Arturia, I hope you're taking note of the moods expressed in this thread. I think I'm the lone voice of a man who's very satisfied with The O as it is. Everyone else is kind of, "Yeah... but the Origin could really use (this or that new thing) to keep me really interested."
People are very visually oriented. This is why us guys want our cars to resemble some exotic speed machine, and why the opposite sexes are drawn to the "hotties" of the other gender (some are drawn to hotties of the same gender, but that's another story).
So it's no surprise that most of us want some sort of visual goody to go with the instruments we're making, and I will admit that the rather bland panel with generic knobs in that display aren't all that fantastic looking. The images of the MiniMg and Jupiter-8 are much more exciting, and give us a sense that we have a Mg or Jupiter of our own. When it takes a small eternity for these new templates to get released, people feel let down and neglected, taken for granted or even taken advantage of as customers, and I know this is completely wrongheaded, but they feel like their instruments are increasingly smaller, older and less powerful.
And if you know anything about marketing and customer relations, every letter and post represents thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of similar minded people who bought or are thinking of buying your product. So this thread reflects kind of a widely held grouchy mood among your customer base.
I know this makes your tough job tougher. I know roughly what it takes to produce new toys and tools for this module. You can't just scribble down a few dozen lines of assembler code. It has to sound right, sound good. Then it has to be made efficient, fit in well with the available environment of the Origin, communicate properly, work right, not crash, and still sound good. And not take a year to come out.
Among whatever road maps your team are scribbling out right now, I really think that module wise, you need to see about adding in those Prophet V OSCs and Filters, or creating some new Origin modules, perhaps along the lines of Doepfer's fantastic hardware modules. If you can manage to license Tom Oberheim's SEM, OB or Matrix synthesizers, hopefully all three, I still think it would be an incredible idea to bring them out on Origin first, before you offer an Oberheim V synth library. If you can manage to create some sort of panel GUI for us to play with, that will satisfy a surprising number of people.
Template-wise, I think you should put priority to bringing out the CS-80 next. From what I hear, this is regarded by most keyboard players as the greatest performance synth of all time.
You should also canvas your hardcore userbase, and those in the team since you guys have lived with Origin the longest, to see what changes and improvements would be good to include in updates 1.4 and 1.5. I have a few.
On the Mg oscillator, add hard sync, and full pulse width and mod control.
On the ARP OSC, add hard sync.
On the Origin OSC, add soft sync.
On the Mg and Origin Filters - or perhaps all filters - add an 18db 3 Pole response.
On the hardware module control knobs, enable each module to have a switch that would have the module directly linked to the front panel controls. For instance, on the Envelope modules, add a setting to link them to the hardware envelope knobs. It would be nice to program patches that would always respond to the knobs for filter control, Output ENV control, or both. Or all envelopes. Likewise, on the OSC modules, a switch that would link selected modules to the OSC knobs on the Origin panel. Filters to the filter controls.
Make it so the eight soft knobs can have multiple parameters assigned to one knob. This would be less essential if the console controls could be linked to the selected modules.
Well, that's not a bad wishlist for now.
I'm hopeful that some of these can find their way into the Origin at some point.
Well... one more. At some point, I'd love to see an Origin II keyboard, with double the power or more of the Origin, a nicely endowed control panel, and at least a five octave velocity and poly-pressure keyboard. That would be an incredible answer to the Solaris. Although I would love to have a Solaris...
