Review: Dark Zebra Maridor by Sonic Underworld

The latest soundset from Sonic Underworld is a tour de force of dark and moody synths aimed firmly at film and trailer scoring.

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Review: Dark Zebra Maridor by Sonic Underworld

Sonic Underworld must be literally plugged into u-he Zebra at the moment, such is their output for the synth over the past few months. However, for Maridor attention is turned to Dark Zebra. This is a special version of Zebra that was built for Hans Zimmer when he employed Howard Scarr to design custom presets for the Batman movies. Luckily for us it was later made commercially available when you buy the Dark Zebra soundset (there is some confusion when talking about it as sometimes people call it Zebra HZ and other times Dark Zebra, though it seems the consensus is to refer to the actual synth as Dark Zebra now, so I will do the same!). It shares the general architecture of Zebra, but adds particular features which means it lends itself excellently to creating more dirty and aggressive sounds – analogue filters from Diva, more compressors and a resonant filter.

Dark Zebra Filters

Not many preset packs purely dedicated to Dark Zebra get released, so I was pretty excited when Sonic Underworld dropped Maridor recently. They have embraced the cinematic possibilities of Zebra and married them with the Dark Zebra bad boy to create a hugely varied range of 180 arps, pads, basses and more that is heavily inspired by specific composers such as Jóhann Jóhannsson and Mica Levi as well as artists like William Orbit.

Dark Zebra Maridor sells for $35 from Sonic Underworld

Thoughts

I will briefly go through the various sound types, which start with 25 arpeggiator sequences. They often use distortion, comb filters and some of the more aggressive filter types to give saturation to quite complex melodic phrases. The basslines continue this theme, but are much less melodic and sound better at C3 and below. Some of these are just incredible and Moon Bog is one of my favourites, not least because of the great name! Here we have two lanes at work, the first one being a detuned sawtooth oscillator that morphs via the modwheel to a short pulse and feeds a vibey Diva LPF.

The second lane has a higher octave dual sawtooth into an aggressive XMF filter, followed by a dual square shape oscillator that modulates the pulse width slightly via the arp. The arp itself is over 11 steps giving a kind of 6/4 feel and does some cool pitch bendy stuff at the end of the phrase that I am still trying to reverse engineer to figure it how it was done! The FX are heavily used in this patch like they are throughout the collection. On this occasion, a shaper gets it crunchy, with a high frequency EQ roll off, a dubby delay and chorus to thicken it all out. The result is a snaking, wobbly bassline with loads of short clicks sounds on top that keep it really lively. A host of modulation such as aftertouch for filter frequency is also built in.

Moon Bog Preset

The bass sounds are suitably big, bold and brash and are followed by a good range of drum sounds, from big hits to shakers. The FX are hugely inventive and I particular liked Shephards Delight with its everlasting pitch rise. The pads are quite dystopian in feel and can feel quite static until you start moving the XY pads. They have quite a hollow sonic signature and are definitely not the more typical spa treatment backing music types!

The pulses will be hugely useful as most of them are atonal and are basically really interesting percussive loops.

The pulses will be hugely useful as most of them are atonal and are basically really interesting percussive loops. You might need to tweak the exact rhythms but these will layer really well with conventional drums to give a hard hitting electronic flavour to your beats. The soundscapes are masterfully crafted often using unusual waveforms and transport you to hostile alien planets with deadly, swirling gas storms. Not for the fainthearted!

Complex Waveform

A number of more traditional synth lead sounds round out Maridor and many are really huge sounding with multiple stacked oscillators, FM synthesis and down right filthy filters.

Some of the categories I feel are stronger than others, with the basslines being amazing but the pads being less so. This really is down to personal taste though and I can imagine someone saying the exact opposite.

Some of the categories I feel are stronger than others, with the basslines being amazing but the pads being less so. This really is down to personal taste though and I can imagine someone saying the exact opposite. Notwithstanding personal preference, every preset is complex and highly unique, yet without ever being so weird to be unusable in a composition.

Maridor is slightly less of a focused collection than some of Sonic Underworld’s products in that it seems to cover a greater variety of sound. However, although not all patches employ the unique features of Dark Zebra, they do all share a common theme of being predominantly cinematic and dark. I say that more to mean emotionally dark rather than dark in timbre, as many patches have plenty of high-frequency interest. Film, TV, trailer and game composers working on thrillers, dramas, horror, and sci-fi will find much in here to play with and it will also be of great interest to electronic artists who err towards the heavy, experimental and distorted side.

For users needing a Dark Zebra workhorse collection, this is highly recommended, as it does epitomize the aesthetic of that particular synthesizer. There is enough of every type of sound to enable you to find one close enough to the sound in your head and then modify it to suit. There is also plenty in here to influence your playing which is a key factor I look for in preset packs – the best ones feed creativity and give us inspiration and Maridor is definitely one of those.

Facts

Maridor consists of 180 presets for Dark Zebra. There is a very comprehensive walkthrough on the Sonic Underworld website which plays through every preset, so I strongly recommend you check it out to decide if this soundset is for you. Please note, this product will not work properly if you only have the standard Zebra synth.

Dark Zebra Maridor sells for $35 from Sonic Underworld

Demos of Dark Zebra Maridor by Sonic Underworld

Videos of Dark Zebra Maridor by Sonic Underworld