Cakewalk Z3TA

Cakewalk ZETA reviewed in The Technofile by MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi

Look at the description and screenshots on the Z3TA box and read the manual inside and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Z3TA is just another soft synth plug in. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is Z3TA one of the easiest to program soft synths I’ve tweaked, it delivers some of the best analogue emulations I’ve heard.

‘First Contact’, the patch to which it defaults on start up, is seriously impressive, but since one patch does not a great synth make, I thought I’d better check out the rest of its library…762 patches later and I have to say I’m blown away. Close you’re eyes and you’ll think you really are playing a Nord, Virus, DX7, OB8 or Solina (yep a Solina!). In fact at points I got so carried away with some of the analogue emulations that I was looking for the keyboard split button…until I remembered that I wasn’t playing my Jupiter 8 that is…

Many soft synth manufacturers claim their products offer everything from cutting edge modern sounds to classic analogue emulations. Z3TA really delivers…big time! Almost all of its patches are instantly useable and many are classics. Its analogue emulations are warm, lush and fat, with a bass end to die for, its FM sounds are nasty (in the best possible sense) and its trance sounds are spot on. Added to which it has a completely mental arpeggiator with over 200 different patterns! There’s even one that plays the first 8 bars of Jean Michelle Jarre’s Oxygene…which is bound to be useful to all the Jean Michelle Jarre tribute bands out there…

Features include 32 bit wavetable synthesis, 6 oscillators, 60 built in/6 user loadable waveforms, 64 voice polyphony, independent per-oscillator waveshaping, 2 stereo filters with 10 filter modes, morphing capable tempo-sync LFOs, eight 6 stage envelope generators, a 16 row modulation matrix, 24 modulation modes, tempo-sync stereo modulation, compression and delay lines, stereo reverb, 7 band stereo EQ…and 19 stereo amp cabinet simulations.

Of course, being me, I do have some (very minor) complaints. First and foremost, instead of grouping presets logically by some kind of criteria, e.g. type of instrument, patches seem to appear completely randomly, which, when you have 762 of them, doesn’t make finding what you want very easy. Secondly, you can’t change the size of the window in which Z3TA appears and thirdly, if you’re using a wheel mouse, when you move it upwards, you will advance to the next patch…but when you move it downwards, you will also advance to the next patch …instead of moving back to the last one (which would be the logical event).

While I’m tempted to knock off half a bagel for these misdemeanours, the bottom line is that Z3TA sounds superb…in fact, its analogue emulations are so good that they remind me why I got into electronic music in the first place and for that it gets the full five bagels!

Cakewalk ZETA awarded 5 bagels in The Technofile by MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi

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