Au5 Supersaw Killer Serum Tutorial

[noodln]

I found this tutorial that looked really great on the first viewing, but which turned out to be more difficult to follow than I'd hoped:

My first stumbling block was the wavetable he's using. I don't know if it's the funky skin he's using, but it doesn't look right, not extending to the edges, and it looks like it would create a square, not a saw wave. I just used the default saw from the init patch and moved forward.

As I started through the first few steps, I realized I wasn't getting anything like his sound, and I noticed the effects on his Ableton rack. "Chord", "Chord", and "Major". I used a single "Major Chord" and that got me a lot closer (I'm also using Ableton), but I'm curious why he would stack chord effects. Maybe something like an octave plus a triad, but beyond that, I dunno.

I'm about half-way through and there's something wrong with my version that I couldn't put my finger on. Mine sounds dirtier, and not in a good way. When I applied the high-pass filter, I could hear a noise that he wasn't getting, so I think I failed to cancel out the noise oscillator the way he did. I'll have to go back and review that part.

It feels like the purpose of the video is to showcase his skills with Serum more than it is to actually instruct. I followed the link in the description to his Serum Masterclass, and it went to a really aggressive sales pitch. If the video was more of a real tutorial, I'd have been more inclined to buy his class.

Anyway, I wondered if any of the gurus here would have any insights, or maybe the video is of more use to those if you who are further along than I am with this stuff.

[juno987654321]

I don't feel addressed by that last term but I could try and give my opinion, anyways. I also feel like writing at the moment. Maybe that could help to clarify some misunderstandings.

Overall, I think the author of that video succeeds in showing what he promises to show and it IS of some educational value. It shows a somewhat more advanced technique, so the targeted group would be people who are already somewhat familiar with the basics and who now want to find new ways of creating good sounds.

We are shown here how to create real impressive sounding supersaws by means of modulating supersaws with Serum's hidden chaos oscillator. I didn't know that Serum even offers this possibility so it was interesting to me. It seems quite useful since one could maybe avoid phase cancellations that you would get with the more typical detuning method otherwise. So it's not a bad tutorial for a youtube video, I think. I've seen worse. That guy does not want to show off in my opinion. He could just at some points go a little more slowly and explain a bit more so that more people could more easily follow. But those are just didactic aspects and he's after all not likely a professional teacher but just someone who's into sound design trying to teach as best as he could as an amateur teacher, so to speak. And that's a good thing. So let's just assume that he tries his best to share his knowledge in a more or less honest way.

With that being said, it's a youtube video after all. Youtubers do usually want to make money with their video contents if they post regularly. So that's another thing he does. We may not like that fact but as a youtuber I believe he has found a way to at least be better than those who really only want to show off and only allude to their knowledge to keep it a mystery, a secret and nothing but their income source: something they would only be willing to share with others if you were to pay them. You know, such videos are just tacit commericail ads. Not so much with this guy: there are many videos he created that you could watch for free and they WILL tell you something interesting. You don't have to give it a thumbs up or anything. So I think he's OK. Maybe he could join our forum at times. That would make him better, though, of course, he can't reach guys like Choos if he mostly spends his time on youtube already! Those guys often won't give up their youtube business. Well then, it's their free choice. They will be dependent on always having to create new contents for their "masters" (those who own youtube and actually make the real cash on THEM). Let's hope he would convert to an honest kvr'er one day who only does what he does based on real free will w/o any pressure, etc. ...

So why did he use Serum's wavetable view instead of the normal view? If you click on Serum's wave graph you get the z axis on top, hence the wavetable view but he just started out with the init saw. Answer: I don't know. It's just personal preference. It really proves that he does not start out with any wavetable because there's nothing along the z axis and it stays like that throughout. Maybe he used a wavetable sound before he created the video and he forgot to change the view. It won't matter!

But why did he use 2 instances of Ableton's stack chord plugin? It's because one instance would have been limited to maybe 4 or 5 notes and he just wanted a bigger chord. That's all. Then he used a harmony plugin so that you could just hit the white notes and still get minor chords with one hit or sus chords if you like. He just wanted to show us some cool ways of creating big and wide ("killer supersaw") sounds in various harmonic keys if you only want to hit one key per chord. I don't think that bragging was his purpose for that. A professional teacher would have taught it differently, more reduced to what's essential with just one instance of the chord stacker plugin...

You write that you wanted to follow through and then you got some noise when you applied the HP filter but he used a LP filter. Maybe you took the wrong one to follow through. Also don't forget to route to osc A and B AND to the noise sampler, too. If you forget one, then you will get too many high frequencies or "noise".

Anyways, you don't have to get the exact sound he created because he only wanted to give one example of an arbitrary supersaw chord created in a new way rather than a specific sound. We are sometimes after specific sounds in this forum here but he didn't want to create a specific sound. This may be yet another misunderstanding? The video, as I see it, is just about a general new method of creating sounds using both Serum and some plugins in your DAW, e.g. Ableton Live (but Cubase and others have those plugins, too)...

[noodln]

I don't feel addressed by that last term but I could try and give my opinion, anyways. I also feel like writing at the moment. Maybe that could help to clarify some misunderstandings.

Wow, thanks for the incredible reply! Sorry for my late response. I kept checking back, looking for a notification, or reading through the recent posts page, but saw nothing. Today I finally doubled check on the post itself and here you are.

That was super helpful! I didn't know that Serum had a different wavetable view. I kept looking for a menu or something before I finally found a simple left click toggled it.

Thanks also for your insights on the other plugins, and ideas for why I was left with noise. I'll take another run through it and see if I can learn more, especially with your excellent notes to help.

Thanks again!

[Tendou]

where the synth/fx/matrix are there is one where you can set Oversampling. maybe thats the solution

[CHOOS]

Anyway, I wondered if any of the gurus here would have any insights, or maybe the video is of more use to those if you who are further along than I am with this stuff.

Can you post what you got when you recreated it?
upload the preset in a zip file.

If I can understand better what you're missing or maybe at what point it goes wrong I can help

[noodln]

Thanks Tendou and CHOOS - I will do that. I didn't save the half finished work because I figured I'd start again from the beginning. Hopefully I'll have time to muck with it on the weekend. Maybe I'll get it myself this time! I'll post it either way - maybe others would like to add it to their library

[noodln]

I took another stab at re-creating this. I used the graphic in serum of the depressed keys to work out the chords he was using and got really close to his sound. Then at the end of the video, after I'd given up in frustration the first time, he actually explains what he's doing with the two chord plugins and the major scale plugin. The first chord plugin was to add distinct notes, and the second one was to duplicate all of those again to another octave. Makes sense now! But the funny thing is that I duplicated the settings he showed for these, and they're different from the ones he used for most of the video, so my own settings sounded a lot more like what he showed.

I also completed the settings in Serum as close as I could get them to the demo. I still get the hiss, which is made worse by how he has the EQ configured, but I guess it wouldn't be an issue if the hiss wasn't there to begin with. It seems to come from the noise oscillator, which is used to drive the master tuning, and then cancelled out by feeding it back into the oscillator A/B pitch. Honestly, I can't remember what remaining thing noise was supposed to be modulating after cancelling out A/B.

I've attached the preset as best as I could replicate it in case anyone wants to muck around with it.

Also, if anyone else wanted to follow along, I used a single chord effect with +12 ST, +19 ST, +27 ST and +31 ST. The notes he usually tests with are B, G# and G using my chord settings, but the last G is out of scale, so his scale plugin is fixing the chord output to make it sound right. Or at least that's my guess. He's probably really using negative adjustments in his chord settings, so the notes he's really playing are probably different from my guess.

The chord settings he shares (which to me sounds completely different) are:

First effect: -24st, +7st, +15st, -12st, +19st
Second effect: +12st

He's using a major preset in the scale effect, but tweaked. He moved the sixth note down one semitone.

[Ogundimu]

I really like sound design by AU5. He thinks outside of the box, comes up with impressive ideas and often he's using plugins in ways that were not intended by the devs
btw: he produces some of the best colour bass tracks i know

For those who are interested, i made his chaos modulated supersaw in MSoundFactory. Here is the preset:

Code: Select all

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