Orra Space User Manual

Orra Space is a dual-engine space processor: five distinct reverb algorithms running in parallel with a tape-style delay. The two engines are not stacked in series, both are fed from your dry signal at once, and a single BLEND control crossfades between them. A kick of reverb, a long tape echo, or any mix of the two sits under your source, balanced exactly where you want it.

The reverb is genuinely five engines, not one engine with presets: Room, Chamber, Plate, Hall, and Spring, each with its own bespoke DSP. A global Character switch, Vintage or Modern, sets the overall voicing, and Motion, Age, and Shimmer take it from pristine to worn. The core is built to sound clean and modern; the vintage flavour is added on top with saturation and tape wow-and-flutter, so you choose how much of it you want.

The two engines can cross-pollinate. X-Feed feeds the delay's output back into the reverb, or the reverb's tail into the delay, for blooming, evolving textures neither engine makes alone. On the output, the wet signal has its own tilt TONE, stereo WIDTH, low/high cut, a DUCK that keeps the source up front, and a FREEZE that holds the tail forever.

Everything is shown on one large analyzer with five views: predicted decay and delay taps, the live wet spectrum and EQ, a stereo vectorscope, the ducking history, and an animated signal-flow map. The ducker can key from the track itself, the host's sidechain, or any Orra Link source, numbered channels or live tracks picked by name with Orra Link 2, so the reverb can step out of the way of a vocal on a completely different track.v1.1.0

This manual runs front-to-back: start with the Interface Tour, read How the Two Engines Work for the one idea that makes the rest obvious, then skim The Controls. Later chapters cover the five reverb spaces, the analyzer views, ducking with Orra Link, and a tips section.

The window is organised top-down into four horizontal regions on a brushed-bronze faceplate. The header and the control cards are raised out of the plate; the analyzer is recessed into it.

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

Most reverb-and-delay plugins run the two effects in series, the delay feeds the reverb, or vice versa, in a fixed order. Orra Space runs them in parallel. Your dry signal is sent to the reverb engine and the tape delay at the same time, and a single BLEND knob crossfades between their two outputs: fully left is pure reverb, fully right is pure delay, the middle is an equal mix. The blended result is the plugin's wet signal.

A second knob, MIX, sets how much of that wet signal you hear against your dry input (an equal-power crossfade, so the overall level stays steady as you turn it). So BLEND chooses which ambience, and MIX chooses how much, two independent decisions instead of one tangled one.

The two engines can also feed each other. X-Feed (crossfeed) injects one engine's output into the other's input: turned toward the reverb, the tape delay's repeats spill into the reverb and bloom into a wash; turned toward the delay, the reverb tail re-enters the delay and is chopped into rhythmic echoes. At centre the engines run cleanly in parallel. Small amounts add life; large amounts build evolving, self-feeding textures.

Finally, the Character switch and the Age and Motion controls add the vintage layer. The DSP underneath is voiced clean and modern; Vintage mode, tape Age, and the wow-and-flutter that Motion drives are applied on top, so "vintage" is a dose you dial in, not a color baked into the sound.

Grouped across three cards plus the header. All knobs are automatable, double-click to default, and double-click-to-type. Ranges below are the user-facing values shown on each control.

The Reverb type selector chooses one of five algorithms. They are genuinely separate engines with their own DSP, not a single reverb re-tuned, so they respond differently to SIZE, MOTION, and Character. Switching crossfades smoothly, so you can compare spaces on a held sound.

The recessed screen shows one of five views, selected by the tab strip above it. Each is tied to a part of the plugin, so the picture always matches what you are adjusting. Four of the five are displays driven by the knobs below; the TONE view is a live EQ you can shape by dragging directly on the curve.

The tips toggle in the header turns on hover tooltips for every control and for the analyzer, handy while you are still learning the layout.

The DUCK control on the OUTPUT card pulls the wet signal down while a key source is playing and lets it recover as the source pauses, the classic trick for keeping a vocal or lead clear of its own reverb. The KEY selector beside it chooses what triggers the duck. It is a multi-select: tick any combination, and the sources are combined by maximum (the duck follows whichever is loudest at each moment).

The Orra Link companion plugin

Orra Link is a tiny sender-only plugin shared across the compatible Orra plugins (Orra EQ, Orra Press, Orra Space, and Orra Ducker). It broadcasts a track's audio onto a shared bus that every one of them can read: pick a numbered channel (Link 1 to 36), or let Orra Link 2's Auto mode claim a slot invisibly and identify the track by its name and color. Drop it on a track, then tick that track (or channel) under KEY in Orra Space.

To key off several discrete tracks at once, tick them all, Orra Space combines every selected source. (Putting two Link instances on the same numbered channel will not sum them; give each its own.)

Open the DUCK analyzer view and two compact sliders appear over the gain-reduction history: ATT (attack, 0.1 to 100 ms, default 5 ms) sets how fast the wet is pulled down when the key hits, and REL (release, 10 ms to 2 s, default 180 ms) sets how fast it recovers when the key falls away. Short settings give a tight, pumping duck that follows every syllable; longer settings breathe, letting the tail swell back in gently between phrases. Both are automatable, double-click to default, and read in milliseconds.

A self-calibrating detector

The duck detector responds to the key's dynamics, not its absolute level. It continuously references the key against its own recent peaks, so a quietly recorded key track ducks the wet just as fully as a hot one: DUCK stays a pure depth control at any gain staging, and there is no threshold to set. Keys whose level falls below a silence floor (about -60 dBFS) are treated as silent, so a track's noise floor never triggers the duck on its own.

Practical consequence: the duck follows the shape of the key. A whispered verse pumps the reverb as deeply as a belted chorus; if you want a shallower duck, turn DUCK down rather than the key track.

Offline renderingv1.1.0

Bounces, freezes, and offline renders (including Pro Tools' Commit) render Link-keyed ducking correctly: during an offline render Orra Space validates each Link source's timing stamps and reads it aligned to the render timeline. A Link sender that is not running in the render pass simply contributes nothing to the key, so the duck relaxes rather than keying off stale audio. Internal and Sidechain keys render exactly as they play.