>>> MP3 DEMO HERE! <<<

"These classic dance synth patches add an important dimension to the Zebra2
soundset. If you know what to do with a square wave monophonic lead with
glide or a pure sawtooth bass through a fat lowpass filter, you've come to
the right place." - Jim Aikin, contributing editor & writer, Keyboard magazine.

Hey everyone. Around Christmas I posted a preview bank of patches for Zebra 2. I got a lot of good feedback on it, so I decided to spend the rest of my break working on rounding it out. I am proud to announce that this bank has been completed! It contains 64 sounds total, all oriented towards dance and electronic music. All sounds were designed primarily with usability in mind. I didn't just tweak some knobs randomly and slap a name on them. As I worked, I asked myself how practical each and every sound would be for modern dance & electronic music. If I had to struggle to figure out how one might use the sound, I scrapped it. Everything here is, in my opinion, highly playable & usable and compliments the factory bank of Zebra 2 well.

*** ALL PATCHES have been optimized by tasmaniandevil (tas) for volume and X/Y control. Thus, every patch is ready to go the second you click on it, and built in with useful parameters to enhance your experience. ***

This bank can be purchased for $15 USD. Simply send the money via Paypal to aaversa (at) gmail (dot) com, and I will send you the patches in a ZIP file. I believe Urs will also be setting it up in his shop at some point.

Post here if you have any comments, questions, cookies, tuna fish...

And of course, thank you again Urs for creating such a brilliant synth.

The full patch list is as follows. I tried to name them in ways that would be descriptive about the category and timbre of sound, rather than something cryptic. I know what it's like to work on deadlines and browsing through sounds with names like "Moonlight Over the Flowing River" doesn't help.


Last edited by zircon on Tue Jan 30, 2007 6:06 pm; edited 4 times in total

And here's the MP3 demo!!!

http://www.zirconstudios.com/zirconz2demo.mp3

Showcases about 15 patches, 1 at a time (except the guitar powerchord + solo one which is 2 patches). No external effects except light compression/limiting on the master track. Enjoy! It's my first demo for this kinda thing.

Beautiful!

How come nobody ever posts patches for free for this synth??....I checked the patch area here on KVR and nuttin there.
Ohhh, they are nice sounds by the way zircon

Thank you. There are in fact free patches for Zebra 2, however - some of which I've posted myself in the "Preset Exchange Area" thread! I suggest browsing through that, and also picking up the Howard Scarr bank which was released for free. If you liked the sampling of patches that I uploaded then you will no doubt like the expanded version which I have described in this thread.

Nice Zircon,these will be useful for my music and for my Zebra2 learning!
I hope that will be sooooon available!!

i'm not impressed....
zebra is much more powerful than these presets show...
regards bodan

mate you made that benassi sound, you're gonna get rich

I don't think the intent was to create astounding new dance material. I think the intent is to broaden Z2's repertoire of sounds by providing useful sounds, 'common' as they might be.

It's all in how you look at it.

indeed.. isn't the most mentioned criticism not the fact it doesn't come with normal bread and butter presets?

that's the reason why i love u-he stuff!!

Hey, don't get me wrong, there are a lot of very deep, well-designed patches in the factory bank. But from my perspective, here we have a synth that sounds AWESOME - even for more basic VA/FM stuff - but seems to lack more traditional sounds like the ones here. You might ask, "Well, if you want traditional sounds, why not use another synth? Zebra 2 is so powerful, isn't that a waste?"

My answer... because Zebra 2 sounds better, that's why! Seriously, lots of my other soft synths are collecting dust, even if I can produce the same subtractive/FM patches on them. Plus, Z2 is modular, so if you like a more basic patch and want to add on to it, it's really easy.
Last edited by zircon on Fri Jan 12, 2007 8:44 am; edited 1 time in total

Oh yeah! More presest for the best sounding synth (virtual or hardware) I have ever heard. I have freaked of several keyboard players I know so bad with Zebra2 - they felt like idiots for not knowing about Zebra before I did.

URS for President!

that reminded me of those horrible 30 minute "Bedazzler Plus"-type commercial presentations

Do you plan to release another bank when Urs finally releases the XMF filter or update the current bank?