Empress ZOIA

I decided to go ahead and place an order. Apparently shipping was supposed to start today... No idea yet how long before I receive it.

I really need another toy to absorb my copious free time :D
 
unix-guy said:
How are you liking it? Can you create synth sounds that the guitar controls?
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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!
 
hdcs said:
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!
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Cool. That's my primary goal, too.
 
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:
  • 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
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.

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.
 
hippietim said:
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:
  • 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
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.

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.
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Hmm... Well, that sounds good (simple editing), and bad (pitch tracking).

I suspected many of the cool effects could probably be recreated on the Axe Fx, but one thing I was hoping is that it would actually help me to get a better grip on HOW the effects work internally - which would be great.

Also, if nothing else, it might good for offloading some CPU eaters from the Axe Fx.
 
Tonight’s Zoia exercise was to experiment with basic delay lines to create a flanger. This was simple enough.
  • Add audio in and out modules
  • Add delay line with max delay of 100ms - flanging just needs like 10ms or so. Set the bias point of the delay to 5-10ms.
  • Add LFO set to sine wave. Set the rate around .250-.500
  • Add cv multiplier to tame the range of the LFO which just goes from 0-1. I set mine to around .3
  • So LFO out to the cv multiplier to the delay rate
  • Connect audio through delay to output as you’d expect. Then connect the delay out to the delay in and drop that level a few dB.
Now you’ve got a flanger. Next I duplicated all that with slightly different values for separate left and right flanger lines. At this point it sounded pretty cool. Not too extreme, a pretty usable sound.

Out of curiosity, I experimented with additional feedback lines but with effects included. Pitch shifting was kind of cool but what I ended up liking was a bit crusher.

Adding the ghost reverb at the end really made for a cool clean tone for arpeggiating chords
 
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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 :D
 
Yeah... I've had mine a few weeks and only spent about 15 minutes with it. I'm not sure I'm ever going to get time to really dive in, but we'll see :)
 
decreebass said:
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 :D
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I'm probably not the best person to explain just about anything but I'll try :)

A delay line is literally a single audio delay. If you were to create a patch that was input -> delay line -> output, everything you hear would be delayed by whatever time you specify. To make something more like a delay pedal, you'd need to have a connection from input to output (your dry sound) and for repeats you need to feed the output of the delay line back to the input but at a lower level so it doesn't go indefinitely. The delay line does not impart any sonic changes on it's own so there's no tape, analog, etc. To do that sort of thing you need to process the signal that is the feedback connection (delay out to in) - this can be introducing filters, noise, distortion, pitch, etc.

With very short delay times you can create a flanger since it is basically a short variable delay. The thing that makes the flanger sound is the comb filtering you introduce by mixing singles that are just barely offset in time from each other.

For controllers (like an oscillator), think of the bias point as the starting point for the range of motion - depending on the controller and how you augment it, this bias point can be what establishes the minimum, maximum, or middle value.

If you use an oscillator to control the time on a delay line, the bias point could control the minimum delay time.
 
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!
 
decreebass said:
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!
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CV from audio should have been the envelope detector right?
 
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.
 
unix-guy said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Muad'zin said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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