U-He Zebra Basic Overview Series: The Global Tab

Welcome back to this in-depth introductory series for U-He Zebra. This week we take a look at the Global tab and cover the basics to help get you started.

The first thing touched on in this lesson are the Voicing options in U-He Zebra. The various voice modes include Polyphonic, Retrigger, Legato, Arpeggiator and Duophonic. The number of voices can be used to increase or decrease the total number of voices available to be played together at any given time. With these available options you can basically deliver any kind of sound, or series of sounds, that you could ever imagine. Combined with the many other options, tools and functions found throughout U-He Zebra there is no end to what you can create and the voicing options play a big role in how your sounds are delivered.

The next area of the global controls in U-He Zebra that is discussed in this tutorial is pitch and tuning, which also includes glide control. All of these things are centered around how a sound in Zebra uses and interacts with pitch. It is worth mentioning that in the video, Mark mistakenly says that the numbers in the Pitch Bend fields represent octaves, when in fact the represent semi-tones. There are 12 semi-tones in one octave. This entire part of the global tab is quite intuitive and consistent with all other synths you may have use din the past, so there is no great need to go into too much detail here.

The Smooth Attack feature helps to resolves any clicks you may hear in some of your synths that is not easily remedied through extending the release parameter a bit. The Voice Drift feature imparts a small amount of randomized detuning (very subtle) to help emulate some of the irregularities and imperfections that made classic analog synths so interesting and full of character. The Voice MicroTuning feature allows you to load tuning scales other than the default configuration, whether that be your own custom tuning or perhaps tuning scales from other pats of the world (other than traditional western music scales). If you have interest in making your own .tun files to load into U-He Zebra you can use this generator to do so https://www.u-he.com/scripting/Arprestrictor.php.

The last thing touched on is the Swing Generator, which is used in conjunction with the arpeggiator in U-He Zebra. Is is quite simple to understand and to use. It simply changes the delivery timing of the notes programmed into the arpeggiator matrix and allows you to alter the timing from very subtle to quite drastic. A great way to to add a simple human feel to a sequence that sounds a little too robotic, or change it up completely to the sequence seems more unpredictable altogether. That wraps up this lesson, but we’ll be back soon with more great in-depth tutorials so you can quickly master U-He Zebra and get the most out of it!