Product Reviews by KVR Members

Fantastic analog emulations. Mixing and matching oscillators, filters and envelopes from several classic analog synths opens a tremendous sound design palette. Sounds fantastic in the mix. Can use a lot of CPU but if you work in draft mode and then freeze or final record in the high quality mode it's very workable. Great synth.

Synthmaster 2.6.8 AU 64-bit Version.

This is a great sounding synth. UPDATE: The worst bugs I mentioned previously in this review were fixed by the developer almost immediately after I wrote in to their tech support, and it now works as it should.

THE GUI:

As this is a complex synth with a fantastic set of sound making features, the interface is by necessity complicated. Unfortunately, the one dimensional, mono-chromatic color scheme is hard on the eyes, and it lags far behind the more comfortable graphics used by most of it's competitors. The modules and controls are well organized, with lots of tabs to select the various oscillators, envelopes, LFO's, etc…. but the graphics are ugly. It takes a little getting used to but with practice navigating around becomes easy and (almost) intuitive. This synth allows tons of modulation opportunities, but the modulation matrix display is clunky – it's a list of Source and Targets which can be organized in various ways, but as you pile up modulations, working through the list can be a little arduous. To help, there is a convenient facility to display modulations filtered by Source or Target. I've found the most useful option to be it's "Automatic" mode, which displays the modulation for whichever control you click on – i.e. if you click on the Filter Cutoff control the list shows only the modulators for Filter Cutoff.

The envelope, filter, distortion, LFO's and Oscillator waveforms are displayed as graphs, but they look and feel rudimentary at best. I'm sure this is a stye issue, and the displays are accurate, but they are not at all elegant or fun to look at. When you change any parameters there is a tiny display of the numerical description at the top of the screen, showing the current value and how much you've changed it. This is good information; unfortunately it's pretty small.

PRESETS:

I generally program my own sounds or heavily tweak presets, so I can't evaluate the presets that came with the Factory version for stand-alone usefulness. Some of them are really good starting points for programming, and de-constructing them has been useful. They tend to sound better in a mix than by themselves. There are lots of positive reviews of the sound sets you can purchase for SM, so if you rely on presets there seem to be plenty of good ones out there. There is an on-line library of presets also available, that users can upload their patches to, which is a nice feature. UPDATE: There are 50 new factory presets with the new update, and I'm sure they are the same outstanding quality as the other presets.

PROGRAMMING:

Soundmaking is kind of clunky. It's not a quick, grab some knobs and make great sounds right away type of device. However, if you have the time to think about what you want to do, and are willing to explore Frequency Modulation, Phase Modulation and Amplitude Modulation, the sound making potential of this is huge. There are several types of oscillators – Basic (for subtractive synthesis), Additive, Wave Scanning, which is incredibly cool, Vector Synthesis and it's also possible to use SFZ samples as a sound source. There are lots of built in wave-forms to use as the starting point for programming.

SM has two independent layers, each layer has two oscillators, two filters that can be arranged in series or parallel, and the opportunity to apply FM or PM modulation in various places during the signal path. This is very powerful and it's easy to drastically change the character of the sound with these modulations. Again, there is huge potential for making really interesting useful sounds. There is also distortion that can be applied pre-filter, post-filter or in the filter, and a wide range of filter possibilities. Almost every control can be modulated, which is great, but as I said earlier, the modulation display leaves something to be desired.

There are also plenty of LFO's, envelopes, multi-segment envelopes (great idea but poorly implemented), 2 Dimensional envelopes, Easy Controls which provide a good way to assign one controller to several functions, as well as a couple of xy pads.

Copying and pasting partial pre-sets now works perfectly, and it's a fantastic feature that makes programming much easier.

EFFECTS.

There is a robust and good sounding effects section with both layer level and overall routing options. This includes compressors, a vocoder, delays, reverbs, distortion and a phaser. Lots to play with and they sound fine.

CONCLUSION.

For the price (now 50% off for Thanksgiving) this is a great sounding synth. Once the GUI is fixed I think this will be an upper-tier professional synth.

PROS:

Great sound.

Tons of modulation possibilities.

Impressive (and probably infinite) variety of sound-making possibilities.

CONS:

Hard to look at for any length of time (ugly)

Poor visual feedback from the screen.

Clunky interface.

I bought Zebra to replace some old favorites that were becoming expensive to maintain -- an Oberheim Xpander, Korg/MonoPoly and Roland MKS 80. After trying demos of several software synths including SynthMaster and Electrax I chose Zebra for it's combination of great sound (the presets are interesting and show off it's capabilities but are generally over-effected), the impressive modulation potential, and clever interface.

Zebra2 is semi-modular which means that sounds are made by creating relationships between all sorts of modules -- morphing wavetable oscillators, FM Oscillators, self-modulating resonant filters, comb filters and some others. There are modulators including traditional envelopes (with some extra twists), LFO's, and incredible multi-stage envelops. There are also modulation modifiers, an arpegiattor, step sequencer, arp modulation and a robust effects section.

The brilliant aspect of the interface is two-fold. First, the center section of the screen contains a grid showing the entire signal path, provides an easy way to turn modules off and on and allows you to quickly and easily setup the equivalent of layering in other synths. In a quick glance you can see the full structure of extremely complex sounds. Second, only modules in use are displayed. If you are using only one oscillator, an envelope and an LFO, that's all you see. Add a VCF and it appears on the screen -- turn it off and it disappears. As you build a sound from simple to complex and add modules your screen goes from empty to full, which is very, very intuitive.

From day one I have loved this synth. I've been programming patches and designing sound for more than 25 years (pre-midi days) and this software has the potential to go as deep as any sound designer could want.

I would not recommend this for someone new to synthesis and sound design -- it can probably overwhelming, but if you are experienced with different synth techniques, it's a joy to usel It took a little while to get used to how powerful just a delicate touch on some controls (especially the spectral effects) can be, but after only a couple of months of practice and experimentation I'm finding it very, very easy to come up with very useable, fantastically different sounding patches very quickly. Once you get a handle on some favorite wave tables making great, useable sound is FAST and intuitive.

For me, the biggest downside of this synth is that it's easy to get so involved in the fun of experimenting with sound that you lose time getting work done.

I'm finding it to be very easy to mentally envision a sound and then execute, which is pretty much everything that a sound designer can ask for.

The support community is fantastic -- the online tutorials are nicely done and demonstrate useful programming tips.

My wish list for the next version -- an easy facility to copy and past modules in the grid with duplicate parameters. A warmer analog filter mode.

I highly recommend this for experienced synth programmers who are making the switch form hardware to software.

UPDATE: The latest build with revised graphics is fantastic. Also, get HZ - it's worth it for the extra modules.