — a spectral tilt across the collided signal, ±12 dB per octave. Left darkens, right brightens.
• STEREO — the width of the collision itself. At 0 it happens once and both channels match, perfectly mono-compatible. Above 0 the collision runs twice with subtly different settings per channel. This is real stereo generated by the physics of the collision, which is why it sounds so different from the WIDTH module later in the chain.

Eight tabs across the top of the chamber. They are eight genuinely different operations, not one operation with presets, switching mode is the biggest single change you can make to a patch.

Everything that happens after the chamber, in the order it happens. The row of tiles along the bottom of the faceplate is the actual chain, left to right: FILTER, FOLDER, DRIVE, ENSEMBLE, DELAY, REVERB, WIDTH, OUTPUT EQ, MASTER. Each tile's power dot bypasses that module; clicking elsewhere opens its full card in the FX drawer. MASTER has no power dot, you cannot bypass the output. Bypass always beats modulation.

• FILTER — eight types: LP12/LP24, HP12/HP24, BP, Notch, and Comb+/Comb− (tuned resonators that add a metallic ring and pair beautifully with the inharmonic modes). CUTOFF, RESO, DRIVE (the filter's own overdrive, where a generated bass growl comes from), and KEY TRK.
• FOLDER — a wavefolder with three characters: Sine (smooth), Triangle (harder), and Orra (our own asymmetric curve, warmest). Because folding is level-dependent, a folded patch changes harmonic content as it decays.
• DRIVE — five flavours: Soft Clip, Hard Clip, Bitcrush, Downsample, and Rectify. DRIVE goes to 36 dB, and MIX blends it in parallel so you can add grit under a clean signal.
• ENSEMBLE — a three-phase bucket-brigade chorus, the string-machine kind. Its three MODE keys (I, II, I+II) are its whole control set. There is no MIX, a real ensemble is fixed half dry, half wet, and that ratio is the effect.
• DELAY — stereo delay with a tone-shaped feedback path. MIX, TIME (or SYNC to tempo), FBK, PING-PONG, and TONE (a tilt inside the feedback loop, so it compounds with each repeat).
• REVERB — a true plate reverb, dense and immediate. MIX, SIZE, DAMP, WIDTH, PRE-DLY, plus GATE and HOLD for the 1980s gated sound. Your dry signal is never gated.
• WIDTH — HAAS (up to 30 ms between channels), M/S BAL, and a bipolar LOW W with XOVER that folds the lows to mono (or widens them) below a crossover. The mono sum never changes at any setting.
• OUTPUT EQ — three bands: a low shelf, a fully parametric mid bell with MID Q, and a high shelf, ±12 dB each.
• MASTER — output level, a lookahead brickwall LIMITER (on by default, a collision can produce far more energy than either source put in), and HQ OVERSAMPLING (Off, 2x, 4x) that runs the filter, folder and drive at a multiple of the sample rate. 2x is the default and almost always right; 4x for heavily driven patches on a final bounce.

FFT Size lives with the parameters and sets the resolution of the spectral analysis: 1024 reacts fastest and is kindest to transients, 2048 resolves finer detail and suits pads and drones. Neither this nor HQ changes the reported latency.

Eighteen modulation sources, and one gesture to use them: drag the source's chip onto the control you want it to move. That is the whole system. There is no matrix to fill in first, and it works on any knob or slider, including the ones inside the drawer.

The sources are four full ADSR envelopes with a curve control (ENV 1 is the amp envelope; ENV 2 is routed to filter cutoff by convention; ENV 3 is where a generated 808's pitch knock lives), four LFOs (free-running 0.05 to 20 Hz or tempo-synced, each able to play a curve you draw yourself), a 32-step SEQ, four MACRO knobs (your performance controls, GENERATE never touches them), and the MIDI and expression sources: VEL, NOTE, A.TOUCH, WHEEL, and SLIDE.

Making a route

Drag a chip onto a knob. The control outlines in cyan as you hover it, and the route is made at 30% depth with a small amount slider so you can set the depth immediately. Or right-click the control and choose Add modulation. A modulated control shows small coloured dots, one per source, and a bright arc showing the live modulation in real time. Depth is bipolar, negative depth inverts the source, an envelope that closes the filter instead of opening it. Up to four sources can share one destination, and they add together.

The editors and the matrix

The MOD drawer page shows the selected modulator's editor above the modulation matrix. Envelopes are shaped directly by dragging their breakpoints, or bent by dragging vertically on a segment. LFOs offer seven shapes plus a drawable custom curve; RATE or DIVISION, PHASE, and RETRIG. The step sequencer's ENABLE, STEPS (4 to 32), and SYNC drive whatever you point the SEQ chip at, with SNAP to lay steps on 24 equal levels (which become exact semitones at a pitch destination with the right depth). Under the editor, the matrix lists every route in the patch, source, arrow, destination, a bipolar depth slider and an x, the place to audit and rebalance a generated patch.

A real arpeggiator, at the note level. It takes the keys you are holding and plays them as actual notes, so envelopes retrigger, glide glides, velocity carries, exactly as if you had played every step yourself. It starts the instant you press a key rather than waiting for the next grid line, so an offline bounce matches what you auditioned. It lives on its own ARP tab in the drawer, with a footer key that reports whether it is running.

Mode, the order notes come out in

Nine orders: Up, Down, Up-Down, As Played, Random (seeded, so a bounce matches the audition), Converge (outside in), Diverge (inside out), Chord (the whole stack on every step, up to eight notes), and Custom (a pattern you paint on the display, as chord degrees, so it follows the harmony you play).

Timing and Chance

OCTAVES (1 to 4) stacks copies of the chord upward; DIVISION locks steps to the tempo (with dotted and triplet values); GATE sets how much of a step sounds (wide open ties into the next step, the 303 move); SWING from 50 to 75%. CHANCE adds RATCHET (probability a step doubles), REST (probability a step falls silent, the pattern keeps counting through the hole), and ACCENT (lifts the step that begins each pass). Both RATCHET and REST are tapered so the ornament range gets the bottom half of the rotation, and each runs on its own seeded stream so riding one never reshuffles what another chose.

Hold and the ARP LOCK

LATCH keeps the chord playing after you let go; RETRIG decides whether a fresh chord restarts the pattern. The ARP LOCK padlock pins the entire arpeggiator, the pattern, the feel, whether it is on, through preset changes, so you can hold a groove and audition sounds under it. Two boundaries: GENERATE never touches the arp (it is performance state, like the pitch wheel), and with MPE on the arp stands down entirely, since an MPE controller gives every finger its own channel.

MPE, MIDI Polyphonic Expression, lets a controller send bend, pressure and slide per note instead of for the whole keyboard at once. Collider supports it, and it is off until you ask for it: MENU ▸ MPE Enabled. This is a preference for this instance of the plug-in, remembered with your DAW session and deliberately not saved into preset files, so sharing a preset never changes anyone's MPE setting.

With it on, each note bends independently over ±48 semitones (the MPE standard), per-note pressure arrives at the A.TOUCH modulation source, and sliding a finger up and down a key drives the SLIDE source. This is the whole point of MPE on a synth like Collider, because the two sources move together in pitch and the collision changes as they do. Put your controller, a ROLI Seaboard, LinnStrument, Osmose, or Haken Continuum, into its normal MPE mode, set its pitch bend range to 48 semitones, and set VOICING to Poly 8 so there is room for the notes.

Collider's preset library is a keeper shelf, not a catalogue. The instrument's supply of sounds is GENERATE; the browser is where the ones you liked go to live. Click the preset name in the header to open it. Search filters as you type (just start typing, the space bar is left alone so your DAW transport still works). Shelves down the left cover ALL, FAVORITES, a row per category you have presets in, and FACTORY. Single click loads with the panel open, that is the audition flow; double-click loads and closes; the heart toggles a favourite.

The arrows either side of the preset name step through exactly the list the browser last displayed, so you can filter once and then audition through the filtered set from the keyboard. SAVE opens a small form: Name (pre-filled), Category (pre-filled from the IDEA you rolled), Author (remembered), and an optional Description. A blank field in the SAVE form keeps what the file already had; the pencil / EDIT form clears a field you clear. The factory shelf ships 100 hand-curated presets across the ten IDEA categories, read-only, so an update refreshes the set without touching anything you saved.

Sharing and the MENU

A Collider preset is a single plain .json file, human-readable and self-contained. A wavetable you imported or edited travels inside it, so a preset you send to a collaborator sounds identical on their machine with nothing to install. The MENU also holds Init Preset, Init Modulations (clears every route but leaves the sound alone, the fastest way to tame a busy generated patch), Load / Export / Import Preset File, Save as Default Preset, Open Presets Folder, Rescan Presets, the MPE toggle, and Show Tooltips.

Collider is licensed per person, activated per machine, and once activated it does not need the internet again. A fresh install opens behind a panel offering three ways forward: enter a license key, start the 14-day demo, or open the store page.

The demo

The demo runs for 14 days and it is the whole instrument, no noise bursts, no silent periods, no disabled modes, no watermark on your bounces. Presets you save during the demo are ordinary preset files and are still there afterwards. The only thing the demo does not do is last, and it can be started once per machine.

Activating, and working offline

Your license key arrives in the purchase email. Open MENU ▸ License & Info, press Activate License, and paste it in. After a successful activation Collider works offline, indefinitely. It checks in with the server when it happens to be able to, and that check-in can only ever revoke a license, never withhold one: no connection, a dropped Wi-Fi, a studio machine that has never been online, none of it touches you. The only things that stop a live license are an explicit refund, chargeback, or disabling on our side. Deactivate hands this machine's seat back so you can use it elsewhere.