Is Serum worth cashing out for, when you get Vital for free?

[cel4145]

Serum was the first vst I bought after taking a 15 year break from music. Great purchase. I just found out about Vital a few months ago but hardly used it yet.

I'm eyeing Serum, but so far I fail to see what it does better then Vital. Aren't they pretty much the same? There are much more presets for Serum available floating around, but apart from that, what's the difference?

damn sorry about the super late response on this. yeah i'd say they are about the same tbh. serum does have a lot of presets available though.

And a ton of sound design tutorials for electronic music.

Although I've noticed many YTubers offering Vital tutorials this year. Makes sense because it's free. So if they offer a sound design tutorial with Vital, anyone can go download it without shelling out money. Which would be especially appealing to people new to music production. Easier to grow one's audience.

[Spencer Maddox]

In my honest opinion the main advantage Serum has over Vital is the Wavetable editor. Serum still has the best Wavetable editor in the business. Vital has a fun editor with a cool keyframe based workflow, but serums editor is truly insane.

A lot of the rest of the bases are covered by Vital. I would say overall Serum is still some of the best 189$ you can spend but Vital I would recommend first to someone just starting. It has so much power and it's all so smooth, the effects and warping modes are tremendous, the text to wavetable is literally one of a kind, and its just such a great plugin that I wish I had when I was starting.

Serum 2, when it comes, could flip all of this however.

[starktomb0625]

Couldn't have said tit better myself. The sheer quality of the sounds, fx, and options available beats out most other synths even today. Especially now with all the newer hip-hop using more synthetic sounds and stepping further and further into an alien type aesthetic, its just unmatched, not to mention the popularity of Serum itself, being used for so many genres. Its like a swiss-army synth... well almost. Also the skins are pretty

[Biome_Digital]

In my honest opinion the main advantage Serum has over Vital is the Wavetable editor. Serum still has the best Wavetable editor in the business. Vital has a fun editor with a cool keyframe based workflow, but serums editor is truly insane.

Serum 2, when it comes, could flip all of this however.

Yeah, that is sometimes overlooked.

Serum 2!! Ohhh.

[Bartone]

Correct me if I am wrong:
- Serum you can create your own categories for presets (ie. Bass4Club, Leads4Trance etc).
Vital you only have Bass, Lead, Keys, Pad, Percussion, Sequence, Experiment, SFX, Template

-Serum you can give 1-5 star rating for presets. Vital only 1 star option.

-Serum also has “hybridize” option where you can randomly combine different presets into a new preset! Anyone tried it/good results with it?

[tony10000]

Serum IS NOT Vital...

[kobal]

serum still get features and updates regulary so many years after, and free upgrade to serum 2 , many newer plugins even from well know companies feel like abandon ware in comparaison.

one of the strenght of serum is all the filter types for creative use , you won t be abble to do some of the patchs using these with any others synths and there is really a lot of usefull patchs possible to make with these.

to be abble to modulate lfos nodes is also a amazing feature, there is plenty of great features that one might not see at begning.

vital is also really good in his own way , the sound caractere is different so these don t overlap and it has different strenght, it has become really popular also cause it s free , youtubers can get more views/ sells more patchs ect so it may feel like it replaced serum but no to me these are 2 different synths with different strenght.

[astralite]

No! Wait before you buy Serum. Vital is doing an amazing job for me even though I own Serum(I bought it way before Vital was released). I of course still use both the plugins but I'm pretty sure Vital can do everything that Serum can, and more. Don't worry about the presets, you will collect them over time through producer friends and your own sound design.

[BONES]

They are all just synths, they all do the same stuff so use as many or as few as you feel like using. If the monthly One Synth Challenge tells us anything, it's that you don't need to own every synth under the sun to make good music.

[chakkimatti]

The real pro for Serum is the number of preset packs for Serum. I think both are very powerful and Vital is totally awesome for what you pay for it.

[mortfell]

Gonna give my two cents on this as someone who love both:
Vital is pretty amazing, especially considering it's free and open source... There is lots of sounds you could make in Vital that would be really hard or impossible in Serum, especially if you use the mod remap stuff a lot

I still use Serum a lot more and have never regretted buying it for these reasons:
- Serum is like getting a nice knife for cooking or something, it doesn't do everything, but it does what it does very well, Always sounds excellent and just works.
- Steve Duda designed Serum from the beginning for the needs of professional producers he was friends with. He was a producer/engineer/musician before being a plugin designer as well. Because of these factors Serum has a TON of tiny workflow and design decisions which make it feel and sound super polished.
- Vital still feels pretty buggy to me, especially the graphics i've tried it on a bunch of systems and there is always laggy weird things that happen.
- Overall Serum is a lot more stable and predictable, it almost never crashes and bugs get fixed within days or even hours. Often free or cheap synths will make updates that break compatibility and stuff over the years, go months without updates etc. Serum is deliberately and carefully designed to be reliable for professional use.
- The FX in Vital are not bad... they are far from useless and some of them are awesome, but they really aren't in the same ballpark as Serum. The filters and reverb designs were outsourced to people who specialize in those things, and it shows. A lot of the other FX are based on designs Steve Duda has been working on for years, none of the FX feel extraneous or thrown together.

So yeah.... do you "need" Serum, probably not, but it's a really useful instrument to have in your toolbox as a producer.

[Igro]

Does anyone know, if the Serum v2 upgrade is going to be free, will the Splice rent to own version 1 be automatically replaced with the new v2 version?

[chk071]

As far as I read, the Serum 2 upgrade will be free, so, the Splice version will probably be the same.

[Igro]

As far as I read, the Serum 2 upgrade will be free, so, the Splice version will probably be the same.

Yeah. I mean, if I will get Serum now via the Spice. I don't want to be in a situation, where I have to pay completely for the v1 and only then Splice will change to v2 for me.

[Samiver]

As far as I read, the Serum 2 upgrade will be free, so, the Splice version will probably be the same.

Yeah. I mean, if I will get Serum now via the Spice. I don't want to be in a situation, where I have to pay completely for the v1 and only then Splice will change to v2 for me.

Personally you cannot guarantee there will definitely be a version 2. We know it is being made and that it will be free for v1 owners but what happens if Steve duda is hit by a bus or something (hopefully not of course).

I would say if you want serum 1 then get it as if/when serum 2 comes out we do not know what price it will be and maybe it will cost more than Serum 1. It could obviously be cheaper so there is that risk. For all we know it may be years until released and you could be using serum 1 during that time.