UHe has presented a beta update of their Zebralette synthesiser for community response and suggestions. Zebralette is only the oscillator section of the more expansive Zebra synthesiser, but more independent than that term would suggest. In my experience many jobs can be done by Zebralette and the larger version is for the complicated moments. This beta makes that ability more evident.
Being a beta there’s some things that don’t work properly – I’m not going to pick errors that will be fixed, just comment on things that could be improved before release.
The sound palette of Zebralette has not fundamentally changed, the old version can make a similar range of noises. Most change is in the interface which is based around an ‘oscilloscope’ graph and the kind of drawing tools that come with Adobe Illustrator. This graph can be of a single waveform or a spectral frequency chart. The old Zebralette made the difference clearer in that spectra were shown as a chart of levels.
Both are now shown by the same simple graph, which I first found less helpful in visualising and adjusting frequencies – but I accept that’s a convention that UHe are deprecating in favour of more advanced tools.
Whether working with waveforms or frequencies your task is to draw shapes with splines, creating morphing targets to be reached over a time domain. I use software such as Illustrator and Cinema 4D a great deal. Creating a sound in a similar interface to creating 2D/3D objects causes me an awful lot of confusion. It’s taken a few days to reprogram my mind to know that ‘rotating this set of points’ = ‘add more bass at the start of the sound’.
Truthfully a lot of the adjustments you can make in the graph are useless. It takes time to move past the interface, forget the interface, hear what you are doing – which fortunately quite often can be heard in real time. The irony then being that the new graphic interface you are trying to transcend is the main feature advance on the old version. So is this just overkill? Well no, but it wilfully breaks some important rules about affordance and utility.
For better or worse Zebralette is a superset of other synthesisers. For example Korg’s opsix can match most of its useful settings and sounds, but has been pre-designed to only produce combinations that ‘work’. Software synthesisers most often picture ‘knobs’ and ‘sliders’ even for complex spectral adjustments as a form of story telling. This is affordance. The virtue and difficulty of Zebralette is that it’s not restricted to sensible settings and you will have large areas of shitty sounding ear splitting noise to learn to avoid. You will have to be that pre-designer.
Like I said – my mind reprogrammed and began to control the tools. The waveform/spectra travels over time between morph points, so set up a few of these as waveforms or frequency graphs. There are three other graphs that guide two morph effects over time. Simplest version of that idea is a low pass filter following a curve, however the filter frequency could be changed by an envelope at the same time the contour is being morphed by a guide. Simplest example again – filter closes over time and also changes from low pass to high pass. You might, just might, see the resemblance to a Z-plane filter – and that’s not the only EMu that UHe has picked up.
The MSEG is a complex envelope that also travels over time. However that’s a different time span to the graph’s time. So you can have the time in the graph modulated by the time in the MSEG causing it to loop different sections of the morph. Again an EMu kind of thing and rather difficult to pre-plan.
Summing up. I’m not going to rate this yet, but I have great enthusiasm for much of it and some concerns about the rest of it. I think the drawing tools are very interesting but they are sometimes irrelevant to the task at hand. That’s fine because you just don’t use the ones you don’t need – and heavens knows Illustrator has an awful lot of the same WTF in their toolbar. Limitations are sometimes the best part of the design but then maybe limitations are just a lack of effort?
I think by the time the larger Zebra shows up there’s going to be a lot of people who just use the Howard Scarr presets. It’s in danger of becoming the latest Ultimate Kick Ass Motherfunka that does Everything You Could Possibly Imagine … or just Henry.