KVR Audio

V0RT3X · Post by **V0RT3X** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 6:56 am

Zebra is amazing, it also has incredible value since it also comes with an FX version that lets you use it to process other audio through it's amazing modules.

Now depending on the style of music you want to do, you'll find Serum and Zebra are both a little bit different. I don't have any experience using Trillian except a short demo experience at a friends and it was good, but a little bit different as far as either Zebra or Serum goes. I'll just talk about what I do have experience with.

Serum is awesome, I was on the fence for a long time deciding if i should buy it or not, but i eventually caved. The CPU usage while running serum with polyphonic patches on my i7 2.4ghz quad core laptop can definitely creep up quickly if i am not careful. You can of course fix this by lowering the oversampling quality, voice count, using 3rd party effects etc.

Serums greatest strength is in the ability to load your own wave tables and edit them with a incredible amount of detail. The modulation system in Serum is as straight forward as you can get with a wave table synthesizer, and i would even say it's less complicated than native instruments massive for the beginner. Sound wise i know it has gotten a bad rep on here for being "cold" and "sterile", but there are lots of ways around this and you can get very nice results. I know the developer Steve Duda has gone to quite some length to make sure Serum remains more alias free than other wavetable synthesizers, so that might or might not be of any importance to you.

Out of all the genres you listed, i mostly create IDM, Glitch and soundtrack style stuff with serum. I really like using it for building complex effects and rhythm sounds since you can modulate the wave tables and multiple filter types in very chaotic ways. As for EDM serum was built by a fairly well known EDM producer who is friends with a famous EDM producer.

Now Zebra2 is much different, as it lets you patch together your own setup. Since it's modular you can add the various synth modules as you see fit to create whatever patch you want. This kind of flexibility is fun and quite powerful once you make some good setups. Zebra is also very gentle on the CPU in comparison to Serum, so you can use many instances of it. You can't load audio files into Zebra directly, but there is a Zebra2wav utility which does this and you can use it to create your own custom wave tables. The wave table length is also much shorter than serum, so this does limit zebra in certain ways when making some kinds of sounds. Zebra has a spline based editing system which Serum does not have, and this is pretty unique and can make some very nice sounds if you want to draw your own oscillators in!

Honestly Zebra and Serum are two different beasts and excel at different things. I would recommend owning both if you can, but if you have to start with just one then buy Zebra.

V0RT3X · Post by **V0RT3X** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 6:57 am

*edit* - not sure why this was posted twice

Stan Navi · Post by **Stan Navi** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 9:25 am

Thank you guys for describing Serum and Zebra 2!

One question about Trilian. It's mostly for bass sounds, but it have analog synth's soundsources. So i heard that it is good in synth programming with analog warmth(leads, pads, chords), not just for bass. If somebody have such experience, because i saw only a one or two videos for this?

wagtunes · Post by **wagtunes** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 11:33 am

I have Omni 2, Zebra 2 and Serum.

You have everything you need already

Zexila · Post by **Zexila** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 11:58 am

Stan Navi wrote: One question about Trilian. It's mostly for bass sounds, but it have analog synth's soundsources. So i heard that it is good in synth programming with analog warmth(leads, pads, chords), not just for bass. If somebody have such experience, because i saw only a one or two videos for this?

It will still sound like a soft synth, because that what it is basically, when you put that static probably processed sampled analog waveform trough digital filter and rest of it, it sounds like an good soft synth, nothing more, better buy Diva instead, you can get more variety of sounds.

quantum7 · Post by **quantum7** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 4:23 pm

I would also go for Zebra...but like the poster above said, if you find Omni difficult, Zebra will most likely be the same.

bmrzycki · Post by **bmrzycki** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 4:32 pm

Stan Navi wrote:One question about Trilian. It's mostly for bass sounds, but it have analog synth's soundsources. So i heard that it is good in synth programming with analog warmth(leads, pads, chords), not just for bass. If somebody have such experience, because i saw only a one or two videos for this?

I purchased Trilian primarily for the Synth sound sources and patches made with them. The acoustic and electric bass sounds are good but I tend to gravitate more towards the electronic sounds.

I think the samples sound fantastic and Spectra did a great job of sampling quite a bit of vintage gear. Don't expect it to be a full replacement for those synths since most of the samples are either raw waveforms or a soundsource of a static (custom) device preset. Using waveforms from classic hardware and Spectrasonics' filters, modulations, effects is a nice combination IMO.

Don't expect the sampled stuff to be too crazy or boutique. They tend to stick to usable sound territory for their samples. A full list of patches and sound sources is here: https://www.spectrasonics.net/products/trilian-lib.php
You're interested in the ones labelled "SYNTH BASS" in the first and second columns.

4damind · Post by **4damind** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 4:55 pm

I'm not the biggest fan of Zebra.. tried if very often but it was not my cup of tea.. don't like the overall sound. It's not the best synth for big pads and soundscapes (this works a lot better with synth like Dune2) and for typical "bread & butter" sounds there are easier to use synth... and here comes Serum to my mind. It's a synth which doesn't sound "warm" or "analog" but it fits very well all kind of electronic styles (Serum is IMO a bit like Massive.. but a lot better

)
So I would say Serum (yes, I own Serum and use it also in my productions).

Trillian.. hmm. IMO there are better plugins if a real acoustic bass is needed (Orangetree, Amplesound,...) and for synthetic bass lines.. there are a lot options (I prefer most of the time FXpansion Strobe)

V0RT3X · Post by **V0RT3X** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 6:21 pm

4damind wrote:I'm not the biggest fan of Zebra.. tried if very often but it was not my cup of tea.. don't like the overall sound. It's not the best synth for big pads and soundscapes (this works a lot better with synth like Dune2) and for typical "bread & butter" sounds there are easier to use synth...

I'm surprised, i think Zebra is an incredible synthesizer for designing soundscapes and pads. It might not excel at analog pads but there is always Diva for that which is a great synth.

I actually didn't like the sound of Zebra initially when i first tried it years ago. I was mostly basing it off the presets, until i started patching my own stuff. Once i got to grips with the patching i was blown away with it, and think it's probably the most versatile synthesize one can own apart from something like synthmaster.

I also have owned synthmaster and as much as i wanted to like it, i found it far to buggy for my system so i ended up selling it. I might try it again with bitwig, because at the time i was using Ableton live 9 with my macbook and it would crash live lots.

4damind · Post by **4damind** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 6:52 pm

V0RT3X wrote:
4damind wrote:I'm not the biggest fan of Zebra.. tried if very often but it was not my cup of tea.. don't like the overall sound. It's not the best synth for big pads and soundscapes (this works a lot better with synth like Dune2) and for typical "bread & butter" sounds there are easier to use synth...
I'm surprised, i think Zebra is an incredible synthesizer for designing soundscapes and pads. It might not excel at analog pads but there is always Diva for that which is a great synth.

I actually didn't like the sound of Zebra initially when i first tried it years ago. I was mostly basing it off the presets, until i started patching my own stuff. Once i got to grips with the patching i was blown away with it, and think it's probably the most versatile synthesize one can own apart from something like synthmaster.

I also have owned synthmaster and as much as i wanted to like it, i found it far to buggy for my system so i ended up selling it. I might try it again with bitwig, because at the time i was using Ableton live 9 with my macbook and it would crash live lots.

I think this is not a big surprise that newer synth can make some things better than older synth. Maybe this will change completely with Zebra 3.. but this time I highly recommend Dune2 for pads/soundscapes etc.
I agree, Synthmaster was very buggy it crashed my DAW instantly so I gave up. But it seems that Bülent fixed all this bugs... it's now very stable and I cannot remember about crashes. If it comes to a not expensive synth with the most features, Synthmaster is not to beat (the downside is of course a steeper learning curve... it's not Sylenth

)

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 7:50 pm

Stan Navi wrote:Thank you guys for describing Serum and Zebra 2!

One question about Trilian. It's mostly for bass sounds, but it have analog synth's soundsources. So i heard that it is good in synth programming with analog warmth(leads, pads, chords), not just for bass. If somebody have such experience, because i saw only a one or two videos for this?

Yes, there are some great patches for leads. Some really happening sound design IME. But Zebra is a full-on synthesizer while Trilian is prefab patches from samples with a filter engine on top.

bmrzycki · Post by **bmrzycki** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 8:01 pm

jancivil wrote:Trilian is prefab patches from samples with a filter engine on top.

Not even remotely true. Trilian does not have the Omnisphere DSP engine but otherwise is identical to Omnisphere 1.x in terms of modulation, filters, effects, layers, arp, LFOs, and envelopes. And since the OP already has Omnisphere they can plug it into Omni as an extra set of sound sources giving them the best of both worlds.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 8:58 pm

Yeah, I omitted a lot, but it is not a full-on synthesizer. We don't even disagree, do we. I think it's a true statement. It _is_ that. All of the features are after-the-fact of *soundsources*; as opposed to an oscillator or otherwise engine. It's kind of like arguing Kontakt is a synthesizer, that.

bmrzycki · Post by **bmrzycki** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 9:06 pm

jancivil wrote:Yeah, I omitted a lot, but it is not a full-on synthesizer. We don't even disagree, do we. All of the features are after-the-fact of *soundsources*; as opposed to an oscillator or otherwise engine. It's like arguing Kontakt is a synthesizer, that.

I still feel that's too simplistic. The sound sources have modulation targets and modifiers like WaveShaping, FM, Multi, Ring, etc. You can modulate a whole lot of that sample before any filters or effects are added.
https://vimeo.com/17383889 (start at 5m55s)

EnGee · Post by **EnGee** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 9:57 pm

bmrzycki wrote:
jancivil wrote:Yeah, I omitted a lot, but it is not a full-on synthesizer. We don't even disagree, do we. All of the features are after-the-fact of *soundsources*; as opposed to an oscillator or otherwise engine. It's like arguing Kontakt is a synthesizer, that.
I still feel that's too simplistic. The sound sources have modulation targets and modifiers like WaveShaping, FM, Multi, Ring, etc. You can modulate a whole lot of that sample before any filters or effects are added.
https://vimeo.com/17383889 (start at 5m55s)

I think what jancivil means, it doesn't have oscillators as sound sources so it makes it like some kind of a sampler. Most samplers now have lfos, modulation matrix ....etc.

Trilian, Zebra 2 or Serum?