Zebra 3 and Zebra Legacy

[Urs]

I checked the screens. Maybe ive missed but will there be some drift knob to make more "analog" behaviour of the oscillators without needing to setup random lfos to fine pitch/phase?

It's under "Calibration". Various ways to get analogue or not-so-analogue sound.

[Urs]

But if both Carrier and Modulator are internal sine waves, what does the external Input effect? Pardon my question if this is basic FM

The external input can either FM the carrier or the modulator, or be set to go through and add to the mix. So you can have two modulators on the carrier, the built-in one and the external one, at the same time.

(as I said, loads of routing options...)

[misterandy]

Nice, sounds like lots of possibilities

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Very excited by ALL of this! Getting giddy!

[Home Studio 87]

the first public beta came with NKS ?

[Urs]

the first public beta came with NKS ?

Can't say yet. It's possible that NKS is going to be something we'll add during beta simply because the new NKS V2 requires automatic mappings, and Zebra 3 has 4000+ parameters that need to be mapped automatically... not so easy...

[dayjob]

the first public beta came with NKS ?

Can't say yet. It's possible that NKS is going to be something we'll add during beta simply because the new NKS V2 requires automatic mappings, and Zebra 3 has 4000+ parameters that need to be mapped automatically... not so easy...

Only 4000? My midi controller has 6000 knobs.

[NAD]

I'm so excited from all these screenshots it's making me physically queasy . Hard to believe we'll be seeing a beta in just a few weeks.

[Lbdunequest]

I was thinking. If Zebra legacy has ZebraHZ and Zebra 2. Why use Zebra 2 over ZebraHZ?

[GruvSyco]

Personally, I’ve tried to just switch over to HZ but there’s more of a comfort in using Zebra 2. A little less cluttered maybe. It just feels like I navigate it faster.

[misterandy]

But if both Carrier and Modulator are internal sine waves, what does the external Input effect? Pardon my question if this is basic FM

The external input can either FM the carrier or the modulator, or be set to go through and add to the mix. So you can have two modulators on the carrier, the built-in one and the external one, at the same time.

(as I said, loads of routing options...)

So the sort of growly sound you get in Bazille by PM'ing a saw tooth with a sine is best created with the OSC FX DeltaX with the Direction set to Sine * Wave, not with the FMO?

[jtsterays]

Will a module just dedicated to supersaw be out of place/unnecessary in Z3? I know the sound is overused and has existed for so long now, would be quite a contrast to all the new next gen generator modules in Z3. But it just sounds really good and a good base to a lot of layered sounds (it's also a reese bass, and that sound will probably never go out of style). So a module just for that task with different detune laws + aliasing option (which imo are why the JP saws sound really "alive") + optimized CPU would be pretty nice.

[ffx]

Can you start the countdown now?

[Fannon]

Will a module just dedicated to supersaw be out of place/unnecessary in Z3? I know the sound is overused and has existed for so long now, would be quite a contrast to all the new next gen generator modules in Z3. But it just sounds really good and a good base to a lot of layered sounds (it's also a reese bass, and that sound will probably never go out of style). So a module just for that task with different detune laws + aliasing option (which imo are why the JP saws sound really "alive") + optimized CPU would be pretty nice.

Probably it's sufficient to have a few saw waveforms in the Z3 OSC, maybe also emulating a bit the style of particular hardware synths? There are many wavetables out there that do this, no reason why you couldn't do it as vectors for Z3 OSC.

Just picking a clean saw should be very easy and adding "super" is just a matter of duplicating it with some drift, which many OSCs can just do via parameters.

But I do like the simplicity of e.g. Hive or Pigments 3, where you can also just go for the simple standard OSC types and not have to use something more complicated like a wavetable. Not sure this fits into Z3 design philosophy, though.

[audiojunkie]

Pardon me for being out of the loop, but what’s the design rationale for not having wave tables? Is the idea that something else Zebra has effectively covers that basis?

Yes.

Zebra 3 has a built-in waveform editor, but it is vector based, using splines - as opposed to sample based waveforms that wavetables are made of. You can import and vectorise individual waveforms from .wav files, and Zebra 3 will create a smooth transition between two or more of them. But it won't import hundreds of frames, only up to 16.

However, wavetable import is hit and miss. In most cases, hand edited waveforms and transitions sound much better. And like Hive's .uhm generated wavetables, they are as crisp as it gets.

Here's a video from three years ago (gosh) that shows what Zebra 3 waveforms are made of, and what kind of transitions it can do easily:

But why only 16? For reference, Serum 2 uses 256 frames. I'm just trying to understand... Are you saying that with Zebra 3, you can get the same motion and sound evolution with 16 frames that Serum 2 can get with 256 frames through the advanced "smoothing" process?

Also, I'm curious how big of a frame can be imported (WAV file) to create the reference for the Zebra 3 conversion to its way of doing things. For example 2048 samples? 4092 samples? etc?