Empress Zoia // Euroburo

I hope- but I would think if they intended on computer editing there’d be a USB port on there, which I haven’t seen anybody mention. It seems counter intuitive for taking in and out the sd card when patching something together…

They will apparently not be making a computer editor themselves


(from /r/synthesizers on reddit)

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Shoot- well, it’s a step in a good direction at least

Oh wow. Well, then I’m not sold yet until I can muck about with it.

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on thegearpage they said it’ll have about 100 modules.
it’s not in pure data.
users will be able to share presets/chains.

empress has a voting forum to submit firmware/modules requests

I had the superdelay vintage modified, now have the reverb and echosystem. seriously amazing sounding effects. gotta say the firmware got updated with addons.
they’re even adding a 5 track looper into each of these effects.
they take their time but they do stuff eventually…

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I remembering them doing that. So they came through in the end?

I mean it is a lot. Not like we won’t be starved for options. Plus I imagine, whatever the work on in the future, would just offer later…

Good to hear.

I’m blown away by this pedal!

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Very impressed. Aside from its obvious use as a slew of guitar pedals, I can see this on an effects send in a portable live setup and as an Octafood creator.

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If they incorporate a sequencer into this thing, I’m sold. It would be an insanely portable little box on which to jam out ideas.

Zoia looks very useful, great interview Cuckoo, asking the tough questions!
Who knew David Duchovny worked for Empress :grin:

Really liked: “Make a synthesizer from scratch … can you do like, an FM synth for instance?”

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@cuckoomusic - Well done on the Zoia interview! Got some important questions answered there.
“Unprecedented potential” is absolutely correct. Thanks :thup:

One of the (many) crazy things just casually mentioned in the NAMM videos is that you can easily assign MIDI CC numbers to anything you want in the Zoia. The idea of using that in conjunction with Bitwig or Numerology is properly doing my head in. Instant complex insanity!

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it does have a sequencer module :star_struck:

Well fudge me sideways.

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Be great to see elektron moving outside the current form factor paradigm, though the 1/2 sized DT and DN are a great evolution.

A superslim battery charged Op-1 machine or a grid controller digital modular like the Zoia.

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This thing is seriously blowing my mind.

As far as ecosystem health, around the 13:30 mark he talks about how they’re building looper codes for the other two pedals which they would then use for the Zoia. Which imo means that any code later written can and/or will be used for the Zoia.

And did you pick up that he mentioned being able to send MIDI OUT? And the “mono send/return” feature??

A seriously awesome bit of kit. I can’t wait to try it. High hopes.

“So what kind of building blocks have you got here?”
“Ummm…well what do you want?”
:joy:

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i’m very interested in this

would be a huge win

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I like when he chains together delays and modulates the timing with lfo’s, coolest pedal yet it seems

please keep in mind he’s talking to guitar players :joy:

Question on TGP: Any chance the environment will be open to other developers?

Empress answers:

In a way, no. In another way yes.

The answer is no because there are already a lot of open source systems available for developers.

The answer is yes because the Zoia is more of a visual programming language than a traditional guitar pedal, so it already is an open environment! For instance, for fun I made an interval trainer using it. And it was funner to do than if I did it in C. First I just used a paper notepad (how refreshing!), and then just translated that into Zoia land. So you can program with it. It probably took less time too! For instance, there are basic modules that let you do conditions and math on audio and cv signals. Cause you can see all the signals quite easily, Zoia is a really good debugging environment. It makes REPLs blush!

The whole point of the Zoia for me personally was to untangle music playing from the computer. I really don’t want to move the interactive environment back into the computer! But if someone has a ton (metric preferably) of money lying around, as a capitalist pig I’d definitely consider it.

About RAM:
Actually we are looking into maxing out the RAM. But RAM sizes don’t really go obsolete on embedded stuff like they do on PCs. On PCs, developers have a lot less pressure to optimize RAM usage, so everything seems to take up a monstrous amount. For instance, I have a single chrome tab that is currently taking up 517MB. That’s like 10 thousand times the amount of memory that the Apollo Guidance Computer had (64kB). One is showing me my email, the other is piloting the only human-made object to have made it outside of our solar system.

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I wonder if you could possibly make an elektron style sequencer with conditional trigs with this :grimacing: