When I demo'd Icarus I just wasn't grabbed by its sound.Ingonator wrote:FWIW Icarus has more Morph modes (around 63)...
But to be fair, I also didn't like Serum the first time I demo'd it, based on the presets rather than patching it from scratch.
The State of Serum in 2017
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- KVRAF
- 8074 posts since 9 Jan, 2003 from Saint Louis MO
But to be fair, I also didn't like Serum the first time I demo'd it, based on the presets rather than patching it from scratch.
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- KVRist
- 469 posts since 20 Aug, 2010
The best part of experimenting with serum to me is the resample to oscillator and the noise / sample playback oscillator. You can build a fat sound with included fx and then resample the resulta and you have fatness (or whatever) as a new starting point.
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- KVRer
- 27 posts since 5 Jul, 2017
Like the OP I don't make EDM. I was a jazz musician and now make my music on the computer; soundscapes, ambient, piano sonatas , a little EDM but not much. At the moment I am making jazz trios with acoustic bass and drum loops and then designing leads on Serum (and other synths) to jam along to; not much recording , just fun jamming and making synth leads <3
I don't buy synths for presets, but for how much creative 'room' they give me. I have used many in the 18 years I been doing this, and Serum and Zebra 2 are by far my favourite and most used. Made soooo many presets for them.
I agree with what someone said earlier in this thread; "you can make any synth do anything"
To the OP question:- I would say Serum is in a good place now (mid 2018).
I just got Thorn and ANA2 (2017 new synths, both with wavetable functionality) and for their price $115-120 they are both great value, but not without their flaws. However, for sheer depth, breadth and precision with wavetables Serum is better, as it should be for the $60 more it costs. Thorn's sound is genuinely awesome though....that 'Harmonic filter' was done in the synth called 'Spectral', but in Thorn it is more stable and much much better; draw your own filter shape OMG!! add that to Serum or Zebra 2and I may have a heart attack !!
That's my two penneth worth on this
I don't buy synths for presets, but for how much creative 'room' they give me. I have used many in the 18 years I been doing this, and Serum and Zebra 2 are by far my favourite and most used. Made soooo many presets for them.
I agree with what someone said earlier in this thread; "you can make any synth do anything"
To the OP question:- I would say Serum is in a good place now (mid 2018).
I just got Thorn and ANA2 (2017 new synths, both with wavetable functionality) and for their price $115-120 they are both great value, but not without their flaws. However, for sheer depth, breadth and precision with wavetables Serum is better, as it should be for the $60 more it costs. Thorn's sound is genuinely awesome though....that 'Harmonic filter' was done in the synth called 'Spectral', but in Thorn it is more stable and much much better; draw your own filter shape OMG!! add that to Serum or Zebra 2and I may have a heart attack !!
That's my two penneth worth on this
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- KVRAF
- 3506 posts since 27 Dec, 2002 from North East England
If this functionality particularly interests you, you might also like to check out Harmor. You can draw your own filter shape, or analyse a single cycle waveform in the oscillator then copy the data across to the filter. IMO the filter in Harmor sounds smoother than Thorn's, where harmonics tend to pop in and out quite abruptly when the position is modulated. Harmor is a tremendously flexible and powerful synth that tends to fly under the radar.R0bins0n wrote:Thorn's sound is genuinely awesome though....that 'Harmonic filter' was done in the synth called 'Spectral', but in Thorn it is more stable and much much better; draw your own filter shape OMG!! add that to Serum or Zebra 2and I may have a heart attack !!
That's my two penneth worth on this
Still, having said that, Thorn is a bloody fantastic synth (I'm using the CM version). The harmonic filter being quite severe under modulation and 128 harmonics for oscs being a little on the low side, leaving bass notes a little dull, are the only criticisms I have of it.