Zebra3 Info

[ckoe]

First, thanks for check my wish. I have no glue how many performance a visual mod display costs. It was only an idea and it is not really important. It's the icing on the cake.

[himalaya]

Modulation visualisations can indeed use a lot of CPU. Synths that do use elaborate visualisations could always benefit from a user option that allows to disable them, when needed.

[spacepluk]

Even static visualizations (Massive-style) really help me understand how the patches work. The animations would be cool though, and if they are too expensive maybe they can be disabled with a switch. After all, once you understand how a patch works you don't need all the light show.

[Sound Author]

While I agree that modulation visualization is often superfluous and distracting, I do like adjustable (non-animated) modulation depth rings and value meters. I think it makes a lot of sense to go that route instead of having completely separate controls for modulation depth.

That said, in Urs I trust

[Urs]

What speaks against Massive style visualization is that it necessarily needs to exclude the ModMatrix. I wouldn't knowhow to visualize a knob that has a dozen sources attached to it. But if we use it as a means to loose dedicated modulation knobs, it might actually be a good idea to try this out. Unless it makes pointing the mouse over a mod depth control kind of strenuous.

I have thought about Serum style visual feedback ever since MotU brought out the MX-4, maybe even before that. Plug-In formats have not been designed in favour of this. A plug-in needs a meter-style parameter for each knob-style parameter that can receive modulation. Zebra2 currently has about a thousand of these. That's like a few tenfolds more than what the MX-4 or Serum require.

I think over the years I simply built up a strong reluctance against these things.

[spacepluk]

Hmm, I think I understand. Maybe there can be an extra arc to represent the combined modulations from the matrix.

[jme-audio]

Hey, I have just seen the new preset browser. And while it offers very much, which is of course good, I got the feeling it just never ends. This tree is just so enormous. Sorry to be on the critical side, but couldn't that be visually a bit simpler?

Not saying you should go the NI way but in their browser I can see all options at once. And in your browser I see pretty much nothing.

I really respect the work that went into this, but I thought you would come up with something that would be simple and genius.

[ckoe]

Hmm, I think I understand. Maybe there can be an extra arc to represent the combined modulations from the matrix.

Yep, only the sum to the target will be displayed as animation arc. The massive style with static mod rings ist also a good idea to became a glue of how a patch work. I think this is a good compromise.

Urs, don't think to much about my animation wishes. You will take my money for Zebra3 anyway

[Sound Author]

What speaks against Massive style visualization is that it necessarily needs to exclude the ModMatrix. I wouldn't knowhow to visualize a knob that has a dozen sources attached to it. But if we use it as a means to loose dedicated modulation knobs, it might actually be a good idea to try this out. Unless it makes pointing the mouse over a mod depth control kind of strenuous.

I have thought about Serum style visual feedback ever since MotU brought out the MX-4, maybe even before that. Plug-In formats have not been designed in favour of this. A plug-in needs a meter-style parameter for each knob-style parameter that can receive modulation. Zebra2 currently has about a thousand of these. That's like a few tenfolds more than what the MX-4 or Serum require.

I think over the years I simply built up a strong reluctance against these things.

Sorry to mention another developer on a u-he thread, but I kinda like the way Dmitry Sches implemented modulation visualization for knobs in Thorn. When you drag & drop a source onto a knob, you can right-click and adjust the modulation depth (a gold ring around the knob). If you have multiple sources assigned to a knob, each one is listed within a context menu when you right-click on that knob, with it's modulation value displayed in parentheses. When you select one of those sources, the modulation depth (specially from that source) is shown. Select another source, a different depth is shown.

The only problem with Thorn's modulation visualization is that bipolar assignments appear to be linear when that depth is actually moving in both directions. And I'm sure some people really don't like clicking through context menus. But for me, if going that route means we've opened up real estate for other GUI elements, then it might be worth the context menu navigation, especially if we can avoid the dreaded "tabby"" interface.

[Urs]

We'll see where it goes... not sure I have the energy to deal with this early on. What's more important for me is the interactivity that a modulation source gets highlighted when a modulation depth gets touched. In 2.8 we also started implementing visualization/access to the other way round, where the MSEGs have adjustable mod depths of their target parameters. We'll certainly experiment more with that and we're curious what you guys think of this.

[Sound Author]

I does make a lot of sense to concern yourself with modulation depth adjustments from the source and not so much from the target. Besides, those new envelope editors look lovely

[clangorous]

We'll see where it goes... not sure I have the energy to deal with this early on. What's more important for me is the interactivity that a modulation source gets highlighted when a modulation depth gets touched. In 2.8 we also started implementing visualization/access to the other way round, where the MSEGs have adjustable mod depths of their target parameters. We'll certainly experiment more with that and we're curious what you guys think of this.

This sounds really good! I especially like the idea of showing this information at the source.

This is similar in concept to what we have in Repro-1 where we have our sources on the left and can apply those sources to their targets. It's a good visual at a glance, and it's low cognitive load to interpret.

What you are describing is cool because each target gets its own depth...more Zebra-like.

[ckoe]

Another idea is to visualize all the sources if you klick and hold on the mod arc of a destination knob. This can be static done.

Fabfilter is also a great company which knows how to use the benefits of a computer display + mouse. And there plugins are very low on CPU. They dont't show alle parameter at once, the GUI is dynamic you can dive into more detail but you don't must do that if you don't want to. All time you have all information you need without spam the screen with to much things at once. Everytime I see Fabfilter Q2, MB or R I'm very impressed and say to myself: "Yes, that make more sense then only rendered knobs and faders." But there synths are crap

And again don't get my wrong I love u-he plugins, they are like oberheim, moog etc. in software.

[Marian W]

I have read, that you want to put the focus on rather small wavetables with morphing spline waveforms.
Therefore I want to mention, that I greatly benefit of the possibility in Serum to copy-paste single waveforms into a big wavetable, what I can´t do with Zebra at all.

In Serum I made one rather big wavetable from the ones where I extracted single cycles and deleted the rest which sounded unusable or not special to me.
I rather want to do that one time instead of searching over and over again where the parts in which wavetables are that will work for my needs.

My point is, that I don´t only use wavetables for morphing purpose, but also as a (merged) collection.
In my case I expanded my "Basic Shapes" Wavetable to 79 waveforms from over a hundred inital wavetables.
I have just to turn the Wavetable-Position-Knob to go through them quickly, which is very handy and fast and it improved my workflow big time.

-> Copying, pasting and merging in and between wavetables, which arent limited to 16 slots would be great

[Urs]

I do think about opening it up to load wavetables in the same format as Serum (same as Synth Tech's free WaveEdit). But it won't just switch between them in a steppy manner. I can do their "spectral morphing" in realtime between the tables, no problem - and you'd still have two more degrees of freedom with the oscillator effects.

It will have fewer restrictions than Zebra2. But we'll still promote simplicity as a rewarding means for intuitive handling.