Zebra 3 Public Beta Revision 20399

[sarmad5]

Maybe I do not have enough coffee in my veins yet, but I do not exactly understand the previous two requests...

Currently voices are started by notes played. That is a pretty fundamental thing. We are toying with options to add a latch mode. This would run 1 voice permanently, and maybe it could offer Gate to be used as trigger to move things while that voice is running.

Retriggering oscillators might be possible, but it sounds rather esoteric as an option. If it's for OscFX such as Spectral Decay, there are tricks to achieve retriggering.

A tutorial video with an arpeggiator patch should pop up soon, if that is what you're looking for (basically triggering different parts of the synth at different times with different keys)

(maybe elaborate a bit more and I'll be able to be more precise...)

@Urs can you please elaborate on the tricks for how retriggering can be achieved?
Intended Use: Osc 1 has Spectral Decay selected as OscFx and I want to retrigger the Osc. Thank you for the Zebra 3!

[Fannon]

It would be nice if you added some premium tube and tape distortion @Urs

That's like bread and butter for me when working with Zebra 2.

Yes please

maybe some small Satin, like you have in Repro-5 - but with a bit more options? An easy way to add wow & flutter might also be helpful for lo-fi patches if you don't want to setup / use LFOs on this.

[NAD]

No, that's not what I meant. I meant changing the pitch (frequency) of the sound itself.

The Exciter doesn't have a "pitch (frequency)" as such (plus I don't know what you mean by "height of the pulse"), but you can modulate Stiffness i.e. the tone with e.g. KEY. Is that what you wanted?

To be fair you can get a pitch (briefly) if you crank up "Number" and keep "Distance" pretty low. But I wouldn't recommend it!

I'm ashamed of how long I spent on this example. It's neither very precise nor particularly useful. But I could, so I did...

Tonal Exciter.zip

Only works for notes lower than middle C, but I guess it doesn't actually matter anyway.

[jrwaltb]

the learning curve is fu$%ing really high for Zebra 3

Yes.

We will do our best to make the UI more readable in its final version. The concept itself is probably easier to follow for people who have used Zebra 2, and many of those will just upgrade. Which makes me hopeful that within the next 1-2 years there'll be widespread expertise and numerous tutorials that help people who are initially overwhelmed. But that resource has to build over time.

"The concept itself is probably easier to follow for people who have used Zebra 2" I thought of this as well and possibly that is the disconnect.

"We will do our best to make the UI more readable in its final version."
Why? Maybe you guys have created something that a simplified ipad app interface does not enable the full potential of the technology being developed.

What if a pdf document made by a human who cares is all that is needed instead of 10 years of UI development? Anyway, thanks for the reply.

[Ah_Dziz]

Pretty seriously "bumpy" CPU consumption on a 4 yr old i5 laptop. Some huge spikes on start of playback before dropping down to "regular" CPU consumption. Also getting full daw crashes, usually when opening the GUI, in bitwig and maschine. I know it was mentioned, but having a "low quality" mode could be very useful. Even if it only stopped or reduced internal oversampling. Definitely worth doing if it's possible. Still very much enjoying everything about z3.

[r1_000]

Is there a way to set the key range for the oscillators?

[Borbolactic]

using dubious licenses and/or license cards

"I didn't quite get the gist of your post, but let me chime in on some of the subjects...

In my world, loyalty discounts are a tool to turn a disadvantage into money." ~ Urs
____

To clarify:

It's someone else who may have expressed an interest in 'loyalty discounts' (and/or that kind of thing), not I.

I am uninterested in loyalty discounts and the like since I have no loyalty with your company. So the part of your response that elaborates on that is of little relevance, at least to me, although it may be to others of course.

If I have any 'loyalty', it is of a general gift-economics position, including such concepts in our little context here as peer-to-peer, file-sharing, and FLOSS (Free/Libre/OpenSouce Software). That's real 'long-game ROI', since you mention it.
You do have freeware, but the code is ostensibly still proprietary.

BTW, did you name your 'Civilization' hardware as inspiration from my quasi-joking with you roughly a couple of years ago about getting into acoustic guitars for after civ's decline/collapse? Europe doesn't seem to be doing very well these days, but then, neither does most anywhere else.
____
"I don't think that we're the only company to do public betas." ~ Urs
____
Yes, I seem to recall Madrona Labs going that route with Sumu for example.
____
"For instance, had we not done a free to use beta, many people would have bought Zebra 3 already based on certain expectations, e.g. that it would load wavetables, that it did resynthesis, all of which it doesn't, and this thread and the feedback hopefully helps to clarify these things during the initial hype. I think we help people understand what Zebra 3 *is*, and what it *is not*. Which is more valuable for us in the long run than selling more licenses now, to more people who then turn out to be unhappy." ~ Urs
____

Sure I get that in its own context.
WRT the import/resynthesis, however, are you saying that all sounds/waveforms are to be made from scratch? Did Z2 not have some kind of import app called Blueberry and/or whatever?

Madrona Labs, for its Sumu additive synth, has, if understood correctly, a modified version of an open source program they call Vutu (maybe renamed to that) that resynthesizes and then outputs to the native Sumu file format that it can then read in. Can Z3 not manage that or something similar? Where are you getting your code for the physical modeling part? Is it open source? Apparently, SurgeXT incorporates Mutable Instruments.

CVilization is named after CV = Control Voltage and for the large array of applications it has there, using sets of rules to tame CV.

Where I got the code for physical modelling? Man... certainly not from open source repositories...

It seems that a fair bit of research for software in general comes, or at least, begins, at university (and tax-funded corporate/small-biz grants), which is kind of open source, or should be, since much of its funding is via the public tax-slave... Legal land-grabs, (closed software license) artificial scarcity and all that...
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"No, Zebra 3 is not similar to Sunu." ~ Urs
____

It's Sumu, and understood.
When I get some time, I might take a better look to see how we can get sounds into the thing (or if we have to bake them from scratch inside it), and can work on the imported sounds at the sine/partial level. Yes, curves, sure, but AFAIU, sines are what we find in nature, fundamentally. If Z3 is supposed to be additive, then presumably it's somehow ultimately about sines, at least within one of Z3 oscillators/engines, yes?

Here's something written on another site to clarify my mention of the beta testers:

"Open beta's good for the dev; free beta-testers. Looks good on the dev too.

Zebralette? A free sample. Looks good on the dev. (maybe for Z3 up-sell for some folks for bigger hits)

'First hit's free.' (Addiction?)

Urs is shrewd.

"Hey, everyone! I'm a card-carrying U-He member!" ~ proud hypothetical U-He card-carrying member"

Happy 2026

[Urs]

@Urs can you please elaborate on the tricks for how retriggering can be achieved?
Intended Use: Osc 1 has Spectral Decay selected as OscFx and I want to retrigger the Osc. Thank you for the Zebra 3!

Spectral Decay can be retriggered (kind of) by briefly setting OscFX Depth to 0.00

I found spikey MSEGs to be pretty useful for this.

Simple example preset attached.

[Urs]

your personal freedoms

Your personal freedoms in this forum just went away. Nobody has time for that stuff.

(I rarely use mod powers, but in a now deleted post this user exceeded my patience for convoluted rants)

[krans]

I may be making a fool out of myself now, but let's take that risk.
The manual doesn't seem to mention the compressor.

I'm really fond of the compressor in Hive and the lane compressors in ZebraHZ (my guess is that these are pretty much the same unit), I think they fatten up the sound so easily and nicely and they're great for defining the patch.

However I don't seem to get that same effect with the Z3 compressor. It could be my eyes deceiving me, that it actually sounds just as good, and just looks different. Yet I don't seem to get that same boost out of it.
Is it based on a different idea?
And could someone please explain the cutoff knob? I'm used to cutoff knobs in compressors when there's a mix between wet/dry signal (like in Presswerk), but I don't quite understand its purpose here.

[Urs]

"The concept itself is probably easier to follow for people who have used Zebra 2" I thought of this as well and possibly that is the disconnect.

Maybe. We did add new concept to it, but we put much effort in making the new concepts, such as the Pitches page, things that can be triggered etc. somewhat optional. If someone wanted to use Zebra 3 like they used Zebra 2, that should still be mostly the same workflow and toolset. Individual tools have changed, but their meaning / effect has not.

"We will do our best to make the UI more readable in its final version."
Why? Maybe you guys have created something that a simplified ipad app interface does not enable the full potential of the technology being developed.

No worries, the overall layout is pretty final - we won't dumb anything down. Our next step is to do things like increase font size and improve colouring. And we also got a lot of feedback and suggestions on things that may look and feel ambiguous or where a few simple changes could make huge difference on usability.

What if a pdf document made by a human who cares is all that is needed instead of 10 years of UI development? Anyway, thanks for the reply.

Our user guide is still written by a human, but we do use a modern computer program (the inevitable "AI" thing) to explain to us certain details of our code base to save time and nerves. Like, when Howie asks me exactly what the algorithms of the Map-o-Matic OscFX do, I could type it down, back and forth, in an hour, whereas the AI does it in a minute.

We're also going to produce a lot more video content to explain things, but that just takes a lot of time. So that for now we do more of those bite sized feature explainers before we dive deep.

[Urs]

I may be making a fool out of myself now, but let's take that risk.
The manual doesn't seem to mention the compressor.

I'm really fond of the compressor in Hive and the lane compressors in ZebraHZ (my guess is that these are pretty much the same unit), I think they fatten up the sound so easily and nicely and they're great for defining the patch.

However I don't seem to get that same effect with the Z3 compressor. It could be my eyes deceiving me, that it actually sounds just as good, and just looks different. Yet I don't seem to get that same boost out of it.
Is it based on a different idea?
And could someone please explain the cutoff knob? I'm used to cutoff knobs in compressors when there's a mix between wet/dry signal (like in Presswerk), but I don't quite understand its purpose here.

The user guide is work in progress, and the chapter about the compressors is indeed missing.

The compressor should be pretty close to Hive's with some features added. I do not know for sure but I can ask the dev after the holidays.

[NAD]

Here's something that might be helpful for anyone who happens to find themselves in this very particular set of circumstances:

1. You use Reaper and aren't averse to JSFX.
2. You downloaded Zebra 3 and occasionally like to browse the presets.
3. For whatever reason you don't have a convenient way to adjust MIDI CCs and/or control velocity.
4. You happen to have made it to page 77 of this particular KVR thread.

So basically I created this simple JSFX plugin just for you! All it does is allow you to easily transmit the relevant midi messages to fully enjoy the factory presets in Zebra 3. Most of it should be pretty self explanatory. The "Reset" switch will return all controllers to zero (scroll on it with your mouse wheel in either direction if you're lazy like me). I recommend doing this every time you switch presets. The velocity slider when set to any non-zero value will convert every incoming note-on to the specified velocity, and at zero has no effect.

A couple of additional notes:

• All messages will transmit on midi channel 1 by default. If for whatever reason you wish to change this, you can simply edit line 18 in the code. This does not apply to the velocity slider though, incoming notes will always transmit on their original channel.
• If you happen to have made any changes to the performance control CCs in Zebra's preferences panel, you will want to edit lines 24-27 in the code accordingly.

OK here it is:

z3_controller.zip

Have fun and stay safe!

[NAD]

Oh and I forgot to mention, it's (trivially) automatable.

[Fannon]

OK here it is:
z3_controller.zip
Have fun and stay safe!

Nice idea! I also created something like this for Bitwig, which also includes 2 XY pads.

Which CC Values are chosen needs to be adjusted. Sorry, I forgot the defaults, so I took CC 24-27 which are what my controller already gives me. But this is not the default. It's simple to adjust in the grid, though.