Z3TA+2 developer feedback and mini-review

I bought Z3TA+2 earlier this year and only now got around to delving into it, these are my initial impressions:

Good:

- 2x oversampling and highest precision mode sounds awesome
- performance playing and real time control options are probably the most configurable and advanced I've seen so far in anything
- loads your own wavetables, LFO shapes, arp patterns if you want - yay!
- that arp's really quite nice
- flexible FX order
- useful EQs
- good, voluminous factory content

Bad:

- 2x oversampling and highest precision kills CPUs dead, compromises must be made
- Badly parameterized, inflexible reverb that as a result doesn't work in many situations because it's impossible to dial in the sound you want (for instance, predelay and room size are not configurable other than by choosing one of 5 reverb types, and then they're linked to each other so you cannot have a long reverb tail without a long, mushy predelay)
- the arp screws with playing and testing patches - if host playback is stopped, for example, the arp will not play the sequence but just one note, and unless you know what's happening it feels as if the patch is inexplicably monophonic. this is exacerbated by the overreliance of the factory content on the arpeggiator
- modulation usability kind of breaks down with very small values (like those necessary for subtle vibrato)
- unintuitive modulation lingo has to be learned by heart and is otherwise pretty much unusable without the handbook (you're constantly going like, wait what the heck does BLINEAR- mean again)
- patches and especially modulations can get incredibly intricate (which is great!), but there's no way to comment patches or at least name modulations sensibly, which limits preset usefulness (especially in third party content), re-usability and accessibility.
- distortion effect is weak - this is partially offset though by the waveshaper
- delay time counting seems off by a factor of 4, at least compared to my host and other synths like Massive. Perhaps it's not a bug but unintutive naming, like "1/4" not meaning "1/4 note" but "1/4 of the length of the currently loaded arp pattern" or something
- the GUI has these multiple choice fields everywhere, you're supposed to left click to go to the next value, right click to get to the previous, and that is aggravating. Impossible to know how many choices there are and what exactly you're going to. Some fields, with no discernable pattern, get a nifty and useful dropdown menu in addition, but most don't

I guess that list looks overall more negative than positive, but I wouldn't say the points were all equally weighted, much of the "bad" stuff is workflow related and doesn't impact the sound much. I'm pretty happy I picked it up and it's definitely possible to get kickass sounds out of it. I won't however do what I did with Massive, I think (which is build a 500+ preset sound bank to sell). I saw a post here talking about the standard oscillator octave being lower than on most other synths, and I definitely hear that - I usually design at C3 as a reference point, but with Z3TA+2 C4 is more appropriate. It should be fairly easy to shift all the oscs 1 octave up in the default patch though. Also, to me personally the live performance capabilities, really one of the strongest points of the software, are perhaps less valuable than to others, since I am not a great instrumentalist and prefer sequencing and automating asynchronously to performing and recording live.

Overall (preliminary) verdict: 7 out of 10 cats
 
(if any of my criticisms are rooted in ignorance, as they may well be, please speak up! thanks :))

Ah! That clears that up. Thank you!

I wonder why that is (that, AND the note length/bar fraction thing you explained earlier)... what positive consequences there were that outweighed the negative impact of going against conventions in the minds of the people who made these decisions. Or whether there really are environments in which one could have grown up and that would have made this stuff feel right. ;)

Ableton Live 8

XP. I'll try on a Win 7 machine later

Standard? I mean okay, it's one thing to say "we're doing this a little differently than most everyone else" and be clear about it, but it's another to claim that I shouldn't expect the measures to be in notes in the first place, and it's actually MORE common to do it in beats, and z3ta got there first anyway – as if the age of the first predecessor of the software were the basis for my expectations ;)
 
I just spent an hour trying to find another piece of software or an online calculator that defines "1/4" other than as "a quarter note" (ie 500 ms at 120 BPM), but no success. Not even the sonitus delay included with Cakewalk's own Sonar does it like z3ta, according to the online documentation I could find. 
 
I mean, what does the D and T stand for if not "dotted" and "triplets"? Surely you'll not claim that there's such a thing as a dotted quarter beat? Those two modifiers pretty heavily imply the use of "notes" as the base unit here.
 
It's also a false dilemma to present the issue as if the only other option were to measure things by ear. Sure, there are lots of ways to skin a cat, but some are better than others, and it's perfectly valid to talk about that. For sync, for knobs, for sliders, and for multiple choice menus too!
 
 
 
 
 
 

Italo 84 (the standard first patch) is a good example. When I open z3ta+2 in Live 8 and start playing one note and hold it, it will play a sustained single note. When I keep holding it and play another note, the first note will end, the second note will not play, and no further sounds will be made as long as the first key is held. When I hit play in Live, things change: z2ta will play the arpeggio pattern when I hold a note. When playback is stopped, and I disable the arpeggiator, behavior changes as well: The patch now becomes polyphonic (so when playing a sustained note and hitting another key, that second note will play in addition to the first one).
 
And yes, there is such a thing as a dotted quarter NOTE, which is why one would assume that something that says 1/4D refers to a fraction of a NOTE, and there's no such thing as a dotted quarter BEAT, so it would be strange to assume that 1/4D would refer to a fraction of a BEAT – just as I wrote earlier. 
 
And yes, Massive uses 12th and 24th, and still 1/12 there is 1/12 note, and not 1/12 beat or 1/12 bar or 1/12 measure :)

I find the method of tempo divisions useful - so do others synth and effect makers like Nomad Audio.  It is less math than cross-referencing ms v bpm - and sorry you didn't get the humor about analog.  It was actually quite fun and never quite as steady with tape loops.  FYI, Sonitus was bought by Cake as a third party add-on and had their own methodology going on before they went belly up as a separate entitiy. 
 
Z3TA's sync options work pretty well despite the sematic problem.  And I'd give your arp problem a whirl - I got Live!, but wonder if you wouldn't just put words in my mouth as I tried to stumble toward an answer with you. 
 
@
 
 

wayfinder
- 2x oversampling and highest precision mode sounds awesome

 
They are hard to reach - one has to go to the Options Menu, go down, hit Real Time, select, go back, etc... They should be much more easily accessible so as to be able to compare the result. Sometimes though 1.0x Real Time Quality sounds better than 2.0x (oversampling).
 
What I really don't understand is why do we have options with respect to Off Line quality. That seems senseless to me.
 
There's also one  NOT EXCUSABLE bug described here: http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Contact/Problem-Report-Status?id=26670&email=alexbelciu%40gmail.com
However this seems to affect Windows users only.
 
Oh, and what has always been a constant annoyance to me: the Modulation Matrix is split into 2 pages, so that you can never have a complete picture of all the assignments (like in Rapture for instance) without grabbing the mouse (because again, the developers were lazy enough not to include the buttons 1-8 and 9-16 in the MIDI Learn functionality)
 
I would say verdict 6 out of 10.