The State of Serum in 2017

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I mean if you have to generate 256 waveforms for the purpose of not interpolating, yes that would cause terrible cache issues.
Might be optimized for the typical use case only which probably only has a few notes being played without being modulated much, or they have another reason for doing that. Emulating the behavior of something else using wavetable-only methods might be a reason, who knows, doesn't make much sense just to avoid interpolation.
~stratum~

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Concerning wavetable smoothing Tone2 Icarus has a "FADE" prameters in the Oscs where a value of 0 is a steppy waveform change without interpolation and a value of 100 a very smooth interpolation between two waveforms.
At a maximum FADE value even a wavetable with just two waveforms could create a quite smooth morphing between them.

The parameter wil not only make a LFO or envelope modulation smoother but also the WAVE selection knob gets an increased resoution with more additional steps between two waveforms (amount of increased resolution depending on the FADE value).
Ingo Weidner
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cron wrote: This is what I was talking about when I mentioned building smoothing 'into' the wavetable. In the image posted, there are 3 waves/frames. Using the morph feature (as shown in the image) generates intermediate waves so the transition is spread across 256 frames. However, these 256 frames still hard step from one to the next. The wavetable position parameter only has 256 meaningful positions (i.e. one for each frame), regardless of whether you're tweaking the knob or modulating with LFO/envelope etc. It's impossible to land 'between' frames and get a bit of both, or smoothly transition from one frame to the next.

I mentioned a little earlier about why I think this is a contributor to Serum's reputation as an EDM synth. It's all about tempo-synced modulation between two timbres (think dubstep bass), and it excels in that area. It only really falls apart when you start using more complex wavetables with slower modulation (think ambient/new-agey stuff).
Thanks for explaining that. The penny has finally dropped about what happens when I sweep wavetables slowly in Serum.

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cron wrote:
This is what I was talking about when I mentioned building smoothing 'into' the wavetable. In the image posted, there are 3 waves/frames. Using the morph feature (as shown in the image) generates intermediate waves so the transition is spread across 256 frames. However, these 256 frames still hard step from one to the next. The wavetable position parameter only has 256 meaningful positions (i.e. one for each frame), regardless of whether you're tweaking the knob or modulating with LFO/envelope etc. It's impossible to land 'between' frames and get a bit of both, or smoothly transition from one frame to the next.
Ow yes. That's true indeed. There is no interpolation between the (max) 256 steps. Indeed.
Was just pointing out that interpolation IS possible. Over 256 steps, that is :)
And with some proper editing (drawing, etc), Serum is very usable for slow, evolving stuff.

But indeed, there is some stepping going on.

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exmatproton wrote: Ow yes. That's true indeed. There is no interpolation between the (max) 256 steps. Indeed.
Was just pointing out that interpolation IS possible. Over 256 steps, that is :)
And with some proper editing (drawing, etc), Serum is very usable for slow, evolving stuff.
Absolutely! Although the stepping means that super complex wavetables are mostly off the cards (as you need to leave plenty of empty frames for the 'morph' to get good results) it's something you don't notice in 'typical' use unless you're going really slow. Quicker modulations (even the 'faster end of slow' :P ) still sound great to my ears - lovely and clean - no popping or 'zipper' noise unless your wavetable is crafted with a spectacular lack of care.

Just want to reiterate here that Serum is a genuinely brilliant synth that's worth every penny. One of the best around in terms of ergonomics and ease of programming. It's just worth bearing in mind that there are a few use cases for which it's not well-suited. It's an outstanding wavetable synth, it's just that it's probably not going to be your only wavetable synth.

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exmatproton wrote:
Ow yes. That's true indeed. There is no interpolation between the (max) 256 steps. Indeed.
Was just pointing out that interpolation IS possible. Over 256 steps, that is :)
And with some proper editing (drawing, etc), Serum is very usable for slow, evolving stuff.

But indeed, there is some stepping going on.
I can get some nice smooth results by making a handful of individual waveforms and as you say interpolating them over the 256 steps. It seems to be all or nothing though. I've also not had good results importing audio.

Also, it's annoying not to be able to just freely draw a waveform but to be constrained to the grid (unless there is a way to disable that?)

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pdxindy wrote:
exmatproton wrote:
Ow yes. That's true indeed. There is no interpolation between the (max) 256 steps. Indeed.
Was just pointing out that interpolation IS possible. Over 256 steps, that is :)
And with some proper editing (drawing, etc), Serum is very usable for slow, evolving stuff.

But indeed, there is some stepping going on.
I can get some nice smooth results by making a handful of individual waveforms and as you say interpolating them over the 256 steps. It seems to be all or nothing though. I've also not had good results importing audio.

Also, it's annoying not to be able to just freely draw a waveform but to be constrained to the grid (unless there is a way to disable that?)
Yeah; free drawing would be very nice. A.f.a.i.k. there is no way to disable the grid

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pdxindy wrote:I can get some nice smooth results by making a handful of individual waveforms and as you say interpolating them over the 256 steps. It seems to be all or nothing though. I've also not had good results importing audio.

Also, it's annoying not to be able to just freely draw a waveform but to be constrained to the grid (unless there is a way to disable that?)

Setting the grid size to 0 on both axes should sort you out there.

Incidentally, I've tried the FFT/zero all phases thing I suggested to you earlier and it's really not as clean as I remember. Even very simple material (e.g., an isolated, well recorded, fairly high-pitched single tone from an acoustic instrument - the kinda stuff FFT eats for breakfast) suffers from nasty amplitude modulation artifacts when sweeping the table. I found it necessary to thin down to 20 or so 'good' frames then interpolate again. I also wonder if Serum somehow doesn't resample the individual waves to fit the frames properly, as 'phase drift' often creeps in when using the time domain import methods (resulting in pitch modulation artifacts when sweeping the table), again even on very simple material.

I'd be interested to hear how the import in newer wavetable synths like Icarus compares if anyone has experience.

edit: Presumably none of the above is actually as simple as I think. Developer input welcome!

There are a lot of commands you can use in the formula parser (and/or text files accompanying the wavs?) which can give much better results if you already know something about the material being imported (e.g. a stable fundamental frequency). There are some cool tools for wavetable creation like this kicking around too. http://glowshrimpsoftware.com/sfmwts.html

It's great to have these wavetable editing capabilities 'in-synth' as I believe it was the only wavetable synth going that could do it on release, but some polishing in a future update would be nice.

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cron wrote:
pdxindy wrote:I can get some nice smooth results by making a handful of individual waveforms and as you say interpolating them over the 256 steps. It seems to be all or nothing though. I've also not had good results importing audio.

Also, it's annoying not to be able to just freely draw a waveform but to be constrained to the grid (unless there is a way to disable that?)

Setting the grid size to 0 on both axes should sort you out there.

Incidentally, I've tried the FFT/zero all phases thing I suggested to you earlier and it's really not as clean as I remember. Even very simple material (e.g., an isolated, well recorded, fairly high-pitched single tone from an acoustic instrument - the kinda stuff FFT eats for breakfast) suffers from nasty amplitude modulation artifacts when sweeping the table. I found it necessary to thin down to 20 or so 'good' frames then interpolate again. I also wonder if Serum somehow doesn't resample the individual waves to fit the frames properly, as 'phase drift' often creeps in when using the time domain import methods (resulting in pitch modulation artifacts when sweeping the table), again even on very simple material.

I'd be interested to hear how the import in newer wavetable synths like Icarus compares if anyone has experience.
Oh, cool... grid to 0 works fine... not obvious to find, but works as expected.

I feel like I have more to learn in both Serum and Icarus as far as importing audio, but so far, I've for sure had more readily useable results with Icarus.

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Serum is amazing. I managed to get some really unique sounds out of it.

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Also image resynthesis can produce very interesting wavetables, with a bit of manual editing after the image import I got some fascinating results.

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Such as Harmor.
Great synth!
MuLab-Reaper of course :D

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Yeah but Harmor doesn't generate wavetables from them

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aMUSEd wrote:Yeah but Harmor doesn't generate wavetables from them
Yes, but it may not be a requirement as long you are able to generate the sounds you need with the synth.
MuLab-Reaper of course :D

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Ooh! Looks like a new filter is on the way. Wondering if anything else is lurking out of shot...

https://www.instagram.com/p/BWyYtN-BSU_/

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