Zebra 3 Public Beta (final beta)

[Touch The Universe]

Sure, you can make whatever curves you want that mimic a transient of sorts. You can drag and drop a sample and it will convert to curves as close as it can.

Wait... what That is exactly what I'm after. Is there a manual out or videos that cover these features recently? It'd be nice to have one video that covers the overview of all these features without going into depth in them.

Essential viewing.

It only covers the oscillator but seriously opened Zebralette 3 up for me. Now we have 4x the power.

Brainmelt, that's atleast 2-3 watches. But wow, I can draw shapes in the mseg - that is quite useful. Time and Frequency drawing - guides. Lot to wrap my brain around - if i want - the sounds are quite good on its own without any of this deeper diving, interesting to see how going deeper might effect this.

[Funky40]

We might add some kind of slope control. Not sure yet.

vs. Envelopes:
please do !

personally i think envelopes are one of the most important part of a Synth.
Definitly true for everything on the more percussive, staccato, side of things.


Look a Piano how great it is sounding (Pianoteq in SW).
That´s the "Envelope"


(you get the idea, right ? )

[wagtunes]

Okay, I don't know if this is a bug or not but in Zebra 2, when I go to OSC 1 below and modify the shape, the sound changes. In Zebra 3, nothing happens.

Is this a bug or does it work differently in Zebra 3?

[morphex]

I'm blown away by the sound quality so far. It has a beautiful additive engine, and I'm coming up with some very liquid-sounding patches that morph into bells. There's so much to explore here. Wow, really fantastic Urs!!

[kraster]

Okay, I don't know if this is a bug or not but in Zebra 2, when I go to OSC 1 below and modify the shape, the sound changes. In Zebra 3, nothing happens.

Is this a bug or does it work differently in Zebra 3?

Select a shape in the time line and hit the little speaker icon to preview the currently selected shape.

Otherwise the current Curve is determined by the curve morph knob.

[JonSolo]

Am I crazy or are there things that were in Zebra 2 that aren't in Zebra 3? Because I just pulled up Zebra 2 today because there was a particular patch that I wanted to use for a song and I didn't want to have to recreate it in Zebra 3. That's when I noticed that there is indeed an ARP in Zebra 2 that is gone from Zebra 3. I completely forgot about it. Is there a reason it was taken out?

The video does say that an arp and sequencer will be added. This is a beta.

[Robotoad]

limitation push creativity

I will push back against that myth until the day they pry the synths out of my cold dead hands.
Limitations stifle creativity. Period, end of story.
The only thing limitations do are force you to compromise.

Dr. Seuss once took a $50 bet to write a story using only 50 words. The result was the most successful book of his career, Green Eggs & Ham.

I'll point out to you that the book was aimed at preschoolers. If you want your synths to be aimed at the same demographic then there is nothing more I can say.

That's the response I expected! But it implies I want my synths to be aimed at preschoolers, which misses the meaning of creativity versus constraint. The demographic of the book bolsters the point: a man who limited himself to 50 words for preschoolers ended up writing a career-defining work with a multigenerational legacy. Dr. Seuss believed children's books had the power to do more social good than any other cultural force, and the book was written to be about the defiance of norms. Writing music is not a dissimilar goal, nor is it a much different process to express one's self within a limited vocabulary of scales, genres, lyrics, and instruments.

At any rate if he had used more than 50 words there is no reason to believe the book wouldn't have been even more successful.

The limitations contributed to its rhythm, tone, and memorability. He wrote an extensive series of notes in preparation, and he used charts and checklists, rewriting pages several times. In that constrained world, seemingly minute details such as which phrase to apply an exclamation point to became important expressers of a character's state of mind. The writing process was driven by those challenges rather than being stifled by them.

The bottom line is that every time I see the ridiculous assertion that "limitations spark creativity" I'll be here to say "No they most certainly do not, they stifle creativity".

There is research on the relationship between creativity and constraint that contradicts this. As the saying goes, "Necessity is the mother of invention." Limitations spark novel solutions and an exploration of existing tools. An overabundance of features leads to a paradox of choice, endless tweaking, and an agonizing uncertainty over a result. Spontaneity is lost, and objectivity is eroded. This becomes a creativity black hole. Zebra's UI mitigates this danger with a limited number of highly expressive tools in an efficient interface.

It must be pointed out that it's a luxurious complaint to have, that a synthesizer "only" has four signal lanes, four multipurpose filters, four spline oscillators, and so on. Given its capabilities, it's arguably myopic to judge Zebra 3 by the conventions of a traditional environment centered on filters, envelopes, and primitive waveforms. The diversity of sounds you can make with merely one Zebra 3 oscillator is impressive on its own.

I'm confident that if critics explore the tools available here and learn how to use them to their fullest, they will find it difficult to feel as though their sound design options are stifled. If one still feels that way, I suggest exploring Max, Reaktor, or SuperCollider wherein you have almost unlimited freedom to build from scratch, hopefully with an unlimited time schedule in which to do it. The joy I'm finding in Zebra 3 is achieving expressiveness and uniqueness on the level of those environments very quickly and with little UI friction. It's an awesome achievement.

[shonky]

Okay, I don't know if this is a bug or not but in Zebra 2, when I go to OSC 1 below and modify the shape, the sound changes. In Zebra 3, nothing happens.

Is this a bug or does it work differently in Zebra 3?

Select a shape in the time line and hit the little speaker icon to preview the currently selected shape.

Otherwise the current Curve is determined by the curve morph knob.

Found this a little confusing myself but figured it out eventually

[Urs]

I happen to find the auto up and auto down to be unique. I love the results. Thanks for that. Hopefully you also have quantize in there to that can glisten up the pitch in scales or what not - glide up - bot only harmonically relative to the notes gliding. Imposcar something like that and I "think" that iis what is going on, though not sure.

I know what you mean, but we do not have "quantise post glide" for glissando effects. It was discussed, but seemed to be too much of a hassle to be added.

We can have another look later...

[Urs]

Can Filters have spread amongst a layer with unison?

Hehehe, that would fry some CPUs...

The filters are "only" stereo. But 4 filters offer 8 individually positionable and detonable filter settings per voice...

[Urs]

On the topic of performance meter, after the meter gave it's suggestions, could you make it so we can just click on a suggestion text and have Z3 apply it automatically? Would save a bit of time.

I would love to post the emoji...

This suggestion made laugh out loud because while I totally get it, my first thought was "gosh, when is anything ever enough?".

But that's also because firstly we haven't even gone through all modules to gather possible suggestions, and thus haven't tested how useful they'd be, and secondly, adding such a one-click setup requires quite a bit of development. More than one might think. We have already done something similar with the MPE setup in other plug-ins, but in this case it would need to be something to switch back and forth, to see if the patch still works. On top of also being somehow dynamic UI layout based on DSP data... not really anything our UI framework is has templates for...

I will put it on the eternal ToDo List, but can't make any promises...

[Urs]

Curious- what other parameters are being calibrated here?

Only the output of the respective Pitch module. Which e.g. also work on filters with key tracking etc.

If you want per voice "decalibrations" of gains or envelope times, take a Mapper (or two or three), set it to 16 steps with a random pattern, use the "increment" mode with "none" as Source, and each note cycles through these values. Just apply to the parameters you wish to be more organic and alive while playing.

[Urs]

Sure, you can make whatever curves you want that mimic a transient of sorts. You can drag and drop a sample and it will convert to curves as close as it can.

Wait... what That is exactly what I'm after. Is there a manual out or videos that cover these features recently? It'd be nice to have one video that covers the overview of all these features without going into depth in them.

Wav import is currently quite buggy and glitchy... it's one of the areas that I need to improve and fix over time, but I'm afraid it will always be a little bit hit and miss.

[Urs]

One of my favourtite uses for the pitch modules is to use different glide settings on different oscillators

That is how the idea came about, as we have "Glide Offset" in Diva etc. but we thought "so what else can we offset? And why don't we just do 4 of each?"

And also, we wanted to go beyond lowest and highest key for duophonic sounds. We wanted to add a triple and quad option, similar to what the Korg MonoPoly does.

[Urs]

Okay, I don't know if this is a bug or not but in Zebra 2, when I go to OSC 1 below and modify the shape, the sound changes. In Zebra 3, nothing happens.

Is this a bug or does it work differently in Zebra 3?

Select a shape in the time line and hit the little speaker icon to preview the currently selected shape.

Otherwise the current Curve is determined by the curve morph knob.

Found this a little confusing myself but figured it out eventually

Yes. But it had to be.

In Zebra 2 the shape you see is the shape you hear, as long as you don't apply modulation. So in Zebra 2 you always have to set modulation to 0 and Warp to the curve you want to edit. Once edited, you can go back to your original Warp and bring the modulation back in.

This ^^ workflow was tedious, to say the least. It definitely frustrated me a lot at times.

So in Zebra 3, if you want to hear the Curve/Wave/MSEG you want to edit, you simply hit the Listen icon. It's confusing at first, but after some time it comes automatically. Whenever I go back to Zebra 2 I think "how did that ever work?", which might only be me, but I hope you'll end up appreciating the difference this makes.