Zebra has probably been u-hes's only hyped synth I've never really gotten into or explored.
Diva & Hive on the other hand yes, I have had great times with those two.
Will give zebra3 a shot when it comes out though!

 

I did post this in some other thread, but I think it belongs here too, from Urs @ kvraudio: https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=9160297#p9160297

But I'll believe it when I get my grubby hands on it, of course

 

Same here, used it as preset machine with minimal tweaking, but starting anything from scratch was too much pain for me, skill issue for sure, but I'm not someone who enjoys sound design and mangling that much, so yeah.

 

I dont mind a bit of sound design, I own an arturia minifreak i make sounds on that all the time -- dunno what it was about zebra that made me overlook it. Will give it another go.

 

Sylenth1 was my go-to before, then Spire, actually I did enjoy programming sounds in them and that's where I go first even today, have lot of fun in Hive also, that's probably enough for me too, so my thing is probably Diva, Spire and Hive.

Main reason I even got into Zebra is those "complex" sounds that mimic acoustic instruments and just things that have lot of going on, ditched Kontakt moons ago, so use Zebra, Omnisphere and Nexus to get those sounds I might be missing. Zebra is last resort really, keep using Nexus for more synth sounds then I imagined and probably Omnisphere is where I get most sounds for my ambient/instrumental stuff, overall it's my atmo/pad/sfx thing for EDM/trance.

 

Last edited: Dec 2, 2025

Some of the presets are amazing, can't wait for 3rd party stuff to start popping out.

 

I hope we all get interchangeable GUIs for the Zebra 3 soon.

 

After a few hours of testing and getting used to the new GUI, I think it’s decent and not too confusing..

The Filter Matrix is perfect for quick comparisons between all Filter variations.
The filters can be extremely fast, for example, when set to an MSEG with full attack speed ~1ms (Easy pumping Psytrance Basses)

The Arpeggiator from Zebra 2 for quick inspiration using my own sounds, could be usefull, but that’s not high priority.

Importing Zebra 2 sounds probably won’t work due to the engine differences, but well... maybe!

The overall sound is crystal clear, and the CPU load is quite low as well.

CLAP stable , VST3 stable no freezes, crashes or anyhting.

 

I highly recommend that everybody who uses Z3 makes friends with the Pitch modules, pronto.

Man, having 4 of those bastards is a stroke of goddamn genius.

 

zebra 3 is quite great. it has alot of functions. i tested it. yes its useful.. could be!

 

Until now the only synths I used from U-He were Repro 5 and sometimes Diva but I never bothered with Zebra 2 back then.

Well I'm glad I gave Zebra 3 a try:
This synth sounds great with a lot of creative potential.

 

If I'm not mistaken, it was possible to replace the UI in Diva so maybe it will also be possible with this one.
Personally, this Zebra 3 dark theme is fine for me, easy on the eyes.

 

Last edited: Apr 22, 2026 at 7:26 AM

I have imported all my sounds from zebra 2 into zebra3 and it doesnt work. All sounds are "crashy", they sounds almost a same. So it seems that presets from Z2 will not work in Z3

 

Zebra3 is a different product, it cannot import Zebra2 presets.

 

I’ve been away for the weekend so I have to catch up with Zebra 3 and it’s 105 filter types… but the physical modeling is more important, hopefully they reduced the usage a lot in the official release!