Orra Pump User Manual

Orra Pump is a drawable, tempo-synced modulation engine, a rhythmic auto-filter in the spirit of the classics, built around one shape you draw yourself. Instead of a fixed sine or a menu of canned waveforms, you place and bend control points on a large screen to draw exactly the curve you want, and that curve becomes a looping modulator.

The shape drives one destination of your choice: a resonant filter (low, high, band-pass or notch), volume for tremolo and rhythmic gating, or pan for auto-panning. A channel selector aims the effect at the full stereo signal, the mid, or the side, so you can filter only the centre, or wobble only the stereo edges.

The curve can run as a free LFO, lock tightly to the host tempo at any note division, or be triggered from a sidechain, playing once per hit (one-shot) or restarting a loop on every hit. A drawable swing grid lets you place points with groove, and live overlays on the screen show you exactly what the modulation is doing as it plays.

This manual runs front-to-back: start with the Interface Tour, read How Drawn Modulation Works for the one idea the rest follows from, then skim The Controls.

The window is organised top-down into four horizontal regions, sitting on a near-black brushed-metal faceplate. The header, the riser, and the control cards are raised out of the plate; the curve screen is recessed into it like a pane of glass.

It is worth thirty seconds on the core idea, because the rest of the plugin follows from it.

The shape you draw is a curve from left to right across one cycle, with a value between 0 (bottom) and 1 (top) at every point. A playhead sweeps across that curve, and the value under the playhead is the modulation signal. How fast the playhead moves is set by the clock, a free RATE in Hz, a tempo-locked note division, or a sidechain trigger. What the modulation does is set by the TARGET.

DEPTH scales how strongly the curve pushes the destination. For the filter targets, the CUTOFF knob sets the floor, the most-closed point, and the curve opens the filter upward from there by DEPTH. At DEPTH 0 you get a static filter parked at CUTOFF; at full DEPTH the curve sweeps it all the way open. For Volume, the curve scales level; for Pan, it moves the signal across the stereo field.

Two final stages shape where the effect lands. The CHANNEL selector decides which part of the stereo image is processed, the whole stereo signal, just the mid, or just the side, and MIX blends the processed signal back against the dry. Because the groove is drawn into the shape itself, a tempo-locked Orra Pump stays perfectly in time with no extra setup.

Three cards of knobs, two card selectors, and the riser's timing controls. All knobs and selectors are automatable; knobs double-click to default and double-click-to-type.

Send and Insert

The Reverb and Delay both have a MODE switch, because there are two useful ways for a curve to drive a tail. In Send, the curve gates what goes into the effect and the dry always passes, so the tail keeps ringing after the curve has closed, which is the classic throw: open the curve on the last eighth of the bar and that one word or snare hit gets thrown into the reverb while everything else stays dry. In Insert, the effect is fed all the time and the curve fades its output in and out instead, so the tail is shaped by the curve rather than fired by it.

Lane targets and field targets

The CHANNEL selector applies to any target that processes one channel at a time: the four filters and Volume. Pick Mid or Side and the signal is encoded to mid and side, the chosen component is processed on its own, and the pair is decoded back to left and right.

The targets that work on the stereo field as a whole, Pan, Reverb and Delay, cannot be aimed at one component, so the CHANNEL selector greys out for them.

Press EDIT on the TARGET card and the card itself turns into the selected target's own controls: a row of compact knobs above a row of selectors and switches. Press DONE, in the same corner EDIT was in, and the TARGET and CHANNEL selectors and the live readout come back, with every control left exactly where you set it.

Nothing slides over the window and nothing is dimmed out, so the shape, the curve screen and the clock stay live and reachable while you work. Switching TARGET swaps the controls without leaving the edit view, and picking Volume or Pan, which have no controls of their own, returns the card to the selectors. RESET and loading a preset do the same.

Everything in an edit view is a normal parameter: automatable, saved with the session, and stored in presets.

The TARGET menu carries two effects as well as the filters, the volume and the pan. The curve times DEPTH is the effect's wet amount, so a pump shape becomes a reverb throw or a delay throw, and MIX still blends the whole result against the dry.

The recessed screen is the heart of the plugin, it is both where you draw the modulation shape and where you watch it work. The shape is a series of control points joined by curved segments, looping seamlessly from right back to left.

Drawing the shape

Grid, snap & swing

Faint grid lines divide the cycle into beats and subdivisions. Turn on SNAP and points you add or drag lock to the nearest grid line. The SWING box shifts every off-beat grid line later, appearing as dotted ghost lines that slide right as you raise swing, up to a three-quarter shuffle. Snapping follows the dotted lines, so a shape drawn on the swung grid carries the groove with it.

The live overlays

Orra Pump's playhead can be driven three ways, chosen with the TRIGGER selector on the CLOCK card. The first runs continuously; the other two wait for a sidechain hit.

The trigger source

In the two sidechain modes, the source selector on the riser chooses what the detector listens to. Internal uses the plugin's own input, so a drum loop can trigger its own filter envelope with no routing. External (DAW) uses the host's sidechain bus, the classic way to key one track's rhythm onto another. Set the threshold while watching the trigger meter on the left of the screen.

The SWING box reads the amount and the ratio together, “67% 2:1”, or “1:2” for Early. Pump's 67 % is the 2:1 triplet feel a DAW calls 66.7 %, and 100 % is a hard 3:1 shuffle, a DAW's 75 %.

The factory presetsA preset browser sits in the header, centred under the window title: previous, the name, next, SAVE and RESET. It carries 77 factory presets in seven categories, Pump, Gate, Stutter, Filter, Throw, Stereo and Build, with favourites, search, rename and delete. The host's own program list shows the same bank, so a DAW's preset menu walks them in the same order.

The factory shapes are drawn as played phrases across a bar, not as one cell repeated: a bar of four ducks where no two pull to the same depth, chord stutters with ghosts and accents, swung sixteenths, throws that open a hair early and ease off across the hit. The cycle length follows from the phrase rather than the name, so Sidechain Pump 1/4 is still a quarter note pump but its DIVISION reads 1 Bar, because it is drawn across one bar of four different kicks.

User presets are saved to Application Support/Orra Audio/Orra Pump/Presets. A preset carries the drawn curve and every knob, and never the window size or the tooltip language.

The circular ? button at the far right of the header toggles hover tooltips. With tips on, hover any knob, selector, button or the screen itself and a short line tells you what it does. Every control in the plugin has one, including all of the target edit views and the preset browser.

Right-click the ? button and a menu lets you read those tooltips in one of seven languages: English, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and French. The choice is saved with the session, so each project reopens in the language you set it to. It is not part of a preset, so loading a preset never changes it.

Only the tooltips translate; the control names on the faceplate stay in English, so a screenshot or a tutorial matches whatever language you are reading in.