Zebra 3 Public Beta (final beta)

[wagtunes]

To the five people who have quoted me in this thread since yesterday, I'm sorry I just don't have time to read and respond to them all.

So if your posts were in opposition to any of my stances, congratulations you "win" because I'm tapping out.

If your posts were in support of any of my stances, congratulations you've proven yourself to be in the higher echelons of intellectual ability.

But seriously back on the subject of beta testing.....I think right now the number one priority should probably be taming the CPU demand a bit.

Everyone can try the factory preset "Eternity Divides" and play a series of 6 note chords to gauge the CPU hit on your system.

Here it brings my Ryzen 7 7700X 8 core 16 thread that turbos at 5.4Ghz to its knees. No, that CPU is not state of the art on the cusp of 2026 but it handles everything I've ever thrown at it and has never before been choked out in the year since I had it built. So yes at this point in its development Z3 is definitely on the higher end of CPU demand of the synths I own.

Yes I now it's a Beta, yes I know optimisations are most certainly coming but I thought it would be good to get some real world numbers from the beta users since I assume feedback is why you make a public beta in the first place. Maybe others can relay their numbers as well and five dollars to the first guy who says "it doesn't choke out my system maaaaaan".

The one thing I can report is I haven't experienced any crashes or any stability issues, it's rock solid here (Windows 11).

Anyway on the subject of tapping out, I'm going to have to suspend beta testing for a while due to time constraints but I'll keep an eye out for any new betas and will certainly give them a test. Good luck.

Yeah, the cpu hit is pretty significant and I've got a 12th gen Intel, Core i9 12900k with 64 gig of ram. Now I won't say it's brought my PC to its knees but it's getting up there with 10 instances.

But I'm sure optimizations are coming.

I'm just glad I got a new machine this past month. Had to when I upgraded to Windows 11.

[zerocrossing]

While I am able to understand your opinion on the concept of Zebra, I think with this statement you are noticeably wrong. I can not see how e.g. the concepts of Phase Plant do sacrifice either workflow or especially depth. So having curves and LFO shape tables, each able to modulate everything with everything, freely remapable and retriggerable by everything does not offer depth? Sorry but it seams like, you have some blind spots on that.

Phase Plant does not have any kind of oscillator FX and that's where a lot of Zebra's power comes from.

Oscillator FX are not just added extras they are incredibly deep ways of sculpting the sound. The implementation of oscillator FX in Zebra is probably the deepest of any synth I've come across...

Not entirely true. Along with filters, it has a distortion effect with overdrive, saturate, fold-back, sine, hard clip, and quantize types. You also have all the oscillator types, including samples with a granular effect, as modulation sources. Now add a much wider range of effects, that can be used per-voice, and you find a very deep instrument. I did a survey of per-voice distortion on software synthesizers, and Phase Plant was a clear winner, both in depth and intensity of distortion, and lack of digital artifacts. Zebra 3 is good, but not as intense or as artifact free.

You can argue that Zebra is "deeper," but really it's just different. Both are excellent synthesizers, IMO.

[zerocrossing]

Oscillator effects are like the Hydrasynth's mutants on steroids, and if they were good.

Fixed that for ya!

[zerocrossing]

So which VST "sounds" the best between Phase Plant, Serum 2, and Zebra 3?

They are all on equal footing, in that respect. Each one has different approaches, features and strengths, but they're all top tier instruments, and that includes the world of hardware instruments. In fact, I'm not sure there are hardware digital synths that are as good as those. Maybe Waldorf's Iridium.

[zerocrossing]

Unison has spread. Can Filters have spread amongst a layer with unison? <-- lush 101 has this and it's gorgeous, especially with high resonance. The spread essentially generates four or however may unison layers streams of filter position relative to the global filter positon - with highest resonance and sweeping - of course can add formant like quality. I'd be happy to make a video what I mean.

If you like Lush, you'll love Currents. It's got a bunch of very interesting filter models with some that do stereo detune, offset and morphing. They're among some of my favorite digital filters of all time. Some of the Toybox filters for Reaktor are also really cool.

[EvilDragon]

In 3-5 years CPU load of Zebra 3 will be like 2-5% max. So, not an issue, imo. Synths are built for the future.

Probably not because IPC gains from generation to generation are not giant leaps anymore.

[Urs]

Is there any way to extend the Env times beyond 100%?

There is a "Stretch" option in the normal Envs which makes them go for a minute or so, if that is needed.

[zerocrossing]

Of course there's wavetable (err, curve table) scanning, that's the Curve Morph parameter.

Don't get me started.

[Urs]

Zebra 3 is good, but not as intense or as artifact free.

C'mon, really? The worst case I could measure is like 60dB headroom before aliasing kicks in... that's 1:1000... with tone fully up.

If others have better anti-aliasing with an equally beautiful tanh() shaper, I want to see how much CPU (or latency) they use...

[zerocrossing]

I believe I recall something about there being wavetable support and importing .uhm files, but I don’t see the ability to do that yet. And if you can’t import your own, is it even technically wavetable synthesis?

I sometimes think about this. If you're talking about PPG Wave style wavetable synthesis, I'd say... no. It's even less wavetable synthesis than Vector Synthesis coming from a Prophet VS. It really should have its own name, like Wavemorph Synthesis, but that would be confusing to too many people, and since the results are similar to a wavetable, we probably best not mess with the nomenclature.

[jobinho]

So which VST "sounds" the best between Phase Plant, Serum 2, and Zebra 3?

They are all on equal footing, in that respect. Each one has different approaches, features and strengths, but they're all top tier instruments, and that includes the world of hardware instruments. In fact, I'm not sure there are hardware digital synths that are as good as those. Maybe Waldorf's Iridium.

Iridium is still the most beautiful sounding synth I’ve owned in or out the box, I’ve not found a plugin quite like it. hope Waldorf release one someday

[ffx]

The filters are "only" stereo.

Can I then somehow offset left and right filter frequency? Could the modulators each have such an option? Or maybe there could be an modulator "STEREO OFFSET"... Or is this already possible?

[Urs]

We don’t have a cutoff panning, but there’s a hack around it… probably a bit nerdy… need to try first, but am off for the night…

[RobGee]

I just gave this a quick run out and compared a bass sequence from this and Massive X. Not surprisingly sound quality wise it is leagues above Zebra 2 and I preferred it to Massive X as well if I’m honest. Very impressed so far, I’m looking forward to the final version with more oscillator waveforms and all the kinks ironed out. Great job so far…

[adash123]

Is there any way to extend the Env times beyond 100%?

There is a "Stretch" option in the normal Envs which makes them go for a minute or so, if that is needed.

Thanks Urs. Yes, for most cases that will work perfectly so I will look into that. Its still good to know I can swap it out with an mseg for greater control though. Really enjoying discovering all the new features btw.