u-he Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary of Zebra & an Update for Diva

u-he has released new Version of Zebra 2.7 for the 10 year anniversary of the software synth. The update includes a new Distortion module, Howard's anniversary soundset & AAX support for Pro Tools 10 & 11.  Pictured above and below is the original version of Zebra.

Some interesting history via u-he:

"It all began with an innocent little synthesizer for Apple's newly introduced Audio Units (AU) platform. Zebra was one of the very first instrument plug-ins available for this format, long before even the biggest companies had those in stock."

"The Performance tab with 4 XY Controls was already in there, and visual artist Cris Pearson snuck a number of bogus advertisements into it. The Synthesis view, however, looked nothing like it does today. Zebra 1.0 had a modular architecture underneath the hood, but there was no user interface to change its signal flow. This happened later, when Version 1.5 came out in 2004."

"It took more than two years until Zebra 2.0 was finally released in October 2006 - this time for both MacOS X and Windows. From then on things went quickly. Howard Scarr discovered Zebra and completely revamped the factory presets. Shortly thereafter, Hans Zimmer decided to make Zebra his go-to soft synth. He asked Howard to co-design Zebra sounds for "The Dark Knight" movie, followed by several more blockbusters over the next few years..."

As for Diva, it has been updated to version 1.3 with the following:

"The Uhbie, a filter modeled after a famous analogue multimode VCF. Our take on this morphs from lowpass to highpass via your choice of notch or bandpass.

The Digital Osc, a dual oscillator with a flexible feature set reminiscent of the synthesizer that started the hardware VA revolution in the 90ies. Not only have we covered its typical waveforms such as the original Super Saw, Feedback and TriangleMod, we even gave both oscillators the full feature set! (we also sneaked in a high quality mode with less aliasing)

An Arpeggiator! - Not to be mistaken with the recent crop of sequencers that also arpeggiate, this one pays tribute to good old analogue style arpeggiators, including some of the lesser known modes such as the "Leap" mode found in rare monophonic synths.

Further improvements include:
60 new factory presets using the new modules
AAX support for Pro Tools 10/11!
vastly accelerated GUI opening
many little niggles fixed"

Curious if the Digital Osc is based on the Roland JP-8000 supersaw. If so, it wasn't the first VA of course. That title goes to the original Nord Lead 1 and to an extent the KORG Prophecy which followed shortly after and included physical modelling. The Access Virus, Yamaha AN1x, Novation Supernova and Roland JP-8000 came in the next wave.