The State of Serum in 2017

[kokotte]

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

you could draw your wave in a lfo, alt/click drag to osc wave ( change the wave pos, draw another wave... and crossfade for nice sounding wt)

[realmarco]

for some reason i can't get the "set loopback point here" reliably i have to load a preset Lfo that i saved when it did work

so i'd fix that

also i'd add snap to grid when creating Lfo Click points

Edit i have to be in envelope mode...so nvrmind
Edit again...hold alt or shift-alt for snapped segments.

[Ingonator]

After having checked the demo of Serum several times over the last yeras and recently also checking the current demo again (which now is also updated with the latest changes) i finally decided to buy Serum today using a single purchase. The price via Paypal was around 166 € here in Germany (original price in US is 189$) so no extra VAT is involved.

As a big fan of wavetable synths for a long time (whio already owns a bunch of those...) i had a feeling that sooner or later i would have to get Serum anyway even if ffor a long time i had a feeling i do not really need it.

On the other hand i did not get it as a replacement for my other wavetable synths (which are still great too) but because the sound and feature set is nice and/or interesting once on it's own once you stop comparing it to all other wavetable synths but jsut use Serum as it is.

If we talk about synths lik e.g Serum, Icarus, Largo, PPG Wave 3.V, Nave, Falcon, Avenger, DUNE 2.5, PPG Wavemapper 2, PPG Wavegenerator, Synthmaster One and Codex (i own a license for all of those at the moment) they are not directly comparable in terms of sound and features IMO so i will focus on using those based on which one fits best for certain sounds.
Of course i know that from those just mentioned Wavegenerator and Wavemapper 2 are close sound wise and also in many of the features. The wavetable editor in Wavegenarator could be used to create new wavetables for Wavemapper 2 (the wavetable format is compatible).

While the wavetable edior in Icarus (currently my most used wavetable synth besides Blofeld) is alraedy quite nice and powerful Serum adds a few additional/different options and as the Serum wavetables are compatible with Icarus and also some other synths the editor in Serum is also nice to create wavetables for other synths. On teh oter hand teh editor in Icarus has smome unique fetures too so i coudl also create wavetables there that i the load in Serum.
Wavetables crteated in both of them could be also used in e.g. Falcon, Avenger and Synthmaster One.

One inteesting feature in the Serum waveform editor is using mathematical equations for creating waveforms. So far i had ony used such feature in the now discontinued DNR Wave Designer (which still works here).



PS:
I am currently also sorting out some of my hardware synths (mostly older ones or second hand ones) and at the moment will use those mentioned in my signature here.

[Chris-S]

Had some fun today watching this review of Coda, a symphonic preset pack for Serum.

https://youtu.be/3pccnSdxFyQ

[SOUND7]

Serums great for all sorts - whilst we target our presets for Trance, along the journey of creation we easily coax ambient, synthwave, chillout stuff out of it, with ease.

It's got very snappy envelopes and the oscs have a lot of 'bite' which work for EDM and ilk, but the modulation possibilities as well as the extensive envelope options and nodes make ambient stuff very easy.

definitely one of our favourite and we've got Diva, Strobe2, Spire, and a couple others.

[Ingonator]

After i finally also got Serum (as mentioend in my previous post here) here is a list of my current wavetable synths "collection":

A) HARDWARE:
- Waldorf Blofeld desktop (+ SL expansion)
- Novation UltraNova

B) SOFTWARE:
- Tone2 Icraus
- Xfer Serum
- Waldorf Largo
- Waldorf Nave plugin
- Waldorf PPG Wave 3.V
- Waldorf PPG Wave 2.2V (In Waldorf Edition 2)
- PPG Wavemapper 2
- PPG WaveGenerator
- Synapse Audio DUNE 2.5
- VPS Avenger
- UVI Falcon
- Waves Codex
- KV331 Audio Synthmaster One
- KV331 Audio Synthmaster 2.8
- NI Massive


So far i would not say that Serum could fully replace any of the others both sound wise and feature wise but as alraedy mentioned i got Serum to use it "as is", not to use it as a direct replacement for other wavetable synths.
The wavetable editor (like taht in Icarus) is also useful to create waetables for some of the otehr synths mentioned including e.g. Icarus, Avenger, Falcon and Synthmaster One.

If i would have to select a single synth i still would say that Serum would not be my first choice of those just mentioned above. At the moment it might not even be in teh TOP 5 which could change later after having used it for a longer time. Especially Icarus and the Waldorf synths got the highest priority for me.


At the moment i started importing wavetables taht were created in Icarus. I also started using the "Sort" feature in the wavetable editor of Serum where it is possible to sort waveforms in a table based on the harmonic content.

[foosnark]

So far i would not say that Serum could fully replace any of the others both sound wise and feature wise but as alraedy mentioned i got Serum to use it "as is", not to use it as a direct replacement for other wavetable synths.

Exactly -- wavetable synths are not all the same any more than subtractive synths are all the same.

I've been a Serum fan since I bought it. But I still sometimes pull out PPG 2.V for its sound (even though I hate the UI). And I love my Kermit module, which has a very limited wavetable (with content designed for LFO use rather than audio) but an amazingly textured sound.

I'm beta testing a SynthTech E352 Eurorack module, which is an incredible wavetable oscillator. Dual outputs that can come from different tables or be separately addressed, a "cloud" mode that blows Serum's unison away, wavefolding, phase modulation, 2-OP FM. Good built-in wavetables and also loads user tables from an SD card, with editing software. In some ways the software is primitive compared to Serum, but in others it goes far beyond, with some fantastic tricks up its sleeve. I hope to be able to get them sharing data so I can have the best of both worlds. I'm definitely still going to keep using Serum, PPG 2.V, Kermit etc. even with an E352 as the centerpiece of my modular.

https://soundcloud.com/starthief/e352-mayhem
https://soundcloud.com/starthief/syntht ... ph-selfmod
https://soundcloud.com/starthief/e352-foldtri

[Ingonator]

After i had alraedy started to explore the formula editor in Serum to create both single waveforms and full wavetables now i also started using the image resynthesis feature where you could import pictures saved in PNG format by drag&drop to an oscillator in Serum.

Here is a single picture that i created by using 15 single screenshots of the 3D wavetable displays (in Serum) of wavetables i created by image resynthesis:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/532 ... on%201.png


A nice thing about this is that the saved WAV wavetables are also usable in multiple other wavetable synths.


When i load such wavetable created in Serum in other synths like e.g. Icarus, Falcon or Avenger i could combine it with features that are not included in Serum in a similar way and/or those synths might just have a different basic sound.

[p4tz3r]

Wow this is crazy and cool! Do any of them sound particularly good or interesting?

[Ingonator]

Wow this is crazy and cool! Do any of them sound particularly good or interesting?

Some of them could indeed create interesting results but i just started doing pathces based on those.

For certtain patches it might be also good to cut out certain parts of the tables and add additional cross fading then.

Wavetables with lots of fine details and/oe "spikes" like that "Moon surface" wavetable sound a bit more like noise, especially when scanning trough the full table. Adding a certain amount of filtering (Maybe also second filter from the FX section) makes those usable too.

Some of the wavetables you could get from pictures might lead to a few nice single waveforms while playing trough teh whole table nmight not be very nice. If you could extract more than one usable waveform from such table you could create a new wavetable from those by adding crossfading.

The cool thing about image resyntheisis that you might get single waveforms or wavetables with sounds wheer you might never thought about creating something similar from scratch.

[foosnark]

Hmm, I don't think I've ever used image resynthesis in Serum.

I've been creating (and exporting existing) wavetables, to go through WaveEdit (SynthTech's free wavetable editor currently in alpha, meant mostly for its E352 and E370 modules). Serum really helps prop up some less developed features in WaveEdit, but WaveEdit has some effects and tools Serum lacks. (Some of those could probably be implemented as formulas in Serum, some probably not.)

(WaveEdit is also lower resolution than Serum, with 256 16-bit samples per frame, 64 frames per table. But that plays very well on the hardware itself.)

I've been wishing Serum had a way to automatically convert to a specific number of frames, or at least to convert morph tables directly to actual table data. Some tables have, say, 117 frames, or 14, or 5, and the best way to convert those is to record a sweep, and re-import the recording as 256 frames.

[foosnark]

Wow this is crazy and cool! Do any of them sound particularly good or interesting?

I've been getting sort of a firsthand crash course in wavetable design lately. Some things that seem like great ideas turn out not to be that useful in actual patches, but some things work out surprisingly well.

I find that some tables that aren't great where it comes to big sweeps, might have a dozen or two sweet spots where individual waves, or tiny amounts of envelope modulation, sound amazing. And some tables that are crap with envelopes might be great when modulated at audio rates.

So I could see the image resynthesis thing providing some useful material.

Wavetables are definitely not samplers, and material that sounds good as a sample might turn to garbage as a wavetable. Sometimes they turn into magic evn if it's nothing like the original... and it can feel almost as trial-and-error as image resynthesis

[Ingonator]

The idea to use something like my own name, the PPG logo or the radioactive symbol and craeate a wavetable from that was kind mind blowing for me independent of the resulting sounds.
Besides that those wavetables just mentioned actually seem to be quite usable sound wise also as they mostly do not contain waveforms that are close to "noise".

[Ingonator]

While further exploring the image resynthesis in Serum (using PNG files by drag&drop to an Osc) today i searched for pictures and/or illustrations of black holes.

The first i used is an illustration of a black hole surrounded by a disc of glowing gas:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/g0PRf1rXSQU/hqdefault.jpg


The second is a picture of the "Gargantua" black hole found in the movie "Interstellar":
https://d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net/w ... 4_1200.jpg


As it is mostly symmetric i only used half of the Gargantua picture for picture resynthesis.


After editing both pictures in the free GIMP image editing software and importing the pictures as a wavetable in Serum i created two patches based of those wavetables.
In both patches in Osc A i used a wavetable with wavetable scanning and in Osc B a single waveform from the same wavetable.

Here is an audio demo based on a patch created uisng the first black hole picture:
IW - Serum - Black Hole Pad 1 IW - Demo 1

This is based on using a single instance of Serum played in realtime with both hands using a NI Komplete Kontrol S61 controller keyboard. No external effects were used. Changes in the timbre are due to wavetable scanning in Osc A.


Here is an audio demo based on a patch using the "Gargantua" black hole picture:
IW - Serum - Gargantua Pad 1 IW - Demo 1

This is based on using a single instance of Serum played in realtime with both hands using a NI Komplete Kontrol S61 controller keyboard. No external effects were used. Changes in the timbre are due to wavetable scanning in Osc A.



Here are screenshots of the wavetables (3D display) and single waveforms used in those 2 patches:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/532 ... 1%20IW.png


https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/532 ... 0IW%20.png


in the Gargantua wavetable the last waveform in the table is more or less placed at the center of the black hole (the wavetable only uses half of it). Towards the "event horizon" the waveforms get more and more harmonics and the overall loudness also seems to increase. The singe waveform in Osc B is one very close to that "event horizon" (if we talk about how a black holes seem to be built...).

[p4tz3r]

Big thumbs up for this! I love how you can use an image for ideas and inspiration even if you could create a similar sound by other means. Knowing the creative process for the sounds adds an interesting dimension to the demos, IMO.