Make Great Melodies With Noise in Zebra

This week we take a closer look at the noise module, especially at making melodies with noise in Zebra.

Making layered patches in u-he Zebra is the most fun you can have, and Zebra is perfect for the job!

Because you have 4 different lanes you can easily make one oscillator for the bass, one for the melody and then you still have 2 channels left.

In this multi layered patch the Noise module is the most interesting part, because by default a noise module does not listen to pitch.
This is because noise is not a frequency, it is all frequencies at an even level.
So we are going to need a few more things to make melodies with noise in Zebra.

First we need a filter and send the noise through it, if we then crank the resonance of the filter very high it will start to feedback (provided that you use a filter that is capable of feedback.
A more fancy term for this would be “Self Oscillation” this basically means that the tone is going to continue to sound on after the noise has been taken away.

But now for the cool stuff, if we have a self oscillation filter like this we can use the Cutoff Knob to change the tuning of the self oscillation.
We don’t want to keep turning the cutoff knob throughout the song, so let’s choose a modulator to do this for us.
An MSEG would be the best for this, but generally takes a bit more time to set up, so I went with an LFO instead.

You can now use a tuner on your channel to check if you are still in tune, because it’s not going to give you the notes that you play on your keyboard.
In fact the noise module doesn’t care what note you play on your keyboard!
So make sure you check everything is in tune with the other sounds, and you should be good to go!

Have fun guys, and try to master this technique, it can really give you some unique sounds.

– Jorgalad