Zebralette - where to begin? And Tyrell questions.

[nick_op]

Hello, everyone. My name is Nick and I'm relatively new to synths. I joined this wonderful world of sound creation 11 days ago when I noticed a synth course on the Slate Digital Academy. That got me interested, though I wasn't such a fan of the Ana 2 synth - it seems to do everything and I feel like having constraints is a better condition for learning.

I've been working through Syntorial and feel pretty comfortable with subtractive synthesis. I've been using Tyrell to put what I've been learning into practice and have been trying to recreate sounds or even whole pieces of music using only Tyrell.

I did try searching through the forums to find answers to these questions, but the posts I found are usually recommendations for which synths to use as opposed to how to use them.

My questions are about percussion. Firstly, is it possible to create a decent cymbal sound in Tyrell? They don't have to be super realistic. I'm specifically talking about cymbals that ring out (e.g. crash or open hi-hat), as I've managed to get a decent closed hi-hat (plus snare and kick drums) by following a tutorial. I've managed to get a decent transient for the hit and have it followed by noise, but that metallic sound it eluding me. I'm not sure whether it's a limitation of the synth or of my skills (I'm leaning towards the latter, though there are so many things that I don't know that I don't know it's hard for me to make a judgement on what's possible).

My second question about Tyrell is about tom toms. The closest I've got is using an LFO set to saw down to drop the pitch of oscillator 2, while having oscillator 1 set to a sine wave, though it does just sound like a pulse wave having it's pitch dropped rather than a tom tom. Is it likely I can get closer?

I'm not asking anyone to do the work of making the patches, just for someone to say either, "Yes, you're on the right track.", or, "No, it's probably not possible on this synth.".

As to the other part of the topic title - I've been playing around with Zebralette with a view of learning how to use it and eventually moving on to Zebra. However, since it's so different from subtractive synthesis, I'm not sure how to go about learning it. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I have taken a look at the Zebra 2 mini tutorials. I find them to be excellent and try to follow with the functions that are in Zebralette, but often get stuck when they use features that it doesn't have. I've also tried deconstructing patches, but often find I don't understand why the settings are the way the are.

There seem to be almost no tutorials specifically for Zebralette (Tyrell at least has a few that I could find on YouTube.

Anyway, thanks for for taking the time to read this long post.

[EvilDragon]

Welcome to the world of sound design!

You can always check out factory presets, they usually contain percussive patches. Unfortunately Tyrell doesn't have patch browser with tags or search so that's gonna slow things down a bit.

Regarding cymbals, generally you want to play with noise and oscillator cross modulation (x-mod). For toms, mixing in some filtered noise to the pitched downwards sweep should help.


Zebralette is a great introduction to Zebra! Yes, it doesn't have a filter, except some of the OscFX modes do act as filters. So here I would simply recommend just going through the manual and trying every feature one by one, starting from default patch. It shouldn't take you long to figure things out. It is deceptively simple considering it's just one Zebra oscillator!

[nick_op]

Thanks for the welcome and the advice, EvilDragon! I'll have a play with your suggestions and report back.

[Howard]

1) Zebralette can do cymbal-like sounds (there's an example in the 07 Drums folder of version 2.9).
2) I agree there should be a Zebralette / Zebra2 oscillator tutorial. Sorely missing!

[whyterabbyt]

You might find useful info in these specific chapters from Sound On Sound magazine's 'Synth Secrets' articles from a few years back.

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... percussion
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... ic-cymbals
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... -synthesis

(Full set of articles https://www.soundonsound.com/series/synth-secrets)

[nick_op]

Howard, thanks for pointing out that preset. I had a look and it's pretty close to what I'm looking for. The one thing I'd like to change is that it sounds like it's starting with a specific pitch at the moment and I've been trying to make it sound less pitched. Changing the EQ has helped - I increased the bass and lowered the treble and increasing the ChopLift just slightly has given it more of big crash at the beginning. So I feel like I'm closer.

whyterabbyt - thanks for those links. I had stumbled across them before but I do find them a little difficult to follow, so I think I need to set aside some time to sit down with them in order to thoroughly understand the details.

Edit: And I did manage to get a decent tom sound. I'd completely forgotten about the T-Mod controls, so had been using the Tune 2 control instead and leaving Oscillator 1 muted. Once I switched over to the T-Mod controls and switched to using a sine wave it started to sound much more convincing. I actually ended up layering two instances of Tyrell, one which had a low pitch sine wave and noise, the other with another sine wave an octave higher, both with T-Mod controlled by ADSR2 with slightly different settings.

[Clem4]

For those who also would like to make kicks...

How to make kicks with Zebralette
https://www.musictech.net/tutorials/wee ... ebralette/

[nick_op]

Thanks for that link, Clem4. It was interesting to see how this kind of thing can be done. That Essentials Kick plugin seems really cool.

[k2006]

Zebralette free presets on Uhe site have some drum sounds -download "Percussive Oddities" by Iriondaronin. https://u-he.com/PatchLib/zebra.html

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

Howdy and welcome to this awesome world of SD.

Something you may find interesting. This is a link to a past contest where the contestants had to create a song using only Zebralette and free mixing tools. It gives you great insight into what can really be done with only one synth. There are some amazing songs in here. This one of the older contests but still holds up. The KVR one synth challenge is a great place to learn and accelerate your knowledge curve

https://sites.google.com/site/kvrosc/osc-32

[nick_op]

kone2006 - thanks, I'll take a look at those presets that you recommended. I hadn't even thought about extra presets, to be honest, so thanks for the heads up.

Scrubbing Monkeys - that's really cool! I'll gradually work my way through the playlist over the coming week. I noticed there's also a more recent Zebralette one as well. It's great to hear some of the possibilities in a very contained way - I know that Zebralette and (even more so) Zebra2 have an enormous amount of possibilities to create sound, which is both hugely exciting and simultaneously overwhelming. Listening to those submissions for the competition will help me focus a little more.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

Yeah....I gave you the old one because it simply blew me away when I first heard it. There are not only great examples of SD skills but some amazing compositions as well. Have fun. All of those guys are happy to share their knowledge

[nick_op]

I agree, there are some amazing compositions there. Having stuck with pop and rock for so long, it's quite rare within those styles that anything surprises me, but with the pieces for the composition I was regularly thinking, "That's cool! I wouldn't have thought of doing that.".

I played around a bit with the SpectroBlend in Zebralette today. Somehow, despite reading the manual, which states that it represents the harmonic spectrum, I hadn't quite linked that to each bar representing the next harmonic in the harmonic series. I'm glad to have finally made that connection, now it's time to start researching what kind of harmonics are present in various instruments.

Does anyone know if it's possible to enlarge the display for the Geo/Spectro part of Zebralette? I had a quick look at Zebra and found out how to do so immediately, but couldn't find a way to do so in Zebralette. I ask because I'm working on a laptop which doesn't have a particularly big screen, so it can be difficult to pick out the small details, even with Zebralette set to the largest size my screen can handle.

One last question (for now): am I better off posting in this thread or over in the Sound Design section of the forums when asking whether a particular sound is possible to make? I originally posted here since I had some more general questions about Zebralette as well, but if my subsequent questions are purely about recreating certain sounds, maybe the Sound Design section would be more appropriate.

Edit: I accidentally stumbled across a solution for the cymbals preset in Zebralette sounding too 'pitched'! I loaded it on a channel that was playing 3 note chords (specifically root, fifth and flat tenth, though I haven't tested to see what difference it makes if the chords are more densely packed or spread out). That seems to make the cymbals sound like they don't have a set pitch and gives them more of a crash sound.

[k2006]

Zebralette free "Plugmon" skin seems to have Oscillator editor fullpage view.I think for learning spectral oscillator,free ThornCM Synth with Computer Music magazine is good-you can also import 256 samples length single cycle wave and convert it into spectrum in ThornCM.

[Howard]

Study the little Zebralette user guide, and try everything out.