An Empress Zoia Journey: Making My First Patch

Video Transcript

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An Empress Zoia Journey — Making My First Patch

Hey, my name’s Emily and you’re watching get offset. And I have a Zoia. I, I’ve been really curious about them for a long time. I know that they’re kind of similar to the Poly digit poly digit that I demoed, which is a multi effect pedal, where you build your own signal chains. The digit’s really focused on reverb.

[00:00:27] This is the Zoia, which I understand to be a little bit more like a modular synth. I don’t know much about modular synths. So it was a little crazy for me to get this pedal. That’s essentially a little baby modular synth. but I want to do a series of videos, kind of showing my progress with this pedal.

[00:00:48] So I’ve had a couple sit down sessions with it, and I really want to show off, the things that I’ve learned. And, that I know, so I don’t really want to go through all of the presets right now, but, you can scroll through them like that you select them there and you can turn them on there.

[00:01:12] So I think that, the best way to start with the Zoia. Is to learn how to build your own patch, learn the absolute building blocks of creating a patch and kind of work from there. So this is going to be kind of tricky. I am not sure I’m going to be on the screen the whole time. Cause I’m going to be looking at this.

[00:01:36] I’m kind of looking at it upside down, which is weird. So please just be like Uber patient with me. I. Have, you know, I’m doing my best. So yeah, this is the knob. This is the only knob where the whole pedal and you can scroll through the patches like that. So there’s a lot of presets I would love to, get involved with sometime, but not right now.

[00:02:05] So going, I’m going to go to a new patch. And the first, there are two things you need any patch on Zoia, you need an input and you need an output and anything can go in the middle that’s if you’re using it like a pedal, I’m not even going to get into like the adding oscillators and tuning oscillators yet.

[00:02:28] But that is something I would like to get in at some point. So like with the, With the digit, you always have the inputs over there and you always have outputs, but you do have to connect them still. And with the Zoia, you have to create your inputs because you’re not always going to use an input. So that would be, they scroll to the top.

[00:02:50] So you can all these little different things in there, but let’s just stick to the top. Okay. And I’m going to now scoot my face out of frame. And I’m going to, find the audio input. And that’s what that is. And it’s not a stereo input. I’m only plugged into the left, so it takes up one block. Alright, now I’m going to go and I want to do stereo outputs.

[00:03:21] Oh, no. See what did I do? I didn’t hit done. So you guys scroll back to the top and hit, done. See, I make mistakes. And then there’s that little vet guy, and I’m going to go down here to do the output because I just find that to be easier and I want it to be a stereo output. So I, again, select, I’m going to scoot out of frame again, interface modules, audio output.

[00:03:49] I could change the color if I want, but Andrew would get mad if I moved it from orange and channels stereo. So that’s what I want. Look at me. I’ve changed my angle some so I can lean over and still be in frame. Sure. I’ll be very flattering every time I leave it over. So, we have our input. It’s a little faint, but you can still see them and our output.

[00:04:11] And if we tap on our input, it’s not connected to anything. So to connect connect the two I would need to hold, but let’s, let’s just illustrate how it’s not making any sound yet.

[00:04:27] So I’m on bypass. So let’s turn the pedal on.

[00:04:34] What’s cool is you can see, cause I’ve, I’ve clicked on the input. You can see the little way of forms when I make sound. So that’s how you know, it’s, it’s working. And if I click over here, nothing, nothing, nothing, but you can kind of see that pulsing every time something goes through it, which I think is really cool.

[00:04:54] It’s that little visual key that like that little visual cue, hint, that things are working. So if I want to connect these two, I, you tap. You hold them both down. You press them both at the same time. That’s probably loud

[00:05:22] But since I want to put an effect between them, I’m going to put the guitar down and I’m going to break these chains. So I’m going to select press both down both of those. I’m going to go to chef and I’m going to go up here to delete. So that deleted the connection. And, but when I hit and put again, it’s still showing that they’re connected because it’s lighting up.

[00:05:47] So things will light up when you touch them to visualize like what they’re attached to. So when you’re going through existing patches, that’s how you reverse engineer them a little bit. So I’m going to click those, going to go to shift. And I’m going to go to delete again and now turn up my volume. Once again, no sound just like we want it to happen.

[00:06:11] So I am now going to add, there are two things I want to do. I want to add a panic, a nice, slow panning tremolo, because it’s one of my favorite towns in music and I want different reverbs on the trail of each side. So I think that’ll be kind of cool. Kind of cool to do so I’m first going to click. here.

[00:06:36] So I’m going to have a, the tremolo here, the river one there and rebirth two there. So they’re all gonna have their own line. You can do separate pages. So that would be a new page on the same one. So you can get like really involved, but you always need to be within your CPU memory. So there’s only so much memory that you can put in each patch.

[00:07:01] So you can’t. You can still do a lot with the memory that that is there, but you, you need to, like, there’s only so much space that can fit it physically. Like if you imagine your physical pedal board, you can only fit so many pedals on there. So you have to make some decisions sometimes. So let’s go to, effect modules and let’s find.

[00:07:32] Tremolo. So you can see here, there’s tone control delay with modulation, a ping pong, delay, overdrive, a distortion fuzz compressor gate, which might be kind of fun to put at the end of the reverbs and a plate Reaver. Paul reverb, broom go suburb, reverb, light Fazer course. I brought a flanger. Tremolo envelope, filter, rig mud and Capstans, which are actually pretty cool.

[00:08:03] Also, might add one of those, but let’s go trim alone. It is, I think that says mango. I’m trying to read upside down. So I hope you’re impressed with my ability to read upside down and that’s one in one out. So we want to change that to one N. Two out and we can change the type or like the voicing of it.

[00:08:33] So we can do a square wave fender, ish boxes, triangle sign. I want to do a fender ish and control rate. All right. So let’s just keep it easy.

[00:08:53] All right. So there are five one, two, three, four, five, little guys. Let me go here. So this is, each box has a designated like parameter. You can think of, most of them is knobs, but they’re also inputs outputs. So this is the tremolo end. We want to connect that to our audio in. That is the rate. Let’s make it nice and slow.

[00:09:22] And if you tune this here to get big changes and then you can fine tune there if you press down. So let’s make it really slow. The depth I want and saying death, I just want complete depth. And then these are the outs. You have a left and a right out. Cool. But let’s add another module. Let’s add that reverb.

[00:09:48] We were talking about. So effect module, let’s go with a, a it’s room. Let’s go with a plate reverb. It takes up, it shows you how much space they’ll take up and you can move it around if you want. So let’s just keep it on its own. So let’s do plate reverb, color yellow, and that’s it one in one out. So now we’re going to find the, the input, which is always the first one.

[00:10:26] And then I’m going to connect that to the left out. Cool. And so we also have a. We have two ends, it looks like plate reverb, audio, and right. You know, it just is defaulting to stereo. So it’s going to get that. All right. They’re both going to have the same input, so you’ll see, you can see the inputs there.

[00:10:56] You can see the inputs there and then the other out has no inputs yet. So then I’m not going to really mess around with the. A decay time or any of the other parameters next is fine. And then there’s a left and right out. And those are both going to go because we want this to be a panning trim alone.

[00:11:22] What I could have done is I could have assigned the left and right separately, and then it would be the same kind of river, probably with some stereo differences, but that’s not what I want to do for absolutely no reason. So both of the outputs are going to go. There. So that means work probably gonna start getting sound cause I’ve officially connected something to the output.

[00:11:52] That’s a really fast rate and that is the opposite of what I intended.

[00:12:15] only hearing it in one ear. Good. Because I haven’t connected anything to the other output yet.

[00:12:26] Keep up. So I’m going to click on this new module, going to go back to effect modules. And let’s do on the other side of scrolling the wrong way. Cause I’m upside down, let’s do a ghost verb and let’s actually put that. Yeah, let’s leave that there. So go suburb, color lime one in one out. So this is not going to have the same situation that we had before.

[00:12:58] It’s going to be one in one out. So ghost verb. That’s the N this is the unconnected out of my tremolo connect them. And then I’m just going to leave all those parameters the same, find my out and connect it. So let’s look at the signal chain. Everything’s going into my tremolo and my tremolo left. And right.

[00:13:28] My, the left is going to the plate reverb. My tremolo, right, is going to the ghost, reverb the outputs of my plate reverb. We’re going into one ear and the output of my ghost verb is going into the other. So let’s see if that worked. I am terrified.

[00:14:03] I think I just screwed up the depths of

[00:14:10] and it’s the depth that I want to add. One

[00:14:59] Nice.

[00:15:19] All right. Not bad for like essentially a first patch. So hope that all made sense. cool. Yeah. So, I mean, I could keep playing around with this. We could break some of these outputs and add a cab SEM. Just to, just to see how that sounds. Oops. Did not do that. Right.

[00:15:55] Alright. Let’s go back to the correct page. Yeah. Connect the co yeah. Select those. Right. So those aren’t connected to anything. He’ll click over there. Go to effects, go all the way to the bottom for cab SEM. And then you can select different types of cabs. Ann’s got four by 12, full two by 12 dark. You can there’s they have lists on their website of all of their like little module guys.

[00:16:30] Let’s do the low fi in one ear and let’s do, yeah, let’s do the little five. Can I do stereo? Oh, I can say all right, it’s kind of done. Great. So we need to connect our inputs first. So one reverb and then other reverb. Nope. That’s not working. Oh, that’s dumb. That’s cause there we go. So it won’t let you make connections.

[00:17:13] That don’t make sense. It wouldn’t make sense for my output to go to another output. So it would just wouldn’t let me do that. And that’s neat. So then I have my left and my right output.

[00:17:54]beautiful. Alright, well, that was my. First patch on video. it’s essentially a recreation of the first patch I did, period, just because that’s something that I really liked doing the, the hard panning tremolo with the separate left and right. reverbs. And I’m pretty sure that might, that sounds like it was probably the patch I did on the poly digits.

[00:18:21] So, yeah, that is, that’s a starter. eventually I want to get more into going through like what the different types of reverb sound like, like how do I go in and edit this cab SEM? Don’t you want to know

[00:18:42] you select it up arrow and then there’s a little edit icon. So then I could go through.

[00:19:00] so that is how you, you can like AB test things like sign waves, different signwaves different reverb types, different anything. That’s, that’s how you.

[00:19:15] I also very much want to get into the world of, understanding modular sense. Last night, I went through and made a, from the tutorial, made a tub siren, which I didn’t know is the thing I’m using oscillators and, press buttons and things like that. That, and this morning I couldn’t quite replicate it.

[00:19:35] So I need, I have a lot, like I couldn’t replicate it from memory, so I wouldn’t want to show it to you. But, yeah, that was just the first video in the series. I’m going to do of my journey with the Zoia. It’s not as scary as it looks. once you understand the language of it, it becomes really intuitive and, you can start doing things like quickly and Willy nilly.

[00:19:57] I still haven’t gotten to the point where I’m like comfortable moving between two pages, but, yeah, it’s fun. It’s really neat. And, thanks, please. Like comment, subscribe below. If you’re interested in buying a soya, I know they’re hard to find right now you can get them on reverb. And if you really want to get one on reverb after watching this video, please use the link in the video description.

[00:20:19]it really helps the channel out when you buy with our affiliate link, otherwise like comment, subscribe, et cetera. Thanks for watching. Thanks for understanding until next time. I’m Emily goodbye.