Official Serum 2 thread!

[Cyforce]

A little review about Serum 2 from a more personal perspective. It might seem a bit early for a "review" at first glance, but being in the beta circle and contributing presets to the factory, I've had Serum 2 for a few months. It might be interesting to read for some.

https://www.cfa-sound.com/xfer-serum-2-review-insights/

[Alexander_D]

Just purchased it. I need to say, that it's an amazing synth and really big and great update for sure!!! I am not in EDM music, but I am sure that I will find the way to use this stunning synth!

[Chris-S]

are the Macro Knobs not yet implemented? I'm hearing no effect when moving those...
(Win11, VST-3)

Working just fine.

Ok, so it's caused by a faulty host program (SaviHost), in REAPER it is working.

[HOTF]

Just purchased it. I need to say, that it's an amazing synth and really big and great update for sure!!! I am not in EDM music, but I am sure that I will find the way to use this stunning synth!

Not limited to EDM sounds by any means. In fact the reason it became so popular in Dubstep adjacent music was that V1 was a NI Massive killer at the time wich was to go to for artist of that genre. Also the factory presets of V1 kind of reflected that with of lot of agressive bass patches.

[Morty-C-137]

Serum is the OG easy-to-configure, in-your-face, wub-wub FM synth. IMO Serum 2 hasn't changed what made Serum 1 so popular, it just extended the functionality with the kind of features people expect from a flagship synth in 2025.

To me, Serum 1 was firmly a wavetable synth. It offered FM, RM, filters etc. but all of that felt secondary to the wavetable paradigm.

Right now I'm thinking of Serum 2 as a monster synth that happens to have wavetables as a feature. You can stick with sines on all of the oscillators, and still have so many options for (audio-rate) modulation and distortion, plus the improved filters, to take it really far. The spectral osc with its warp features is pretty fantastic too, but I've barely explored it so far (and granular and multisample even less, sample not at all yet).

If Serum 1 was a department store, Serum 2 is an entire mall.

I just call it a workstation now.

[Morty-C-137]

I wish Serum 2 would have Multisample Editor. I don't want to search and use SFZ converter. In many synths I can just drag and drop multiple samples and set it inside editor.

Yeah, that's a real bummer. I was expecting I could just drag a bunch of samples in the oscillator pane and then select 'multisample' for it to distribute the samples automatically. Like Logic's sampler or Alchemy allows you to do. Alchemy handles this really well when dragging a bunch of samples (or any soundsource) onto an oscillator.

There is also no way to redistribute or edit any of the multisample settings of existing sets.

[_leras]

This is a great update to Serum seems it has a ton of new features and options and seems pretty easy to use and integrate all of them. Great work Xfer! Congrats looks like a lot of thought and hardwork have gone into this and with great results!

And finally 3 oscs a dual filters and sequence page in Serum means:

1. It's finally an OG Massive replacement
2. This 2 osc madness that took over when serum came out can finally stop, it's finally acknowledged as inferior and a design short coming

Great work from Xfer and with them talking about more filters and other features in the works seems like there's more to come. And it makes a very compelling offering!

[Flowshi]

I really wish the spectral warp modes would be available for wavetable osc...

Yeah me too.

[Alexander_D]

Just purchased it. I need to say, that it's an amazing synth and really big and great update for sure!!! I am not in EDM music, but I am sure that I will find the way to use this stunning synth!

Not limited to EDM sounds by any means. In fact the reason it became so popular in Dubstep adjacent music was that V1 was a NI Massive killer at the time wich was to go to for artist of that genre. Also the factory presets of V1 kind of reflected that with of lot of agressive bass patches.

You are right! Amazing synth now. And I am in cinematic music now. V2 is really great! I was sold Pigments BTW and this one is amazing. Two main synths for me now - Serum2 and Zebra

[Arksun]

Just been playing around with it now, sounds good. Made the mistake of playing multiple notes of the PD - Pacific Rain preset, holy cpu core melting batman!

Am hoping a future update will optimise cpu usage a bit more.

[hcv242]

Played with it a bit, very nice, top update! But CPU hit is pretty hard on some (most) presets which is weird.

performance wise is the same as serum 1. if you load a serum 1 preset it uses the same cpu as serum 1.

[Buka]

Multisamples oscillator doesnt read loop points in the custom sfz soundfont. Other soundfont players read them just fine..

[enCiphered]

Hello guys, how are you? Sorry if this has been asked before, but I tried dragging samples from Sononym or my Finder/Explorer into Serum 2, and they don't load. Please don't tell me that importing samples is the only option!

[cb8rwh]

On Win11/Bitwig, dragging and dropping onto the oscs works ok.
Which daw are you using?

Hello guys, how are you? Sorry if this has been asked before, but I tried dragging samples from Sononym or my Finder/Explorer into Serum 2, and they don't load. Please don't tell me that importing samples is the only option!

[enCiphered]

On Win11/Bitwig, dragging and dropping onto the oscs works ok.
Which daw are you using?

Hello guys, how are you? Sorry if this has been asked before, but I tried dragging samples from Sononym or my Finder/Explorer into Serum 2, and they don't load. Please don't tell me that importing samples is the only option!

Ah! That's great, thanks for checking! I'm using the latest version of Bitwig Studio, and this isn't possible.