I got shipment notification today. Hopefully I'll have mine before my vacation trip next week so I can take it with me. Oregon coast is a great place to be inspired
How are you liking it? Can you create synth sounds that the guitar controls?
Cool. That's my primary goal, too.Working in that direction as that's exactly what I wanted out of it. I've got it outputting it's factory bleeps n blorps through my Axe III so far. Next is groking the UI and pushing modules around. More coffee is needed.
With the bit I've poked at, the Life's Been Good and Dark Side patches are excellent factory examples of what you can create with this thing. Plus Union Jack cheekiness for fun with the Fooled Again patch. I love these Empress nerds!
Hmm... Well, that sounds good (simple editing), and bad (pitch tracking).Mine arrived a day early and I spent a bit of time with it tonight. Some of the presets are cool and certainly useful points of departure. The standard effects that I tried are quite good. The pitch shifter is warble city and sounds as good/bad whether you play single notes or chords. It’s actually probably still better than the pitch shifter in the Helix for chords.
I didn’t crack the manual at all and was able to do some basic editing pretty easily.
As an exercise, I decided to create a basic mono synth patch. Here’s the steps I took:
This took about as long to type on my iPad as it did to figure out on the Zoia. IOW, pretty easy. The downside is the tracking blows. Lots of missed notes. Even playing really slow and pretty damn clean it was not what I’d consider usable. It also didn’t track bends - just actual notes with no funny stuff at all.
- Starting with a blank patch, add audio input and audio output and connect them to make sure I’m not an idiot and sound is happening. Break the connection.
- Add oscillator and pitch detector and connect oscillator output to audio output.
- Connect audio input to pitch detector input
- Connect pitch detector to oscillator frequency
- Voila. I have a plain mono synth. I stop playing. It doesn’t.
- Add envelope detector and audio out switch
- Oscillator output moves to audio out switch and that in turn goes to audio output
- Connect audio input to envelope detector and connect envelope detector to audio out switch
- Now I have a mono synth that stops when I stop playing
I think a lot of people would be surprised at how much of what the Zoia does can be accomplished with any Fractal processor. Obviously I haven’t gone deep with the Zoia yet but as I was experimenting I was thinking of what the equivalent would be on the Fractal platform and lots of it is very doable. However, the Zoia is surprisingly simple to operate and edit. A matrix of physical buttons makes for very quick editing.
Dude! I love your adventures I just got the ZOIA the other day and I'm super excited and overwhelmed.
What would be cool is if you could explain exactly what modules you add and exactly how they affect your tone and why. Like, is adding a "delay line" the same as adding any delay? Does it matter what kind (tape, old tape, etc)? What does the bias point do - and how does bias relate to delay time? etc etc etc I have soooo many questions! Can't wait to dive back into the ZOIA this evening
Very cool! I'll have to try that delay line thing tonight (hopefully). I don't know if you're on the FB group, but my first patch was a level meter. Used 5 gates at various thresholds that feeds 5 envelope followers that feeds CV to 5 ADSRs that feed either green, yellow, or red pixels.
The absolute hardest part was figuring out how to generate a CV from audio input! After that, it was a challenge moving/copying modules without messing up/duplicating connections. Whole thing ended up using 114% CPU!
This is truly a magical rainbow box of mystery!
Well... I've decided I probably need to unload my Zoia. It's been in the box for too long and I just don't have the time/energy to invest.
Anyone wants to make me an offer on an essentially new one, let me know.
I actually had a specific goal in mind with what I wanted it for. Turns out it's a lot more work than I have time for.Ah, the natural end result of an 'oh, that looks cool' impulse buy, rather then 'what do I actually need and does this fill an actual need?'
And yeah, been there, done that, lots of times.