What is Fragments?

Good question. Even I didn’t know the answer to it until relatively recently. In many ways, Fragments is the temporary answer to how ws I going to release something new when my shoulder injury meant I couldn’t spend much time in the studio! For those of you who don’t know, I injured my shoulder back in January, which meant I wasn’t able to work for the best part of four months. Only in the last couple of weeks have I been able to return to the studio, sporadically.

One of the things I’ve been looking at with The Unfinished, during my period of recovery, is how I can better utilise sounds I’ve already made; both released and unreleased. For example, customers who have only become aware of my work in the last couple of years might be unaware of the many excellent earlier soundsets I’ve released, since I kicked off the whole The Unfinished thing back in 2012.

The Fragments idea, however, came partly from something I’d already done and extrapolating that idea further. Because Hyperion, Refrakt II and Kobalt all had their beginnings in unused sounds from some of my larger bespoke synth programming sessions for film, TV and games, this meant there were a large number of variations of many of the patches, as I eked out new flavours to them or took them in different directions… dependent on the job. All three were released with Expanded versions that feature a number of those variations of patches from the original soundset that I thought were cool and either aided or enhanced the original soundset.

With Apotheosis it was slightly different, as it was released as two volumes of sounds initially, with a drumloops-only expansion coming later on.

What all four had in common is that there were still many many more variations of those patches left unreleased and, also, some original patches for which no version had been released at all!

And that is, fundamentally, what Fragments is.

In each case, I went back to the unused and unreleased synth sounds of those sessions and went through them all again, selecting the ones I felt were more than good enough to still be released. These are sounds that are no less good than the originals in terms of quality and useability but, had not been released initially becase I didn’t want the soundsets to be too big and unwieldy.

The Fragments soundsets offer you the chance to return to the sounds of those ZebraHZ libraries you already love, and discover and use more of them. Got a favourite patch but want more of it? Fragments, hopefully, will have further variations for you to play with, tweak and fit into your mix.

It’s a fun opportunity to discover new but familiar presets and also can provide you with a bit of insight into how to make interesting variant and takes of sounds for hybrid scoring, trailer scoring and electronic music.

As well as all four individual Fragments soundsets being available, you can grab them all at once at a discounted price in the ZebraHZ Fragments Bundle.