Zebra vs Serum

[billcarroll]

I love every little bit of Serum. The Oscillator and the editing is great.
The synth is brilliant what is made for.
It was quite a challenge for me to make some more soft and warm sounds for it
and i am still proud and happy i could finally made the "Warmed" soundset.

When i switched back to Zebra it was a relief to make the same kind of sounds.
Open possibilities in every direction. I didn't yet found a dead end in it.
Zebra alone is the reason i making soundsets now, so for me it's a great gift and still top of the list - until Zebra3 coming.
(hopefully coming with the same kind of oscillator editing features like in Serum or better. )

No other synth has come close for me as far as being able to craft the exact sounds with the nuances I want. Zebra is a tool of fine craftsmanship.

This!

Cheers,
Joseph

This is quite an endorsement.

If synths worked on desert islands, Zebra. Some of the new skins appearing for Zebra (Massive Modular by plugmon) and Diva (Volta) are simply amazing and make me want to use these great synths even more often.

[Vectorman]

Yes, of course you can. It's just a new trend to make music really bright (it's like adding more and more sugar every day/month/year to your tee and cakes till you get diabetes), and Serum has this brightness straight away. But ears and brains might tire from the constant HiFreq attack in the end, especially when you will be creating your own music starting with a saw wave.

Boy, isn't that the truth. So many modern mixes sound like they've been run through a Kush Clariphonic with everything cranked to the absolute max. While it may help songs come through with greater clarity over the road noise when you're driving down the expressway, it can make for a somewhat tinny, ear-fatiguing experience when listening to it on headphones or on your good speakers at home. We had the Loudness War and now we have the Brightness War.

I like mixes that hit the ear in a somewhat smoother way most of the time, with a top end that's clear but not over-hyped. That's probably one of the things that instantly appealed to me about Zebra. With Zebra's presets (even prior to 2.5 it came with a lot), I felt like its overall character wasn't hyped-sounding...more balanced and round-sounding and something about it just lent itself really well to using a lot of different sounds in a mix. I've programmed more of my own sounds for Zebra than for any other synth. It has a pretty malleable sound and so many areas where you can exercise a fine degree of control over subtleties.

[Apostate]

This!

If synths worked on desert islands, Zebra. Some of the new skins appearing for Zebra (Massive Modular by plugmon) and Diva (Volta) are simply amazing and make me want to use these great synths even more often.

I feel the same way about Zebra (and would recommend it before all other synths...but only if the musician plans on studying it thoroughly). The only thing I feel compelled to add is that Zebra has just enough character (and by that I mean very little in comparison to, say, Waldorf) to make it so it might not work for people looking for a certain sound.

For people looking for more of a vanilla sound, Serum. I personally really liked Serum, but it was just that lack of any sort of distinguishing character, along with the kind of flat sound overall (to my ears at least) that had me selling it a year after I purchased it. Once I did my weeks of Zebra study, I concurrently realized it was perfect for my music, and just didn't need Serum (or Omnisphere, or Synthmaster for that matter) anymore.

This is just my experience, I'm sure there are plenty out there for whom Serum or Omnisphere are ideal. I just wanted to stress that Zebra, like any other, isn't necessarily "the" synth to get. It just happens to be one of the elite choices.