waterfall plot using ribbon

I have a series of spectral data which I want to plot in a waterfall style plot. waterfall itsself is no that usefull, because the thin lines have too many differences in each spectrum, that is is not very usefull

I therefore want to try the ribbon function, which looks promising in the docs .

But the result is completely different and useless!

figure(2); clf;
ribbon(spectralSeries); 
shading flat % otherwise complete dark
axis tight

EDIT:

I created now a manual waterfall plot, which is close to what I wanted:

hold on;
stepsize = 0.35;
for k = length(series):-1:1
    color = cmap(k,:);
    data = spectralSeries(k,:) + (k-1)*stepsize;

    hplot(k) = filledcurve(xaxis, data, 0);       
    set(hplot(k), 'FaceColor' , color*1.2)
    set(hplot(k), 'EdgeColor' , color*0.5)    
end
hold off;
axis tight

Nevertheless I am still interested in a solution of the original problem.

EDIT 2:

Here an example using the same data with waterfall, ribbon and my custom code. Only my code is usefull to visualise the data. I would still like to know how to make ribbon and waterfall look like a decent plot...

This code is now used to create some data

xaxis = linspace(-pi/2,3/2*pi, 1000);
variation = [ 0.5 1 5 10];
spectralSeries = abs(sin(xaxis)'*ones(1,4) + sin(xaxis'*variation)*0.25);

Here a result using ribbon

ribbon(spectralSeries); 
shading flat % otherwise complete dark
axis tight

And here with waterfall

hplot = waterfall(spectralSeries);
set( hplot, 'LineWidth', 4 );
hidden off;

and for comparison a plot using my own written code, which is similar to a waterfall, but without the depth axis. However it is the only one which looks decent and displays the data curves such that the variations between each curve can be seen.

You can still use waterfall, but set some patch and axes properties to get nicer output. The important thing to notice is that spectralSeries should be transposed.

figure
xaxis = linspace(-pi/2,3/2*pi, 200);
variation = [ 0.5 1 5 10 7 3.5 8];
spectralSeries = abs(sin(xaxis)'*ones(1,7) + sin(xaxis'*variation)*0.25);
h = waterfall(spectralSeries');
cameratoolbar;

%%
set(h, 'FaceColor', 'flat');
set(h, 'FaceAlpha', 0.7);
set(h, 'EdgeColor', 'k');
set(h, 'FaceVertexCData', rand(7,3))
set(gca, 'Color', [1 1 1]*0.85)
set(gca, 'GridLineStyle', 'none');

%%
myaa

The (optional) last statement, myaa, produces an anti-aliased figure; get the script here.