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Last edited by Vortifex on Sun Apr 14, 2019 8:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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I love serum. I am new in sound design and I have more than 5 synths. But only with serum I easily get the sounds I want. It is just a matter of taste. :phones:

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Sounds and presets for UVI Falcon "Iterata X".
Bazille soundset - Bioethical Genome Modification.

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Vortifex wrote:
wagtunes wrote:
foosnark wrote:This again.

It's SO FRICKING EASY to make Serum sound dirty. I have no idea what the "it's too clean" brigade is on about.
I agree.

This sounds clean???

https://soundcloud.com/steven-wagenheim ... sive-serum
Good lord.
:lol: I was referring to tonal subtleties.

And @ spunkmuffin: I was talking about looks as metaphor. Sorry that it seemed to have gone above your head. :hihi:
If it were easy, anybody could do it!

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Spitfire31 wrote: :lol: I was referring to tonal subtleties.
Tonal subtleties. Ooookay. So all of the things you can do in Serum to dirty it up? Do that, but subtly. :hihi:

Seriously though, this conversation made me decide that what the track I started this morning needed next was some Serum. So, thanks for that. :D In order of appearance, the voices in this track are:

1. WMD Synchrodyne, imitating the Make Noise 0-Coast a bit in philosophy. (Sawtooth through lowpass filter that smoothes it down quite a lot, but then wavefolding under control of its VCA, to shape it into something interesting. There's aliasing because it's a switched-capacitor filter and they do that.)
2. Make Noise 0-Coast + WMD Mini-Slew, on the basses and plucks.
3. Serum, on pads. I decided to imitate the Harvestman Kermit, which is a dual wavetable LFO/VCO and one of my favorite Eurorack modules. It does sines semi-cleanly within about three octaves of range, but beyond that it's dusty and fluffy and full of aliasing. I overdid it a little here but not by much; if I were going to take the time to go back and refine it or if I was serious about trying to fake the Kermit I'd dial it back a bit. Also this part is polyphonic anyway and that gives it away. :)
4. Serum, imitating the plucky sounds I often get from the 0-Coast. Not sounding too clean here either.

http://starthief.net/mp3/2017/Starthief ... ulates.mp3

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^^^^^^^^^^^^^Gorgeous track, Foosnark!

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SLiC wrote:It has 'a sound', it isn't trying to emulate analogue or anything - it can sound warm (check these out viewtopic.php?t=424785 ) but its more likle NI Razor and a lot of the Waldorf wavetable synths, great bite, movement, evolving pads etc
Good point! :)

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recursive one wrote:....it is also very good for psytrance basslines.
I can't get a decent psy bass out of Serum to save my life! Care to share some tips? I have no problems getting a decent sound from Hive, Diva, Dune or Operator, what am I doing wrong? :neutral:
Always Read the Manual!

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PieBerger wrote:
recursive one wrote:....it is also very good for psytrance basslines.
I can't get a decent psy bass out of Serum to save my life! Care to share some tips? I have no problems getting a decent sound from Hive, Diva, Dune or Operator, what am I doing wrong? :neutral:
What exactly you are struggling with? The basic tone is made like in any other synth - pick a saw wave, set the phase to full retrigger (the Rand knob full left), adjust the phase start position to get the most clicky attack sound (the Phase knob) and switch on a 18 db or 24 db LP filter controlled by an envelope.

TBH, i'm still not very confident about my psy basses but with Serum I'm getting better results than with other synths, here is a small psybass example I've made with Serum and some additional processing.

http://www.filedropper.com/progbassa1_1
You may think you can fly ... but you better not try

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Any ETA for resizeable GUI?

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Spitfire31 wrote:
Vortifex wrote:
wagtunes wrote:
foosnark wrote:This again.

It's SO FRICKING EASY to make Serum sound dirty. I have no idea what the "it's too clean" brigade is on about.
I agree.

This sounds clean???

https://soundcloud.com/steven-wagenheim ... sive-serum
Good lord.
:lol: I was referring to tonal subtleties.

And @ spunkmuffin: I was talking about looks as metaphor. Sorry that it seemed to have gone above your head. :hihi:
I've been casually messin around with serum for a couple weeks and got some cool broken shit out of it. It can get pretty colorful. Dunno if tonal subtleties are what I'd call any of it. What do you mean by that?

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Serum can sound properly nasty. The French filter can be exquisitely unpleasant, while the noise osc is exposed as a modulation source (not to mention the polyphonic chaos generators) which immediately gives you access to an almost infinite variety of textural filth depending on the noise sample you're using and where you patch it. This is before you even touch the effects rack, and everything in there can be modulated just the same.

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recursive one wrote:
PieBerger wrote:
recursive one wrote:....it is also very good for psytrance basslines.
I can't get a decent psy bass out of Serum to save my life! Care to share some tips? I have no problems getting a decent sound from Hive, Diva, Dune or Operator, what am I doing wrong? :neutral:
What exactly you are struggling with? The basic tone is made like in any other synth - pick a saw wave, set the phase to full retrigger (the Rand knob full left), adjust the phase start position to get the most clicky attack sound (the Phase knob) and switch on a 18 db or 24 db LP filter controlled by an envelope.

TBH, i'm still not very confident about my psy basses but with Serum I'm getting better results than with other synths, here is a small psybass example I've made with Serum and some additional processing.

http://www.filedropper.com/progbassa1_1
So I've been having a good old play around with it and it turns out that it's a very capable synth for psy bass, just like everybody says :) My approach to patch design was all wrong; I was trying to programming it on other synth's terms, not it's own. Once I moved away from the usual recipe that I typically use for other synths and focussed on creating a good sounding patch by tweaking/experimenting and justing by ear (like you're supposed to when designing a patch :dog:), I started to get good results!
Always Read the Manual!

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As to clean sounds in Serum - saturate the hell out of it! Wavetables will often contain distinct harmonics which often just turn out sharp and unbalanced, but analog saturation can take care of them.

The same is true for other non-subtractive synths - additive, FM and maybe other odd ones.
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Tricky-Loops wrote: (...)someone like Armin van Buuren who claims to make a track in half an hour and all his songs sound somewhat boring(...)

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