You make a really good point, and I agree about Xfer Records being a company that’s driven by passion and excellence, and not always by money or greed. Personally, I’m interested in a lot of different features and capabilities in VST synths that are priced around $200. I’m also used to deep and complicated workflows since my focus is on sound design.yoursoul wrote: Sun Dec 29, 2024 1:00 pm i hope and think the focus for serum 2 is not about features, but more about how they are implemented and can be integrated in a good workflow. serum was always about ease of use for me.
im happy about xfer, they feel like a plugin company driven by heart, and not primarily by financial reasons. thats why i have no impatience here at all.
But complexity with high-quality sound and ease of use has become much more popular over the years, and less niche. Although wavetable synthesis wasn’t new when Serum initially came out, Steve put a major focus on usability and incredible sounding oscillators, all with an easy to use GUI.
Back when my nephew was still a teenager, he took a massive interest in Dubstep and other sub-genres of bass music. After I got him set up with a laptop, software, and a MIDI controller, he chose Serum as his main plug-in to begin the learning process.
That ended up being a critical decision for him, and I’m thankful that he chose the synth that was being used in all of his favorite music. With zero music-making experience, he was able to figure out how to use Serum fairly quickly. And he’s had a great time experimenting and creating tracks that he shares with family and friends.
That ease of use has always been one of Serum’s biggest selling points, so I seriously doubt that Steve would design a successor that would deviate very far from that ethos. I do expect version 2 to have some cool surprises up its sleeve now that our computers are so powerful.
As an example, I’d love to see a full-featured additive synthesis engine in the vein of NI’s Razor that you could use as a layer with your patches, along with more refined effects to choose from. I also expect presets to be backwards compatible, since there’s so many of them out there already. It will be interesting to see how that’s implemented.
I’m just as excited as everyone else to finally load up Serum 2 in my DAW. After all, it feels good to support a developer that “gets it” and who wants to release their best software to all of the loyal users around the world. I’m sure that the looooong wait will be totally worth it!!
