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.

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.