zebra2

[rbet]

I'm not saying that Urs' plugins are not worth the money... I am just saying it takes me pretty long (say 10 months) to save up $100.

[Sascha Franck]

Oh, that's pretty long indeed.

[luCiPHer]

well, christmas is near ...

[rbet]

makes no difference, sadly. I get tootsie rolls if I am lucky.

[rbet]

so, what's a 'preview'? A crippled version of the full thing? Is it the same as a time-limited full featured demo?

[Sascha Franck]

It'll be fully functional until january or so.
But careful: You'll be wetting your pants!

[gbles]

I posted in the Instruments thread that was running but its probably worth duplicating here.....

Wow..... I'm almost lost for words.
I tried the Filterscape demo a while back and liked the general character of the sound, which got me interested in Z2. The demo sounds you've been putting up were OK, but I'm never sold on that kind of thing as I like to get my hands dirty and try to get the sounds I like. After spending the last couple of hours fiddling around and tweaking presets on this, I can say its the most inspired I've ever felt by any VST. I've been getting sounds I'll spend ages trying to get (unsuccessfully) on my other synths. The interface is also beautiful, well thought out and very usable. The scary thing is that I'm just scratching at the surface so far and am incredibly impressed. So, thanks for putting in all the hard work over the last (couple/few/too many) months. I'll be pre-ordering tomorrow.

[scam_artist]

Hi Urs

Sure, I think it sounds nice too - but is that because most of the presets use a decent amount of FX (particularly delay)? I have to play with it further (without delay) to reach an objective opinion.

But, it does sound quite impressive, and the stereo width control is a really nice and useful feature (do it all in the plugin, as you say)

one thing I don't like about zebra (and filterscape for that matter): the knobs, i prefer sliders for many things (yes, like your competitor vember audio uses )

but the sound quality/features far outweigh that major gripe. i just need to play with this monster without it's FX to reach a conclusion, but from what I'm hearing you're definitely onto a winner here that will stand out from the crowd

[luCiPHer]

and well, included effects are a nice bonus, are they not?
especially when they are great, like zebras, and modulatable withing the plugin (try that with external effects).

they are far more than your typical average addon fx, they are part of the synth.

but hey, try the few presets i did, i usually do not use that much delay (i prefer to tweak delay when i use a plug in a song)

[scam_artist]

the FX do sound very good for internal FX, I'll give you that many other VSTi's in the past have pretty much thrown in FX which are rubbish. Zebra sounds good in the FX department, but I am initially turned off by the use of FX as other developers use FX to disguise an average product... (not Zebra, as you'll tell me)

modulatable withing the plugin (try that with external effects).

i use automation, but if the internal FX are that good I see this is an awesome feature... need to play further to reach an opinion

(i prefer to tweak delay when i use a plug in a song)

i prefer it not to be there to start with, so i can use my third party FX which I know and trust, and then tweak them! but, see comments above, I'll be really putting Zebra2 through the works so I can reach an objective opinion. talk to you later

[scam_artist]

and apologies for my lack of utter amazement, but we've seen far too many synths come by which everyone raves about which just don't do it for me

[Sascha Franck]

I often don't use internal synth FX either, but with Z2 they're something entirely special as you can modulate them, thus "embedding" them in a patch, rather than just hiding some synth shortcomings (which defenitely isn't the case with Z2).
You can for example modulate the ModFX amount through the same source modulating a filter - so whenever the filter frequency opens up, it'll automatically become phasey or so as well. Or vice versa. Or raise the ModFX feedback at the same time. Endless possibilities way beyond "just" adding an effect.

[Urs]

and apologies for my lack of utter amazement, but we've seen far too many synths come by which everyone raves about which just don't do it for me

No problem.

I'm confident that you'll find Z2's dry sound pretty outstanding, too.

I left away a lot of presets that sound dry. Maybe these just did not cut it for me. But I think there's gonna be a lot of dry stuff later on.

Also note that the Chorus is not like a normal on board effect to make things wide and bright. It's pretty subtle, it just does the "flavour" thing. I typically use it more like an EQ than like a chorus in my patches. Mostly because I have not yet had the time to add a normal EQ to the effects section.

Anyways, switching off an effect is just a doubleclick in the effects Grid. You don't have to go through the context menu, just in case you hadn't seen...

Cheers,

Urs

[pummel]

Urs!!!

I must say, this is the best sounding and most versatile synth Ive experienced; and by a long shot.

Every aspect of it seems very well thought out, with a mindset toward ease of use.

While Ive just scratched the surface, I see the huge potential here. Job well done.

[spaceman]

I was wondering..

when you run through waveforms using for instance an envelope, does the value for the envelope represent time or the amount of waves used? (I'm asking because the thing goes to 16, which is the amount of waves available for the oscilator)

if the latter, does it calculate 100 steps betwean 2 waveforms? So if you let's say use a value of 6.80 for the envelope controling the waves, does that mean that it doesn't get to 7 completeley?

if you know what I mean