So it’s my first night of properly tinkering with the Zoia, and I thought there might be some here who were curious about early impressions. Apologies in advance if this doesn’t benefit anyone.
Patch browsing: Empress chose a spectacular variety of presets for the Zoia, showing off some lovely sounding synth sequences (where you can simultaneously play another instrument through), really mindblowing guitar-style patches, and synth-only patches that are set up for an external MIDI keyboard. I plugged in a guitar and a MIDI keyboard and both of them worked without issue right away. Due to the nature of the pedal, though, it’s often hard to visually deconstruct how a patch is working, especially when it spans multiple pages. And it would be super useful for patches to have a category listing, so that when I scroll to the next page, I know whether it will be generative, or a looper, or guitar effects, or whatever else. Won’t be that necessary once I load my own patches, though.
Patch creating: There appear to be only 64 slots for patches on the device, which might be a bummer for some but is more than enough for me. Creating modules and setting up routing is dead easy after a few minutes, and it’s fun, though there’s some sluggishness to the screen that slows down the process. I don’t know why it bugs me, but whenever you press the main knob (essentially as a yes/confirm button), the arrowhead on screen jumps up to the top of the text before the text refreshes, and it always makes me feel like I failed to press the button correctly! The reverbs and delays, on my first pass, are truly great, but the reverbs really eat up processing power. This is certainly a multi-effects unit, but probably with constant clever workarounds. The amp simulations and overdrive pedals sound not so great, at least on guitar (maybe they’ll sound great on synth, though, which I’ll try later). I really like all the modulation effects I’ve heard so far. It’s fantastic to quickly set up an LFO to control parameters of an effect, and it makes this thing utterly unique for anyone using it with guitar. I was primarily thinking of it for synths, but I’m not sure it affords me as much as it does as it would with a guitar setup.
Overall, I really like it, and I like that it is trying to serve both the synth and guitar worlds. For the effects algorithms and LFOs alone, I think it’s totally worth it, but I’m less sure I’ll be using it to create whole synthesis patches or sequences. Can’t wait to make some music with it!
EDIT: I can’t believe I forgot: 1) I really love watching the LEDs respond to the audio signal flowing through your patching. A beautiful touch. 2) I accidentally overloaded the CPU tonight and it made a very, very unhappy sound and hardlocked. I kind of wish I had sampled it!
