Zoia

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

Okay, the saxobone was even better than advertised!

[Dowi]

OK, so, one of these should be here by the end of the week.
I ended up with one as part of a trade and i thought to give it a try, mostly - if not exclusively - just out of curiosity. So i ask to you navigated users, what should i try first (besides building some stuff from ground to understand the pedal)? I watched some tutorials and it doesn't seem THAT difficult, at least for simple tasks, then there's time to complicate things..

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

I'd advise grabbing the Librarian program and strolling through Patchstorage to see what excites you.

Dull but useful — check the firmware version (you can see it when the pedal turns on) and be prepared up update it, especially if the firmware is pre-2.0.

The stock patches are okay but not super-exciting, but you can get some ideas just by playing with them.

I do recommend sitting down with the getting started tutorials, and just doing the simplest sort of patching to reinforce the grammar/workflow. And then also making the most basic of synths is a cool exercise as well.

[Dowi]

Zoia came last week, and it's..a lot easier than i thought! Well, I just made some really easy patches, nothing fancy, a couple chain of effects, a simple FM synth with on-board keyboard, and a basic sequencer, but the interface is not that difficult once you have understood the logic behind it.Tutorials have been hugely helpful, thanks for the headsup HAK.
Right now the only thing that bugs me is the fact that you just have one knob to navigate through the menus etc, but it's not that terrible.

Never played a Strymon Volante but I found a patch that replicates it (already installed on the unit by the previous owner) and lost a good 20 minutes just noodling with the guitar while turning the tap buttons on and off. In general, sound-wise Zoia seems to be very good, not that I have hi-fi needs whatsoever.

I investigated some other patches already on the pedal to see how to obtain some results but it seems to me that it's actually easier to build them from scratch than to modify existing ones, at least for the 3 or 4 patches I tried to modify.
I still have to check the patch library, i'm looking forward to doing it over the coming weeks, but right now I prefer to get to know the pedal a bit more with some experiments.

[Gone Fission]

FYI for the Zoia folks in our midst:

1) Empress has a beta 3.0 firmware out with a new sampler module. https://empresseffects.freshdesk.com/su ... n-the-zoia

2) bug hunters who file a bug report form will be entered to win an Empress pedal of their choice. https://empresseffects.wufoo.com/forms/rrac3co1c8pqsd/

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

Yup, glad this exists, but not rushing to install. In all honesty, I'm not going to design my own sampler patch, so I need to wait for some cool options to emerge from the community anyway.

Samplers aren't really something that are intuitively in my workflow anyway, but I realize it's probably a good thing to disrupt that!

I'll upgrade to the non-beta firmware whenever I have time to do a refresh/reshuffle on my patches. I heard the librarian app was not working + now working again, so not being in a rush has been okay for me.