Zebra 2 - A visual guide to the envelopes

[PaulSC]

Hi all, thanks for the nice comments -- glad the illustrations have proved useful!

Couple of quick answers...

what do you mean by "compact view"? - there's a pair of -/+ switches in the top right of the envelope panel. "-" is engaged by default, and I call this the compact view; clicking "+" exposes 7 additional pairs of knobs, which provide key scaling and velocity scaling for most of the knobs in the compact view.

how did you make those graphs? - I used Freeverse LineForm, a vector graphics program similar to Illustrator (a little less powerful and much cheaper).

[billstei]

Here I was looking forward to another agonizing day of wrapping my head around Zebra envelopes and now you've gone and ruined a perfectly good challenge and reason to get out of bed by making everything too easy.

+1

[bmrzycki]

Paul,
Excellent work there! I am definitely going to print that out and save in my zebra notes.

i always wished there was a way to show the envelope in Z2 (& the LFO) this is the 2'nd best thing

Ah, I've been meaning to post this for a while now but I keep forgetting to.

With a fairly recent version of Zebra a new modulator snuck in without much fanfare. The name of this little device is the ModMapper.

We get two of these things but for this example we only need one of them.

First, assign a Modmapper as a modulation source for a knob. In this case I picked the Pan modulator on the Noise device in the built in init patch. Here's how it looks:



If you look on the right hand side in the modulation section you should see something like:



Now you need to fill the entire upper area of the Map to its maximum positive level. I do this by clicking in the upper region of the map, hold the mouse button down move the mouse up and then slowly move left and right to evenly fill the upper region. Here's what it should look like after that:



Next change the type of ModMapper from "Key" to "Map Smooth" and choose the device you want to view as the Modulator field, in this case I'm using "Env1".



In the case of Env1, you'll now see the colored line move when a note is received. You can tweak Env1 and "see" the modulation output.

Note this works equally well for LFOs or input like Aftertouch. For the case of a mod source that isn't triggered by an event the line will start moving right away (such as a global LFO).

I was interested to see we can't apply an MMix as a Modulator source for the ModMapper. I tried to do that to better learn those modules (still a bit of a mystery to me for some of the modes).

Hope this helps, it's how I initially studied the Z2 Envelopes. Now if we'd only get the pretty gui line device like ZCM has...

[Urs]

bmrzycki, you're genius! Using the Modmappers as scopes for modulators hasn't even occurred to me yet

[bmrzycki]

bmrzycki, you're genius! Using the Modmappers as scopes for modulators hasn't even occurred to me yet

I take that as extremely high praise from you Urs, thank you!

[billstei]

@bmrzycki +1 genius

[PaulSC]

bmrzycki - wow, what a great idea! (Would have saved me a bit of work if I'd figured this out when constructing my graphs!)

[bmrzycki]

bmrzycki - wow, what a great idea! (Would have saved me a bit of work if I'd figured this out when constructing my graphs!)

Sorry I didn't post sooner, for some reason I thought I was the only one struggling with these ADSR++ envs

[tboulette]

This is really helpful -- thanks.

[Sascha Franck]

This is becoming an incredibly valuable thread!

- Sascha

[Polybius]

Wow this thread deserves a sticky! Thanks a lot for enlightening us PaulSC and bmrzycki!

[fas1piano]

wow, thank you paul. that's great.

[Nig]

PaulSC and bmrzycki,

Thanks for the efforts, some very useful stuff there...

[cowudders]

you are all crazy around here ... zebra is addictive, hate it.

[Howard]

Thanks PaulSC and bmrzycki Great stuff!