Official Serum thread!

[KingTuck]

Any chance one of those is a larger UI? I heard you were making on at one point.

I actually have most of the work done for this, it was a lot of re-writing (about 60+ hours). I need HD bitmaps from my GUI designer, which is also a fair amount of work, however if he makes me wait too long I will probably put it in an update soon with upsample bitmaps (so many things will not look "better" than say using the OS zoom, but will be "larger" at the least.

Happy Birthday

Thanks!

Happy Birthday, Steve!

Great. Looking forward to it, especially if Lance can get out an updated GUI for it.

[MorpherX]

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[MorpherX]

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[MorpherX]

just a quick note, I posted an update for Serum, now with

- 8 LFO's
- drag-and-drop wav files to the Noise Oscillator
- noise oscillator sample embedding for easy preset sharing/collaboration
- several browser enhancements, and more!

(there's several huge new features which didn't make it in to this release, but will be coming in the future!)

Many thanks for this great update !!!

Serum is getting more and more hard to beat !
And also: Happy Birthday

[MorpherX]

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[tatsy]

I laughed at Sound on Sound's review of Serum, in their 'Pros' section at the end, the first 'pro' is: "Clean, clear and detailed sound." What does that mean? Surely you could say the same about pretty much any VST that exists.

Well, you certainly can't just make the statement that quality is level across softsynths, in fact it's a pretty wide range of difference - in virtually all digital synths, there's both aliasing (artifacts) and HF attenuation (to combat aliasing).

For instance, just play e.g. a 1kHz Sawtooth and look on a spectrum analyzer if you can't hear it, you'll definitely see the harmonics reflecting off the top of the spectrum and typically travelling well below the fundamental (1 Khz) muddying your entire spectrum.

On Serum, you should notice aliasing about 40 dB down from other good synths, it's sort of the equivalent of saying many synths have ~90 dB signal to noise ratio and Serum has ~130 dB. Though I'm not saying these numbers are fact, as it depends a lot on your source note/sample rate and a myriad of other factors.

Then playing a low (sawtooth say at 40 Hz) on Serum will be a lot more bright (flat/real/non-attenuated) than some synths which sometimes sound awful muddy. You might not care about brightness on a 40 Hz saw, but a lot of people actually do. Its one of those things that to me makes an analog oscillator sound better than a (naive) digital one.

So quality and clarity I wouldn't say it's "better than all" (as I haven't compared) but Serum was built to be flat 20-20kHz and clean.

As for factory presets, there is a bias towards aggressive music (I started Serum on tour with Skrillex and have a lot of friends in that world, hence a bias of factory content towards it) but I made Serum to be a general-purpose wavetable synth.

Here's a good example of non-aggressive sound (single preset!) and there's many more earlier in this forum thread:
https://soundcloud.com/asl-soundlab/one ... e-of-serum

Also I released the first "official soundpack" this week which does have a dance music focus but is more classic sounds rather than "bass music" focused, you could listen to the demo there! https://www.xferrecords.com/preset_packs/serum

I'm pretty sure "metallic" comments refer to the Serum 1.0 reverb which is a plate/metallic reverb, probably not the best choice for a sole reverb type. I've done over 90 updates to Serum now, including a lush hall reverb, which is the new default type. So, newer presets such as the preset pack above make use of the new reverb.

Steve
Serum | Xfer Records

Epic sound! could be half a track from Sigur Rós.... and i've just seen an interview with Steve Duda, really liked his mentality

[Sampleconstruct]

8 LFOs, brilliant!

[lolilol1975]

Happy Bday and cool interview with PluginGuru

[exmatproton]

8 LFOs, brilliant!

+1

[kokotte]

ha, if every dev. could be like steve!

[bronxsound]

happy b'day

[hollo]

8 LFOs, brilliant!

+1

Yes and all the little things like module locks...
The LFOs are extremely elegant to see just 4 of them and only when you need more, they are coming

Hats off Steve!

[EvilDragon]

Is the patch browser going to get an update? Tag-based and category filters, and so on? Something to handle lots of presets more easily... I did read there might be NKS compatibility eventually - that kind of necessitates proper tagging, no? Would be cool - and a lot more accessible for patch browsing.

[Kain]

I laughed at Sound on Sound's review of Serum, in their 'Pros' section at the end, the first 'pro' is: "Clean, clear and detailed sound." What does that mean? Surely you could say the same about pretty much any VST that exists.

Clean, clear and detailed sound...

I have to say that I find most of the presets with Serum are too 'metallic' or 'harsh' for my liking, and the few libraries I've listened to demos of also sound 'metallic' - why is this? Is it just bad luck that that type of sound designer has decided to make banks for Serum?

Here is a track where everything you hear except the drums are simple Serum patches I made from scratch (but other FX plugins where used).

https://soundcloud.com/matthijsbos/oooh ... -hell-yeah

Does this still sound metallic' and 'harsh' to you? I do agree with you on the presets that Serum comes with. There are lot's of presets in Serum that do indeed sound a bit harsher than for instance most presets that Sylenth1 comes with. But this has more to do with the guys that made the presets then Serum itself. That being said ... I still think that Sylenth1 has better sounding filters then Serum.

[V0RT3X]

Well, I just watched the PluginGuru video that was posted here, and I have to say that I now appreciate Steve more as a person. He seems super honest and quite humble which is always a good thing. You can't say that about some of the developers on KVR who are known to look down on their customers (No need to discuss this more). I like how there are so many features in Serum that make total sense from a production standpoint and I really appreciate that level of detail.

It's refreshing to see focused designs like this that really put the emphasis on helping you create great sounding music. I mean sure there are some people who want to spend 30 minutes dealing with complex menus (I can be one of them sometimes), but sometimes you just want to quickly make a sound and have it sound good. This is where the Xfer tools excel! You can use them quickly and get really good results fast!

Serum might be becoming one of my favorite plugins for lots of the reasons i mentioned above. It's funny I used to think all these next-gen VA plugins were the best thing ever! However these days I've been more and more drawn to the clean and malleable sound of Serum.