XY Pads For Dialing In Sound

[clangorous]

In this thread http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=396334 Urs noted that:

The Minimoog didn't have pulsewidth modulation. One used to mix an Osc with sawtooth and one with a ramp (inverted sawtooth), then detune a little bit for classical PWM effects.

Like a lot of folks here, have spent many hours playing with waveforms. But am a newb to Zebra. So Urs's comment inspired me to try this out in Zebra2 using two OSC, and then again using just one OSC with the Invert switch on. Jolly good fun, but easy to spend a while tweaking things like Detune, Phase, Sync etc. because the range of sounds is so large, even before adding filters.

But I found that with with Zebra2 the XY pads offer a great way to dial in the sound when there are a lot of variables to tweak. Mapping to separate midi control knobs is good, but the XY pads are so much easier...intuitive even.

Originally overlooked the XY pads as for performance only, but this was cool.

So as a simple approach I mapped Phase and Sync Tune to the XY pads for each OSC, and it was much easier to hear the impact of the adjustments on the timbre and decide what sounded good. What a great tool! This gave me a glimpse of how Zebra is going to change the way I build sounds and how much time it takes to get the job done, so had to share.

[padillac]

Another neat thing about the XY pads is that they show up at the front of the host automation parameter . Because Zebra has so many parameters, some things aren't exposed directly to automation (in ableton at least), and if you're using a host that doesn't handle automation as neatly as Ableton then you might have trouble finding the parameter to automate. XY on the other hand is right up at the front so if you want to automate something in your host, it's easy to set that to an XY and then automate the XY.

I typically don't use XY for performance as much as quickly dialing in different sounds, as you point out. One patch can serve as bass, lead, pad, and fx simply by mapping the XY pads. Pretty cool!

[clangorous]

...
I typically don't use XY for performance as much as quickly dialing in different sounds, as you point out. One patch can serve as bass, lead, pad, and fx simply by mapping the XY pads. Pretty cool!

Ah now that is cool. Thanks!