Our third 80s-inspired feature in a month… safe to say we’re fully immersed at this point. But when a synth nails that balance of nostalgia and forward-thinking design, it’s hard to resist. In this edition of Synth Secrets, we’re diving into Zebra 3. A long-time favourite among sound designers, Zebra has earned its reputation for its depth, flexibility, and unmistakable character. The latest incarnation builds on that legacy – refined, expanded, and still just as inspiring to explore.
From Madonna and Gloria Estefan to film scores like Predator and Romancing the Stone, the 80s saw a sudden explosion of marimba-esque, tuned percussive sounds in music. The reason was simple: mainstream adoption of FM synthesis and sampling. Because, as amazing as analogue subtractive synths sound, they’re pretty poor at sounding like anything in the real world – especially hollow things being hit with sticks.
When you hit metal tubes, hollowed-out wood or glass bells, there are huge numbers of cascading resonances at play, both harmonic and inharmonic. FM synthesis lets you get pretty close to this with complex overtone structures. And sampling makes a playable copy of it. But the new Modal modules in u-he’s Zebra 3… they actually employ physical modelling to recreate these resonances. And they sound awesome.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Modal modules is that the actual sound you run through them is almost incidental to the tonality of the resulting sound. To prove this, let’s turn some white noise into a dancefloor-ready percussive arpeggio.
The vibes of our example are quite minimal tech, but the pattern can easily be tweaked for more tropical, Latin, or Afro vibes. Also, for now, Zebra 3 is in public beta, so you can simply download the installer and a beta license card here.
Before we start, though, here’s a little before and after…
Basic white noise source
Zebra 3 physical modelling
Step 1
Load Zebra 3, open an INIT preset, and look to the centre panel. Replace the default oscillator it added with a ‘Noise 1’ module. Now set the Envelope 1 Attack, Sustain and Release to 0 and set the Decay to about 400ms. Draw in a single one-bar-long note on C2, hit play, then change the Noise Shape to Single Hit and listen to our tight little volume envelope profile, like a stick hitting a hard surface.
Noise source hit
Step 2
Add a Modal 1 module right afterwards. This module will calculate realistic physical resonances using the dynamic volume profile of our white noise. Click Suppress Dry to remove the source signal (the noise), and now play it. Already sounds almost like a tuned drum, right? Listen closer, and you’ll notice that each hit is slightly different from the one before. This is the joy of Modal modules – they naturally impart an organic variation in sound.
Modal module added
Step 3
It might already sound like a tuned drum, but so far, it only sounds like a tuned synth drum. To breathe physical life into it, we’ll need to actually apply a physical model, and they’re hidden behind the little + symbol. Click it now, and