Zebra 3 Public Beta Revision 20399

[Urs]

I don't even own a game controller...

[Grizzellda]

Yep, got it and very sociable of you to reply!

Your new synth is very nice.

[JoeLowery215]

While LFOs go well into audio rate territory, they are not meant to be low aliasing crossmodulation modulators.

FM and audio rate modulation currently are a speciality of the FMOs, the filters and the RingMod. Anything else can be used as modulators though.

Thanks! So there’s really no way to do typical cross mod in Z3. The FMO in TZ mode is too drastic (but sounds great obviously)

Also, another thing I’ve always wanted was the LFOs to be able to see in hz instead of time

[Urs]

We're working on real unit value representation wherever applicable, for the LFO it is tricky though... can't go into details...

[JoeLowery215]

We're working on real unit value representation wherever applicable, for the LFO it is tricky though... can't go into details...

Mm sounds like an interesting secret!

[dj_var]

We're working on real unit value representation wherever applicable, for the LFO it is tricky though... can't go into details...

That's great. I think it will make the LFO experience a bit more straightforward. Looking forward to it.

[DorianBloom]

We're working on real unit value representation wherever applicable, for the LFO it is tricky though... can't go into details...

Will this apply to filters and envelopes? AMAZING if so. Would make a def purchase for me

[Urs]

Yeah. It's an option.

[Andreya_Autumn]

We're working on real unit value representation wherever applicable, for the LFO it is tricky though... can't go into details...

I am glad to hear that. I have done as requested and used the beta on and off for a couple months now (and with deep pleasure, I should add) and am finding that the parameter value readouts are my number one gripe with it. Everything else that bothered me at first either has grown on me or has been addressed somehow. But this keeps getting on my nerves.

The most egregious one in my opinion remains the off-by-one for the harmonic/subharmonic series in the Pitches tab. I would fully respect if you don't want to cater to the wishes of Just Intonation nerds like myself (who know the intervals of the harmonic series up to... by heart). But even folks without that special interest all know that double = octave. So the fact that doubling the number≠octave seems reason enough to change it. 1-indexing is simply more true to reality in this case.


And speaking of those controls. As a separate concern, the unmodified mouse drag on the overtone/undertone control goes in increments of 0.2.
I would find whole-number steps much more friendly (and expect many would agree). So you're stepping through the series (sub)harmonic by (sub)harmonic. And then shift-drag would give you the in-betweens.

If you do want to keep smaller increments, steps of 0.5 seems like a better choice to me.

Now, I understand that the FM ratio control is a bit trickier. I maintain that the solution from Six Sines is really neat. It does the same thing your ratio does, but again the readouts is, well... (not trying to be rude) accurate:

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But it uses that conditional 1/X.xx readout which you don't have elsewhere. So I get if you don't wanna do that. If you don't, I would still at least 1-index the overtone/undertone ones if I were you. Which I am not of course.


Apart from that, the other really weird one I found was the sync ratio control in the Sync OscFX. I expected an offset from the oscillator pitch, in semitones or something. But it is some other weird log scale? Locating an octave up by ear, I expected that double the number should be two octaves up, but it ain't.

The patch idea I had, which is trickier as a result, is to turn off the keytracking on the oscillator, and then keytrack the sync instead. Figuring out what depth to use for that would be more intuitive if it had semitone units like say the filter freq controls do.

[Andreya_Autumn]

All of these nitpicks aside, it's been a real pleasure testing this thing. Sounds great, plays great, super flexible... UI/UX was good to start with and seems to improve significantly with each iteration. Find's total wunderschön. Alles gutes aus Malmö Schweden!

[dj_var]

May I also say that I really like and appreciate the video tutorials with Urs. I really like the way you explain and also your sense of humour sometimes like showimg the CPU usage meme of Zebra3 in the CPU Burner video. I think you're a great guy and I like that it adds your personality to the videos too, I like it.

[DorianBloom]

The one other thing for me personally is num pad input. Makes it so quick and easy to enter precise values for setting filters, mod amounts etc etc.
This is getting quite exciting! The sounds remain impressive. Also been enjoying the videos. I think it was a good move to start putting those out. Its a nice format and they are fun to watch.

[dj_var]

Can I ask something else please? As I was playing around and watching videos about it I noticed that the oscillators in Zebra3 now do not have the spectral bin editor? Or it kind of does bit it works a bit differently now where you have to draw the curve so it's kind of like the SpectroBlend mode from Zebra2. Isn't there a way for us to draw the bins (harmonics and partials) the same way you used to be able to in Zebra2? I find that method to be a much faster way of editing the harmonics and also with the keyboard modifiers like shift/alt. If I have to draw points on the curve line it slows me down by quite a bit, I hope there is a way around this or at least you're working on something to restore the old behaviour as well.

[Urs]

Zebra 3 is all curves. We want to add a special tool to make spectral editing easier, but the feedback on other things was so overwhelming that we figured we need to prioritise CPU, modulation and UI things. That does not mean it's forgotten, it just isn't going to make it in 3.0, but probably in one of the first updates.

[dj_var]

Cool, thank you very much for your reply. Good plans