Zephyr Oscillator

Steady State Fate Zephyr

No stranger to designing feature-packed oscillators, Steady State Fate’s Zephyr is an analog VCO packing powerful waveform generation capabilities and rock-solid pitch tracking. Zephyr combines several aspects of previous SSF designs, namely the Zero Point Oscillator and Spectrum, making it a rock-solid utility oscillator that has no difficulty stepping into the spotlight. Comfortable at both audio and control rates, Zephyr sports a total frequency range of about 0.008Hz to 29kHz, split across an eight-octave rotary switch and a multi-mode Tune control. This phenomenal range in combination with its extensive options for waveform manipulation make Zephyr an adept source of rich timbres and complex modulations.

If there’s any imaginable way to shape a waveform, you can rest assured that Zephyr is probably capable of doing it. In addition to bread-and-butter sine, sawtooth, and triangle outputs, there’s also pulse, sub-oscillator, and Z-Wave outputs. Pulse and Sub, which can be set to one or two octaves below the fundamental pitch, are both affected by pulse width modulation, in either Edge or Center modes of PWM. As for Z-Wave, this output crossfades between the Pulse output and wave-folded sine wave. In addition to exponential or linear FM, Zephyr also has a unique ZMOD input which can affect the module in one of three different ways: Through-Zero Phase Modulation, ZSYNC—reversing sync with TZ phase modulation, and hard waveform FLIP. Venture forth into sonic territories yet to be explored with SSF’s Zephyr.

Zephyr Features

• Wide-ranging analog oscillator with complex waveform generation
• 8-position octave rotary switch
• Tune control with 3 response ranges: Fine, Coarse, and LFO
• Audio frequency ranges from approx. 3.5Hz to 29kHz
• LFO frequency ranges from approx. 0.008Hz to 70Hz
• Sine, Triangle, Sawtooth, Pulse, Sub, and Z-Wave outputs
• Dual mode PWM: Edge and Center
• Sub output may be -1 or -2 octaves
• Z-Wave crossfades between pulse and wavefolded sine
• FM input with AC-couple linear or DC-coupled exponential response
• Hard Sync input
• ZMOD input with attenuation and up to 1.5x modulation index
• Three ZMOD modes: thru-zero phase modulation, ZYNC, and FLIP