Electro House w/ Zebra

[zircon]

Just for fun.. I actually don't ever produce electro-house (I think it's a very boring genre) but I spent a bit of time emulating that overused pluck sound and came up with this. Fun preset to play with.

http://www.zirconstudios.com/music/wips/Z2eh.mp3

http://www.zirconstudios.com/music/wips/Z2eh2.mp3 (even more sidechaining)

[ZenPunkHippy]

That sounds great. How much of it is Zebra? Just the plucky sound or the whole lot?

It's a nice challenge to see how much of a complete sound loop is possible using just one instance.

After reading a thread about techno bass, I'm currently trying to replicate the classic (modular) techno sound by playing an arp that controls FM kick drum, FM bass and hi-hats in one patch with some really great results. Best soft synth ever

Peace,
Andy.

[zircon]

Heh, well I'm not nearly as good as someone like Michael K at doing percussive sounds with Zebra The kick is from my own collection of samples and the clap is from Vengeance. The synth is the only other sound, which is all Zebra 2, including effects. I did the "sidechaining" using simple volume/peak control linking in FL Studio, though it could have been very easily done from within Zebra. I chose not to do it within the patch because sometimes you want that sound without sidechaining, but all you'd really have to do is a sine LFO -> volume.

[Ogg Vorbis]

Just for fun.. I actually don't ever produce electro-house (I think it's a very boring genre) but I spent a bit of time emulating that overused pluck sound and came up with this. Fun preset to play with.

http://www.zirconstudios.com/music/wips/Z2eh.mp3

I think that this example of your's illustrates the strength of Zebra. You've got the effects, the envelope and other elements all modulating. This breathes fresh life into this rather stale genre.

Elsewhere in this forum I stated my astonishment over how "alive" Zebra was, in other words it's a musical instrument more like a fiddle or a clarinet than a sound generation device, although it is a powerful one of those too.

In synth-based music you've got 4 bars of kick drum, then snare on beats 2 and 4. Then eighth notes in the bass part with a 4-bar lick of some kind in the upper part.

Four bars of the full ensemble plus four bars makes eight.
Eight bars plus eight bars makes sixteen.
Sixteen plus sixteen make thirty-two bars which can constitute a section of form.

8 bars of "break" then

Thirty-two plus thirty-two makes sixty-four

and so on...

Symmetrical sameness produces a tendency to create larger structures of symmetrical sameness... it's not the genre's fault. It's the geometry of regular phrases.

Modulation is the antidote to terminal sameness in this genre (dance music does not lend itself to metric or phrase asymmetry). And therein lies Zebra's potentially great contribution to terminal sameness - the ease with which a player can snake, bob, weave, expand, contract, move, swim, dive, in essessence, "dance" with parameter modulation.

I am finding this true in film music. The fun of Zebra's performance area, for example is increasing or decreasing tensions as a scene changes.

A lot of fun.