KVR Audio

Greg Houston · Post by **Greg Houston** » Mon Jan 12, 2015 10:12 pm

dwozzle wrote:
Greg Houston wrote:The wavetable for this patch was made with this formula:
.5*(x*pi-(sin(z)*(sin((y*(x*x*z)^x)*pi*6))))*(-w^6+1)*((1-w)^6-1)

The first sub-table was then removed, leaving 255 frames.

https://soundcloud.com/fabled-audio/serum-texture-pad
Very cool Greg, ballsy without being overly nasty, and nicely varying.

Is that patch in your Fabled Serum soundset?

Thanks. Will be in the next soundset.

blackflag · Post by **blackflag** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 2:29 am

Something that's been bugging me: What exactly do the "drive" and "fat" filter knobs actually do? I can't really hear a difference between the two. Are they adding some type of saturation, or just a small volume increase? The manual doesn't really say.

billcarroll · Post by **billcarroll** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 2:34 am

blackflag wrote:Something that's been bugging me: What exactly do the "drive" and "fat" filter knobs actually do? Are they adding some type of saturation, or just a small volume increase? The manual doesn't really say.

Those are described in the Icon Collective Serum videos, in the Serum filter video starting at 3:23

The entire series is awesome.

Sampleconstruct · Post by **Sampleconstruct** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 3:35 am

The Hang Plucker will help through the night, both involved wavetables in this patch are derived from Hang percussion:

http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/h ... a-rasa-for

Greg Houston · Post by **Greg Houston** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 3:37 am

Drive is a fine tune tone control for me. I might use just a little bit of it, but it's rare that I wouldn't use it all. It helps make the sound richer, less sterile, less perfect. Want the sound a little smoother? Turn it down a touch. Want a little more harmonic richness? Turn it up a touch. Want harmonic overload? Turn it all the way up and toggle "mix" to "level" so you can back off on the level.

Drive pushes the resonance in some filters more than others. The most obvious one being the French LP. So you may need to adjust the resonance after adjusting the drive in some cases. With the German LP and Add Bass, drive also effects the shape of the filter curve with this being particularly radical with the Add Bass filter.

Touch The Universe · Post by **Touch The Universe** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 5:08 am

cb8rwh wrote:I have created a bank of presets for Serum. There are around 128 of the blighters. I have included a text file with my Paypal email address if you think they are any good and would like to buy me a beer
If you cannot download (if somehow the dl limit has been reached, just let me know and I will upload again.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B57O1l ... zB6QmZ2Y3M

Nice presets in here! I have a few dollars on a prepaid visa. Will send soon if I remember to

Sampleconstruct · Post by **Sampleconstruct** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 6:11 pm

I just want to share some tips concerning the wavetable-ization of acoustic instrumental and vocal sources, as the results are often poor when importing samples into Serum, depending on the overtone structure and the dynamics of a given sample.

Fist one should prepare the samples to import in a way, that all non-harmonic/noisy content is removed, e.g. in a sustained flute sample, remove all the breathing, this works best with a spectral filter like e.g. RX3 - e.g. in a trombone sample, remove the air hiss and the very high overtones, e.g. in a electric guitar power chord, remove as much of the amp noise as possible and so on. Then level the harmonics, subdue strong harmonics and enhance the root note.

But even with those steps, some instruments and vocal samples just won't resynthesize in any useful way unless you take the time to manually delete the garbled waveforms from the resulting wavetable, only keeping the substantial ones and then using the various morphing functions in Serum to generate a fluent wavetable.

I just spent about 40 minutes doing that with some male overtone singing, a simple transition from u -> i and no matter which import method I tried, the results were very garbled and crackly. I then listened to all 256 waveforms, kept about 15 of them and then morphed spectrally between them - the result was stunningly beautiful!

So, don't give up too early when an import doesn't yield instantly usable results, investing time and patience can bring out some very good and organic wavetables.

Everything metallic without a distinct pitch and a lot of odd harmonics is very hard to resynthesize in Serum though, but these sources can yield good results when using the FFT import or for generating single cycles which can then be combined in a wavetable or used as standalone.

wesleyt · Post by **wesleyt** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 8:15 pm

Simon,

That advice is very helpful and much appreciated. I have some great samples of my cat's highly harmonic-rich meows and couldn't figure how to convert it into a useable wavetable. You've given me some ideas for other approaches; I appreciate it.

Cheers!

Wes

Sampleconstruct · Post by **Sampleconstruct** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 8:38 pm

wesleyt wrote:Simon,

That advice is very helpful and much appreciated. I have some great samples of my cat's highly harmonic-rich meows and couldn't figure how to convert it into a useable wavetable. You've given me some ideas for other approaches; I appreciate it.

Cheers!

Wes

My pleasure, all our cats have all left us unfortunately, I did record a lot of their sounds over the years though, it's always lovely to use these samples in some weird context

Touch The Universe · Post by **Touch The Universe** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 8:42 pm

make a cat legato lead for goa trance sample construct

Sampleconstruct · Post by **Sampleconstruct** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 8:44 pm

mysticvibes wrote:make a cat legato lead for goa trance sample construct

I have no idea what goa trance might be, so I don't qualify for that task

Touch The Universe · Post by **Touch The Universe** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 8:47 pm

Sampleconstruct wrote:
mysticvibes wrote:make a cat legato lead for goa trance sample construct
I have no idea what goa trance might be, so I don't qualify for that task

No worries, goa is a pretty clever genre so as long as you sample a cat meow into a patch I'm sure a lot can be done. I'm guessing to use the wave into the noise osc or to make wavetable cat meow?

Sampleconstruct · Post by **Sampleconstruct** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 8:51 pm

mysticvibes wrote:
Sampleconstruct wrote:
mysticvibes wrote:make a cat legato lead for goa trance sample construct
I have no idea what goa trance might be, so I don't qualify for that task
No worries, goa is a pretty clever genre so as long as you sample a cat meow into a patch I'm sure a lot can be done. I'm guessing to use the wave into the noise osc or to make wavetable cat meow?

Well in the Noise Osc the cat will be chipmunked to death within an octave if you want to play it chromatically, so you would either extremely stretch the sample before using it in the Noise Osc to compensate somewhat for the chipmunking, or you would make a nice cattish wavetable, or use a simple single cycle with rich harmonics and approach the cat synthesis by clever use of filter and and pitch-modulation-combinations

Touch The Universe · Post by **Touch The Universe** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 9:01 pm

Goa genre would use the patch playing lots of short notes 32nds and use longer notes every once in a while 200-300ms should be enough for the full meeooww and that's when the legato kicks in to pitch smoother to another key

Will try at it using the noise ose, not sure how to go about creating a realistic wavetable...

Greg Houston · Post by **Greg Houston** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 9:18 pm

This is leading to the inevitable picture of 256 cat memes sliced together with X-Fade Edges.

Official Serum thread!