Which doesn't justify that anything could be worse in my stuffbeatz wrote:in all cases, NI is a team of people, producing excellent stuff(my favorite bing reaktor) and Urs is alone yet still producing excellent stuff !!
Anyhow, on the topic of easy controls:
This is what the XY controls are meant for.
IMHO opinion any sort of hard-wired easy edits is only half the way to accomplish things. It's just a technical view rather than a musical one. Let me give an example: Many easy edits would compress or stretch envelopes. Technically this would somehow lengthen or shorten the patch. But, does the patch still sound good when it's stretched or does it just go boring? - Herein lies the problem. Hardwired edits do something regardless of the actual character of the preset.
Now, the XY controls in Zebra are considerably harder to set up (if you neglect the hardwired templates when right-clicking them, more to come in future updates), but with a bit of thought on the side of the patch designer they can be used as easy edits that actually correspond to the character of the sound. Here are some examples: SFX Emulations/tas rainshower 01, Instuments Keys/UH XY FM Synth
Thing is, well thought out controls may not sound as "dramatic" as hardwired edits, but they stay within ranges that actually make sense for the given patch.
However, due to the complexity involved when setting up XYs in Z2, I think best would be writing a few scripts that set them up automagically for certain architectures (synths, comb filter based instruments, fm instruments etc.) as a starting point.
Urs