ZEBRALETTE 3 public beta Review
Note: U-he has opened up Zebralette 3 as a public beta. You can participate in this beta via the KVR forum. Zebralette will be free upon release, but as this is not an official version, some things in this review are subject to change, this will be used as my official review once the beta is over with any necessary changes made and this first line redacted.
Zebralette 3 is the new version of their free plugin Zebralette, a stripped down and minimal version of their flagship synthesizer Zebra. Zebralette essentially gives you full control over the main oscillator you’d find in the fully feature’d synth Zebra. Here in version 3 we get a taste of what to expect, and wow, it is quite the appetizer. U-he are known for exceptional quality and professional sound, the classic Zebra synth even being used by Hans Zimmer for major motion picture scoring. Zebralette 3 and I’m certain by extension Zebra 3 are a continuation of this quality, providing some of the most fun I’ve had sound designing in any synthesizer. The main things to look at here are the oscillator section and the curve editor, with just the single oscillator and curve editing I was able to create sounds that would require entire networks of modules and effects in other synthesizers.
CURVE EDITOR
The curve editor is incredibly powerful, you get the classic MSEG drawing controls, being able to add/ delete nodes, move them, and adjust curves, but they’ve included a whole lot more. There’s tools for painting in shapes, highlighting regions, freehand drawing, adjusting the distance between nodes and far more. It’s almost like using photoshop or a fully fledged vector drawing program. This may be intimidating, but gone are the days of only having a small handful of options. Some of these tools can really speed up the process of creating shapes and patterns. I have a feeling that learning this aspect of Zebra alone will be it’s own artform. Some of the manipulation tools are very nice, one allows you to relatively stretch and deform a highlighted region, another allows you to copy and draw with a highlighted region and one of my favorites allows you to slide the shape within a region window. I’ve yet to explore every tool and option, but they really do expand how malleable an oscillator can be. Seeing as we can use these shapes to define not just the waveform, but other oscillator effects as well, it really makes you feel like you are sculpting sound.
OSCILLATOR
The oscillator has two main render modes, wavetable and additive. Wavetable plays back the waveform in the current wavetable frame as is, where additive renders and approximation of the shape out using an additive synth engine. Additive mode looses wavetable mode’s unison options, but gains a whole additional oscillator effect in the form of a spectral distortion modifier. This modifier includes 7 different spectral warping algorithms that really unlock some of the great additive controls you’d find in synths like Razor, Harmor, and Parsec.
There’s also two source modes, Curve Geometry, which uses the wavetable as you’d expect, to define the shape of the waveform, and curve spectrum which looks at the shape as an amplitude plot for the oscillator’s partials. This gives you multiple ways to draw audio, if you find drawing shapes to be too homogenous and similar sounding, you might enjoy sculpting the spectrum.
Additionally there are two slots for oscillator effects which can load one of 20 different processes to alter the waveform with. These can really sculpt and shape the table you’ve created in a wide variety of ways. Many of them can even use sections of the table to define their processing curve. This brings me to a useful tip, you don’t have to use the full range of a table. You might want to use half of the table for your main shape, and the other half as the effects curve. Perhaps in the future I will go through and describe each and every effect, but I’ll list some of my favorites here
SPECTRAL DISTORTIONS
Expansion/ compression: These two effects move all harmonics of the fundamental towards or away from it
Curve: This effect is the same as both expansion and compression, but it allows you to define the distance and direction the partials take based on a drawable curve.
Clusters: These create a similar partial shifting, but instead of being based around the fundamental they push partials towards particular harmonics.
Chaos and Randomness: These effects move partials around randomly, this can be unique per keystroke in the “wild” mode, or based on a seed or pattern in “chaos patterns”
OSCILLATOR EFFECTS
Curve Filter: Allows you to create a filter based on the wavetable shape
Sparse: Fades out various partials in the spectrum, great for physical modelling
DeltaX: I honestly have no clue what this does, it just sounds cool, if you’re reading this, remind me to read the manual in the comments
Map-o-matic: I think this might be a phase distortion based on the wavetable, but I’m not sure, along with many others in this area of the OSC-FX, they just do some cool waveshaping, I will study and understand this more in the future.
Wrap and Zap: A variety of waveshapers and wrapping processes, these can really add some sweet overtones in certain patches
Zoom: Zooms in or out of the waveform, similar to negative sync when zooming in, and PWM when zooming out. The “center” control lets you scan which region of the wave you are zoomed in on for some uniquely interesting motion.
Posterize: smooths any motion present in the waveform, at 100% it only allows the wave to change when triggered from an external source, this can allow you to reintroduce stepped artifacts or create new blocky textures, Does not apply to the spectral distortion
Spectral Decay: Allows you to use a curve to define the decay time per partial, absolutely perfect for physical modeling.
It’s important to mention that the wavetables are fully vectorized, this means there are no “frames” between shapes as in classic tables, This gives you a MUCH smoother sound and one shape morphs to another. It’s Very clean and fluid. The sounds produced by this engine are phenomenal, I at no point did it feel like the engine was holding me back, or limiting the process. Nothing felt dirtier than it should be unless I intentionally wanted that. It’s quite an incredible oscillator and I can’t wait to use it in the fully fledged Zebra 3 synth that is sure to come eventually. I can’t say I understand everything yet, I currently have no clue what the morph guides are, even after reading the manual on them, so instead I just opt to utilize “curve set” instead.
Finally, there’s a little bit more to the package, you get an MSEG which can also morph between shapes, a great feature I’m excited to see in more synths. This lets you blend modulation shapes, or morph between different patterns for some incredibly complex motion. As it seems with the majority of modern synths, almost every control can be targeted for modulation. There’s also two LFOs that can also be used as randomizers, a main ADSR, and a simple delay/reverb for a bit of post processing effects. Most of the rest of this stuff is just so you can actually use Zebralette as an instrument and not just a wave design tool, it’s nice to have all this stuff to play around with, especially for adding motion to all the various oscillator processors. This really gets my hopes up for Zebra 3, it’s already an incredible sound design tool and instantly one of my favorites, perhaps even my favorite synthesizer, I normally don’t pick favorites, but this one really ticks all the boxes for me.
You can participate in beta testing Zebralette 3 by downloading it from their KVR posting: https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=607153