Is this Zebra3 at SuperBooth???

[PieBerger]

That's cool. No little audio clips yet?

They'll come. When previewing waveforms and morphs while editing, there is deliberately no smoothing, and thus no latency. So when sweeping things with the mouse, it may sound a lot more grainy than it would with an envelope or an LFO. I would prefer to provide audio using smooth modulations first because otherwise people may get the wrong impression that - because the mouse was used - the sound is somewhat harsh and jittery.

You don't want to have an Anderton's Ub-Xa moment

That was so brutal that I feel bad for everyone involved.

They are still going to be hurting from that one in years to come

[Sound Author]

It looks amazing. I just sat there for 20 minutes playing the video over and over. Hopefully, the process of creating morphing wavetables will be more of a seamless and fluid workflow than nervously drawing in nodes and hoping they morph the way you want them to. But I mean no disrespect to Z2's incredible wave-morphing engine, which was a modern miracle when Z2 first came out back in 2006. Still a very cutting edge oscillator even by today's standards.

[pdxindy]

I hope it sounds as wild as it looks.

It actually does.

[pdxindy]

It looks amazing. I just sat there for 20 minutes playing the video over and over. Hopefully, the process of creating morphing wavetables will be more of a seamless and fluid workflow than nervously drawing in nodes and hoping they morph the way you want them to.

I watched the video a few times. The complex waveforms that were being morphed looked too perfect to be hand drawn. Perhaps there is a set of tools to generate and edit complex shapes?

[Urs]

There is a tool to hand draw. But that's just one out of many tools to create and manipulate waveforms. Most tools are much more precise and go the full way with grid snapping and stuff.

There are two major editors besides the morph panel. One uses a grid approach like Serum or Vital, but with what I think is a baffling twist, creating very diverse waveforms very quickly. The other editor uses a toolchain similar to 3D modelling software or vector based graphics editors, which can create Bezier curves based on points (similar to how it is in Zebra2), but with additional tools to stretch, squeeze, flip, clone, trim, warp, draw, simplify, and so on and so on.

As for the morphing, there are various methods in a drop down list which morph between two curves in different ways. Some map points from one curve to the other and add points to fill the gaps. Others map features from one curve to another. There are methods that give the sound designer a lot of control over the morph including the ability to do completely chaotic ones where points seem to randomly move past each other.

In any case, morphing is mostly automatic and does not require special knowledge or skills. PWM is easy. Drawing sine-shapes and warping them in PD-like manner is easy, and the morphs between them are easy too. Extremely complex waveforms usually morph in interesting ways even if it's not always clear what's going where. The most spectacular morph happens when dragging the last waveform in this video between the 3rd and 4th one, and then go one way or another (forgot).

[Tj Shredder]

Apropos morphing - morphing complete presets is a hot thingy. But it needs to differentiate morphable and non morphable parameters like oscillator pitch or switches. For those you would need two instances and a crossfade while morphing all morphable parameters on both instances. One could even imagine a 2d space with preset nodes like in the iOS Novation Launchkey app. Will something like that find its way into Z3? It would open very complex expressions especially with MPE…

[Urs]

Morphing presets totally doesn't work when the signal flow is modular.

[Biome_Digital]

I find randomisation really useful for sound design. Would be great to have some of that.

[Henry Von Wilheimer]

Seems like these editors and morphing options will give an incredible combination of versatility and ease.

I'm hoping we can see a Zebra 3 oscillator module with all these features plus dual oscillator effects in VCV Rack eventually. Was reading a thread on here in January where Urs mentioned the developer tasked with porting Diva filters to Rack had left. Maybe after Z3 release it can be done? I'd be willing to just pay straight up Z3 price for a sound source like this in Rack lol. Also the Eurorack modules/Z3 filters and other sweet components from the u-he collection of course.

[gentleclockdivider]

Can we still use the old skool method ?
When using the phase distortion effect it is essential to merge points (overlap )
See example

[vertibration]

What does Z3 wave morphing offer that others do not? How does it differ, and what are the benefits over other synths?

[ghettosynth]

look, just give us 3 of those OSC, plus the filters from Diva, the efx section from Repro, the cabling of Bazille, the morphable EQ of Filterscape and the Comb Osc's from Triple Cheese, call it Zebra3, then add more stuff later and we all happy, ok????

No no no no no! Let Urs get it right, to his satisfaction. That way he won't be distracted anymore on giving us everything else that's been on the back burner.

On another note, this is the first Zebra that might have a chance of wedging a crowbar into my wallet.

[Urs]

Can we still use the old skool method ?
When using the phase distortion effect it is essential to merge points (overlap )
See example

You won't need overlapping points anymore in order to do this. A point on one curve can map to multiple points on the other.

I'll try to recreate your example when I'm back in the office, just to be sure

[Urs]

What does Z3 wave morphing offer that others do not? How does it differ, and what are the benefits over other synths?

I kind of don't understand the question. Which other synths offer geometric morphing of user editable waveforms?

In my view not everything that's called "morphing" is technically similar to the effect in film and music videos which defined the term (Terminator 2, "Black or White" by Michael Jackson). In music applications the term is often used for all sorts of crossfades and interpolation techniques (e.g. "spectral morphing" in Hive, also Serum and Vital IIRC), but these are by no means comparable technologies.

The kind of morphing that I'm talking about is geometric. It requires that a waveform (or shape, or 3D model, if we include 2D/3D applications) is either composed of mathematical curves (Splines, NURBS, Paths), or masked by them. These curves/paths/outlines are then seamlessly transformed from one shape to another while their visual content is geometrically distorted and - in case of 2D images or textures - crossfaded in the process. The defining aspect is the change of shape though, which is achieved by interpolating the geometry rather than crossfading it.

The only synth I recall to use some sort of user editable spline based waveform for its oscillator is Curve by Cableguys, but it does not perform any morphing between two or more shapes. Synths like Vital or Serum let users edit waveforms that are sample based, so there is no spline based outline which lets the user define seamless geometric transitions.

Hence, I would not know which synth to compare this to.

[Urs]

Can we still use the old skool method ?
When using the phase distortion effect it is essential to merge points (overlap )
See example

Yes, it absolutely still works:

[edit: better video next page]