Zebra 3 Public Beta Revision 20399

[Iores Pyadzee]

Hi, yesterday bought the Zebra 3 as soon as I saw it and I really liked the synth but there’s one issue that makes the sound design very hard, at least to me. Many parameters adjusts so quickly, if I want to increase the decay a little bit and try to pull the knob up, it almost reaches top. Sensitivity like this is pretty time consuming for basic adjustments. And also, I know that holding shift allows us to do fine adjustments but then it becomes very slow. I mean, in the other U he products like Bazille, Zebra 2 and Diva this is not the case. The second disadvantage of this sensitivity is that it feels like the synth is cheap quality but we all know it is not. When I turn the knobs in Bazille or adjusts parameters in Diva without holding shift, there is that sense of a little bit hardness in which we see real synths as well and it makes sound design much more fun than it really is. I do have pigments and although the sound engine of pigments is awesome, since it is visually power demanding, even on my macbook pro with M4max chip it sometimes adjusts not in real time but with a tiny bit latency and I can’t even stand that. In Zebra3, it is the other way around, unless I very subtly move my mouse or trackpad , the parameters change drastically. Hope you guys somehow deal with this, I think I am not the only one with this sense. I do have many plugins, but when I sense the parameters are either change drastically or with latency I immediately uninstall the product without caring the money spend on it. Now I only use my fabfilter and u he products, since they give me the sense of that real gear but unfortunately I can’t say the same for Zebra3. I hope it will be in your consideration, good luck team

[PieBerger]

Is there scope for context aware quantisation of knobs i.e. using a keyboard modifier to increment Pitch in semitones or Harmonic Clusters in 10s?

Might help address the issue above too!

[WalterH]

Key CTRL are experimental as far as I know, for me on linux it simply doesn't work at all (maybe due to a wayland ), but adjusting that way is same time consuming as pressing SHIFT + LMB.
Mouse wheel works for me best, if you press SHIFT and then move wheel it does job just fine, hope key ctrl will be ready soon, and hope to see bug report section here soon.

[perox]

Just selecting some of the presets in the browser—without even playing them—produces a hiss. It lasts for a few seconds and then disappears. When playing those presets, the hiss can be heard in the background. Prominent example is Luftrum – Bioluminescent Cascade. Win11/Cubase 15

[Urs]

I noticed that UI loads very slow under Windows, but I think that had been mentioned.

Yeah... next year we'll have a major project that'll move our vector based UIs to hardware accelerated drawing methods. Our UI is currently rendered on the CPU, which is really fast for bitmap based UIs, but it is slower for vectors. It's the opposite on Mac where our bitmap based UIs sometimes have become glacial.

Unfortunately this may be such a major project, we spent a lot of time optimising Zebra's UI to make it work on Windows, even though it is not ideal.

But next year we should certainly find the time.

[Ghost Dog]

Urs, what's the deal with envelope modes? Is this apparent lack of env modes a beta thing (or a new "meta"), or am I missing something?

Ok, V2/"Feedback" seems to be what I'm looking for (seems to be ).

[Viktor [TUC]]

Just selecting some of the presets in the browser—without even playing them—produces a hiss. It lasts for a few seconds and then disappears. When playing those presets, the hiss can be heard in the background. Prominent example is Luftrum – Bioluminescent Cascade. Win11/Cubase 15

That'll be the analogue modes of the delay, they come with some subtle noise so that a bucket-brigade style feedback build-up is possible.

[Viktor [TUC]]

I am using the Alternating Lanes preset and I wanted to quickly understand what modulates what, and since there are 4 LFOs used in the mod column I expected them to appear in the matrix, but LFO1 (used for the filter cutoff) and LFO4 (still haven't found what it modulates!) are missing from there.

That's my preset, so I'll explain. As we've always done since Zebra2, there's a mix of direction modulation in the respective panels (allowing higher-resolution modulation) and the rest is done via the mod matrix at the bottom.
So look at the panels on the left and you'll find LFO1 used in the first Filter module, LFO2 in the second one. And switch to the Pitches tab, there's LFO4 assigned to the second Pitch module.
LFO3 of course you can see in the mod matrix.

Viktor
u-he team

[Mogular]

This is actually a constant bug bear of mine. I know that if I can see an LFO on the right that it must be modulating something, but I sometimes have to click every tab to find out what. It would be great if this could be made much more obvious somehow

[Urs]

Urs, what's the deal with envelope modes? Is this apparent lack of env modes a beta thing (or a new "meta"), or am I missing something?

Ok, V2/"Feedback" seems to be what I'm looking for (seems to be ).

You can also self modulate with Stretch and Feedback. Maybe not necessarily gain, hehehe.

So I think I mentioned it before, we are thinking about more slope control.

But also, as for "fewer parameters than Zebra 2". Yes, that is a bit deliberate.

First of all, Z2 envelopes were not modulatable throughout their phases. E.g. when modulating decay, it was only evaluated when decay started. In Z3 this has become dynamic, the values update frequently at a. rate of 800+ Hz.

Secondly, we have pretty good statistics of Zebra 2 presets and only very few use expanded stages, looping or complex dynamics. For the few presets that need them, Zebra 3 has other means to achieve the same. Like, if you need an envelope on release, just trigger an envelope with the Release Gate (which currently has a bug though... will fix asap).

So I think we made the envelopes much easier to use in Zebra 3. We did so by sacrificing some features that were rarely used, but which can still be set up differently in Z3.

We're open for feedback, like, if you have a use case in Z2 that does not work in Z3, or that has become very tedious to set up, let us know. We might find a solution.

[WalterH]

why it's so hard to add points on splines ?
it just refuses to add point on straight line, I need to make an arc first and then it adds point with double click.
also sometimes it adds points even on straight line but that happens in 1 out of 100 clicks..

manual says: "Add points .....................................double-click in the background or option+click (Mac) / ctrl+click (Win)"
I'm just doing something wrong ?

[Vortifex]

Playing with the demo. Sounds fantastic, some really impressive presets. CPU not too bad on my Ryzen 7. GUI looks good, although it takes a second to load and close.

I'm having difficulty working out how people have made patches with sequenced notes. With the Arksun patch Never Ending I can't work out how the notes have been programmed or how to change them, or how to disable the sequence playing altogether. I mean it's obviously in the MSEG, triggered by a red line, but I can't access it to manipulate it.

Q: Is it possible to disable mouse control of parameters? I'm often finding that when I want to scroll through the left or right panels, or the FX panel at the bottom, I'm changing parameters instead of scrolling.

[Urs]

This is actually a constant bug bear of mine. I know that if I can see an LFO on the right that it must be modulating something, but I sometimes have to click every tab to find out what. It would be great if this could be made much more obvious somehow

Yep, on it.

So here's a video with something I've been working on:





This is a new UI control that displays the "Modulation Graph", which shows the relation of modulators in respect of their target modules. It does not specifically show which parameter exactly is modulated, but it does give us a picture of who modulates what, in order to determine the ideal signal flow.

Now, my idea is to extend this control (and make it look good), so that only the active modulators are displayed, and also all the modulation targets on the right, with all the MIDI etc. modulators on the left.

We'll be experimenting with this a bit, and I can't yet say if and when it comes, but we think we can fuse this with the Scope tab and the Module Performance Meter into some kind of "insights" panel. With some luck and effort we can maybe even put it into its own window.

We'll see... it's on our radar.

[tasmaniandevil]

Q: Is it possible to disable mouse control of parameters? I'm often finding that when I want to scroll through the left or right panels, or the FX panel at the bottom, I'm changing parameters instead of scrolling.

We actually invested quite some time to make sure that while you're scrolling, you won't accidentally change parameter values. Once the scrolling stopped, you can then edit parameters again via the scroll wheel.

[Urs]

why it's so hard to add points on splines ?
it just refuses to add point on straight line, I need to make an arc first and then it adds point with double click.
also sometimes it adds points even on straight line but that happens in 1 out of 100 clicks..

manual says: "Add points .....................................double-click in the background or option+click (Mac) / ctrl+click (Win)"
I'm just doing something wrong ?

So, a click onto a segment straightens it. That's the same as in Zebra 2, so we thought we'd keep that.

But maybe it's less intuitive, as it prevents points from being added.

What would you alternatively suggest to use to quickly straighten segments?