Zebra 3 and Zebra Legacy

[surreal]

Also I have to ask, will Zebra 3 allow more MSEG points than Zebra 2/HZ? That’s a big one for me

256 (but we'll recommend to keep it below 100 for smooth and glitch-free morphing)

Hi Urs When will the legacy bundle be available for us who already own zebra and dark zebra?

[Download SOphist]

I´m not the one to complain, but even if the wait was one of biblical (like old testament biblical) proportions, a 30 eur upgrade seems very sensible. excited to hear this.

[Lbdunequest]

I´m not the one to complain, but even if the wait was one of biblical (like old testament biblical) proportions, a 30 eur upgrade seems very sensible. excited to hear this.

Thats a small price to pay for a totaly new synth. Other companies are charging few times more for not that significant updates.

[vanyasapronov@gmail.com]

Dear everyone,

It’s been almost ten years since I first responded to speculation about an imminent Zebra3 release. We now know that the envisaged time frame was overly optimistic, to put it mildly! We had just released The Dark Zebra and Diva, and little did I know the extent to which these events would transform the company from being just one guy plus two employees into what u-he is today. Instead of “a year or two, max” it took all of eight years and a global pandemic to finally have something sharable...

Actually, that’s not quite correct, as we spent a good chunk of that decade on product maintenance, and developed a lot of technologies needed for Z3. Here are a few examples of the “milestones” required for Zebra3 development:

• A library of curve manipulation tools (powers e.g. Hive’s Shape Sequencer)
• A multicore-enabled modulation matrix which can be used in multithreaded software. Already implemented in Repro and Hive.
• Wavetable import, manipulation and export like in Zebra2 and Hive, but taken to new levels. Work in progress!
• Filter modelling technologies which rival Diva in terms of “beef” but use significantly less CPU by sacrificing a tiny bit of authenticity: Filters don’t really need to sound 100% like this or that synth if they still sound GREAT. Good examples are already in Hive, Bazille and Repro.
• Novel comb filter and physical modelling technologies, some of which have been deployed in Colour Copy and Hive.

Countless other UI improvements and audio tweaks were necessary to reach our goals, but those were the main ones.

Even though a skeleton Zebra3 project already existed several years ago, none of those technologies have been built into a working example of Zebra3 yet. Our most ambitious goal was always the unification of Zebra’s visual curve editors instead of the 6 different editors for oscillator “Geo” curves, “Blend” waveforms, MSEG curves, ModMapper steps, LFO steps and Key/Velocity scalings. The main incentive of Zebra3 development is to have just one kind of editor for all of these jobs. The new editor needs to be comprehensive, fast and must be ‘professional’ in every way.

Today we have a usable, almost feature-complete prototype of this editor. It does what it’s supposed to and is every bit as good as we had hoped! It’s also as extensible as it gets, so I could probably spend another decade on it. However, we decided to show it off at the Superbooth event in Berlin as we want to let you make music with it ASAP.

A release of “Zebralette 3” (freeware Zebra 3 oscillator plus MSEG) as precursor to Zebra3 has become a possibility in the near future, so we need to communicate a few things that have changed since 2012. Hence this post!

Back in 2012 I pledged that the upgrade from regular Zebra2 to Zebra3 will be 30 bucks, but free for existing owners of The Dark Zebra. Of course we will honour that pledge, but in the meantime we have switched our pricing from USD to Euro. There is a cutoff date: Some time later this year - not sure when exactly - we will stop selling Zebra2 and The Dark Zebra as individual products (see the next paragraph). We will post a gentle reminder when the cutoff date is getting close. So...

To ensure that Zebra2 and The Dark Zebra continue to be maintained and kept up-to-date, we will bundle the two in a new product called “Zebra Legacy”. Everyone who has a license for Zebra2 will automatically have their license crossgraded to Zebra Legacy. Zebra Legacy will contain all our existing soundsets (including The Dark Zebra) for a very attractive price. However, there’s a catch: There will not be an upgrade path from Zebra Legacy to Zebra3 for anyone who buys it after this cutoff date. The upgrade conditions will only be available to those who have bought Zebra2 (and/or TDZ) before these become “Zebra Legacy”.

I know we can’t make things perfect for everyone, but I think that letting you know our plans way in advance should preempt any bad surprises. We think this scheme, while unusual, is best suited to secure the investment of our most loyal customers, and at the same time allows us to keep going.

Now for the part that is probably the one people are most interested in. What must happen for Zebra3 to be finished? Unfortunately of course, a lot! We think half a year or so until the editors, oscillators and MSEGs are ready. That’s several months before we can start beta testing Zebralette 3, make presets, sound demos and so on.

On the module front, everything else is a piece of cake in comparison. We have half a dozen more or less mature modules (LFOs, filters, FMOs, comb filters etc.) and plenty which “just need to be slapped together from existing parts”. On the UI front we lack a few controls and upgrades (e.g. things that exceed 32 layers). All things MPE, CLAP, NKS will happen in parallel anyway. In total it’s optimistic to say “at least a year”. We’ll be super happy if we can show some more technology previews at NAMM 23 or at the next Superbooth.

I think the message you can take away from this post is that there’s a strong commitment to getting this done. There’s a plan!

Cheers,

Urs & team

Will it be one synth called "Zebra Legacy" instead of "Zebra2" and "ZebraHZ"?

[zvenx]

I doubt it. Probably like Repro, which is a package consisting of Repro-1 and Repro-5.

rsp

[robisme]

Hello. Has the Superboot already happened? Did you present Zebra 3 ?
I love my trial of Zebra 2 (discovered only a few month ago, since I switched to Linux), and I think I'd better wait to directly buy Zebra 2, do I?
Many thanks for your wonderful synths.

(Oh by the way : the "ette" is not and english but a french suffix (in your presentation of zebralette), and doesn't mean something tiny, but something feminine. And I have to warn you that it rings not very "serious" for "zebralette", because it looks too much like a french slang word with sexual meaning (the lonely one)).

[imrae]

Dictionary.com disagrees

Screenshot from 2022-07-16 21-46-39.png

[robisme]

Ok, partially disagrees.
Still, doesn't sound very good in french.

[gentleclockdivider]

Ok, partially disagrees.
Still, doesn't sound very good in french.

Then pronounce it in english .
Problem solved

[Tj Shredder]

Ok, partially disagrees.
Still, doesn't sound very good in french.

Then pronounce it in english .
Problem solved

French are not used to pronounce anything in English...
And don't forget, sex sells even if there is nothing to sell...
We also want a CLAP version of Zebralette, and that doesn't sound good in English until you get used to it... (I am already..)

[pierb]

Urs, will Zebra 3 have a bigger focus on audio effects compared to Zebra 2?

If Zebra 3 is going to be THE synth for the next 15 years (like Zebra 2 has been) I wonder if we will now have more power in the effects section. Stuff like being able to add any number of instances, a bigger effects grid, having access to less simplified effects with more settings, and just more powerful effects like more reverb algos etc.

I f**king love Zebra. I've been using it since 2010 and even recently started selling presets for it. It still manages to surprise me even after so much time playing with it. But the thing that is making me look for other products is really mainly the effects. The oscillators, filters/modules, and workflow are still amazing to this day, specially when talking about ZebraHZ.

U-He has a design philosophy of simplifying the effects they put into the synths which makes sense. End users can just add any effects after the synth, right? But sound designers want to release presets as close to a production-ready sound as possible. This is probably why Omnisphere, while being an inferior synth to Zebra IMO, is still so very relevant, specially in the cinematic world. It has tons of effects that can be routed and configured in any way imaginable.

[Shiek927]

I can see what pierb means. I've heard some recent metal songs that utilize plenty of Zebra2 and it's staggering the sort of tones that it can use. Not in a "this sounded good in 2011", but even against more contemporary synths. However, the secret was a long-chain of third-party plugins to get the tones they used: Zebra2 was just the building block.

I'd love to see that not the case. Where you can get professional radio-ready tones straight from Zebra3 with no additional massaging from other plugins.

[BBFG#]

I´m not the one to complain, but even if the wait was one of biblical (like old testament biblical) proportions, a 30 eur upgrade seems very sensible. excited to hear this.

Old testament contracts were often 7 years. (At least for working to gain a daughter to wed.)

OT: Really glad I found this thread today. Been wondering about exactly this (status & time line) for a bit.
Answered all my wonderings.

[mtelesha]

Sounds like Zebra 3 is going to be more of an object of itself and not just an upgrade. Kind of like first cousins. I look forward to making sounds that make me feel many emotions over the years to come.

[Ah_Dziz]

Is there any idea of the performance of z3 compared to Z2 or even ACE or Diva?