Zebra 3 Public Beta Revision 20399

[jtsterays]

Besides bugs fixing, you guys probably already have a list of main stuff to do now. Mind telling us what they are?

[Fannon]

Apologies if this has already been suggested/discussed ... please consider having a visual indicator of some kind on or near the module names in the Lower Bar to indicate whether that module is involved in the patch or not. Having an "in use" indicator would provide a quick dashboard view of the active modules without having to scroll through the Generators and Modulators rack.

I also suggested this before with the idea to maybe grey out what's not available as a module in the current patch. I noticed that when I drag something from the modulation source bar, the currently modulation source gets a green background. First I thought this would indicate modulation sources that have been assigned, but this does not stick when I move on to next modulation source. If I right click or hover over a modulation source, it would also be nice to see what targets it currently has.

But this is all Quality of Life improvements, I'm sure for 1.0 release there are more important things.

[Urs]

Besides bugs fixing, you guys probably already have a list of main stuff to do now. Mind telling us what they are?

UI mostly and finalising/polishing the factory library.

Devs do bugfixes, MPE, some more optimisations. If we can make it, we'll implement some of the suggestions.

Here, I'm giving this a go:

Z3 Quicker Mods.jpg

[Urs]

(I'm surprised that in Serum I can't select the Modulation on right-click, I can only do that by clicking the main selectors on LFO etc. - but maybe that's because I haven't upgraded to 2 yet. And also, In Serum the modulation selectors are pretty much always visible)

[atmelcool]

Dear Urs, I think it would be a good idea to allow more control in the oscilloscope in the future, such as spectrum viewing and window scaling, so as to eliminate the need for third-party devices. Thank you.

[Urs]

Dear Urs, I think it would be a good idea to allow more control in the oscilloscope in the future, such as spectrum viewing and window scaling, so as to eliminate the need for third-party devices. Thank you.

Sure. We'd love to be able to open the scope in its own window, and then add more choices for scaling and all that.

[stippenstoh]

Here, I'm giving this a go:


Z3 Quicker Mods.jpg

Awesome. I think right-click in general still has untapped potential in Zebra3 and it's intuitive.

[mindlessgenius]

Bug:
Zebra 3 CLAP in Reaper, Fedora 42: the plugin crashes every time I solo any node in the grid.

[Emadees]

Very promising stuff from one of the top 2 synth-devs.

Some things i want to ask:

1. i find the modx/y panel in zebra2 absolutely amazing in every way. Are you planning on bringing this back, as i currently can’t find it.

2. filters are solid, feels kind of steep/pointy at the cutoff on the new lps, except for the svf, which is maybe my favorite after some little testing only. Maybe my statement is wrong though. Anyway, are you planning on adding more filters?

3. oscs are sounding great, really punchy somehow. That said, are you gonna bring back the decay-shape option from z2, or will you just let this feature be a mseg-thing in zebra3? If i missed the feature, i am sorry for this question.

4. Are you planning on releasing more osc fx? My very fav-thing in z2 is how easy it is to change the character of sounds with the combination of osc fx and phase adjustment on retrigged mono sounds. Also, i couldn’t seem to find where to adjust the phase of an osc, but perhaps i am blind.

I also feel like phase dist sounded different in z3, but this is after little testing, and no a/b, just a feeling. I also loved phase xfer and trajectory, as well as phase root, expand, warp and so on. some of the new ones are very interesting though, like the noise-thing. Anything which can create small automatic variation in an interesting way is always cool(i know i can get this from random lfo too, but still).

5. will you add more waveforms? I know i can draw my own, but still.

6. i wish i could maneuver more outside of the wave editor while the wave editor window is open, without having to leave the editor each time. Is this something you might work on?

I also wish you had some more sat/dist options maybe, but it isn’t a huge deal. Overall a really amazing synth, please don’t change the ui-design/layout as some suggest. Zebra has the best one imo, and i think people will agree if they just get used to it. Keep on working on the performance too, i am really, really happy that you take that seriously. You could have just made it a monster for people with high end pcs, but you clearly understand that some people really appreciate that you create possibilities for lower cpu usage - even if it might come at the cost of the sound. Z2 is super light on cpu and sounds great if used right. I assume the low quality settings that you will implement will still give a higher sound quality than that of z2, or at least the same.

Sorry for the novel, hope you can answer some of it!

[Urs]

A lot of questions

1) We have not decided yet if we do XY panels, but they simply cost a lot of time to set up and many sound designers outright reject them. So we try to fuse Ctrl A/B/C/D with Macros functionality, and then maybe we can use these for XYs as well.

2) There are currently 102 filter algorithms. We'll probably do some more later, but for now we think that 102 types are plenty.

3+4) We'll probably also do more OscFX, but maybe later down the road. PD sounds different because of the resolution, which is lower in Z2, but has a few happy accidents.

5) Yes

6) We have some ideas, but again, further down the road

Sat/Dist: Sure, but don't disregard wavefolder and RingMod

[jtsterays]

Besides bugs fixing, you guys probably already have a list of main stuff to do now. Mind telling us what they are?

UI mostly and finalising/polishing the factory library.

Devs do bugfixes, MPE, some more optimisations. If we can make it, we'll implement some of the suggestions.

Here, I'm giving this a go:


Z3 Quicker Mods.jpg

Nice. I assume you have people read all the Z3 threads from page 1 to latest to gather suggestions? I posted a list of UX/UI related requests that I think are quite nice, hope you guys see it cause bumping it rn feels kinda narcissistic.

[jnchristp]

While programming some sounds in Zebra3, I tried to set up an "analog style" polypatch. It's really easy to use the pitches for pitch-variations, assigning the oscillators to different pitch-sources. Still, I wish there was an equally easy way to do the same thing for envelopes. It's nice to have little variations in envelope-times PER VOICE. At the moment it needs many, many random-modulators or mod-noises to achieve this.

Long story short: Would it be possible to have some kind of randomisation in the envelopes? Maybe as an option under "V1" or "V2"?

Last thing: Would be great if one could easily duplicate a modulation in the matrix and assign the duplicate to a different target...

[Emadees]

Thanks for the answers, greatly appreciated. I will keep on exploring the synth, mainly for kind of simple mono sounds at the start, as they can often transform into stereo sounds quite easily with more voices. I’m gonna look into the wave edit-window alot more, in combination with osc fx. I’ll give some updated feedback further down the road.


And again, i really hope you bring back the xy mod-panel at some point!! I think most people don’t really understand how extremely fantastic it is tbh. I understand why many preset makers didn’t use it, as they wanna be efficient. But it is super convenient when i wanna automate something. A next lvl thing would be if it was possible to control a x/y controller with some kind of master lfo, but that would probably be a pain to make. If/when you do bring it back, you should make a video on it, and show instances of its practical abillities when creating music!

[Emadees]

Also, i think my third question wasn’t answered. And lastly(sorry if im stupid), is there a way to adjust the phase of an osc?

Edit: can you also bring back the z2 reverb as an option?

[Andrei Marchenko]

Folks, how can I modulate filter's frequency with OSC in the plugin?

The Filter modules has two inputs A and B...

Thanks, pal But Can I modulate the filter's frequency with the same OSC1 without any additional OSC on the lane 2?