Mandatory Steve Duda SERUM Tutorials Post:

https://youtu.be/rf4Dj3FSCjc?list=PLCdl4Odo4R1i0q3SzY0o3I0Qwl85N7H9F

Serum is great for making FX/atmospheric/fill sounds. Pick a waveform or two, and modulate everything on LFOs until you find something cool.

Especially useful is the waveform morphing:
- Sync (No Window) can be nice color on leads to give them an overdriven feel
- Quantize turns the wave into a coarser square shape, often will find a fantastic texture when you modulate through the quantize range of a wave
- Remap lets you draw in your own waveform morph shaper, which is probably really powerful but I haven't explored much yet

And the great part about Serum is that you can see what is happening to the waves as you modulate.

A few things I've been doing lately:

Vocal phrases as wavetables: (I know I know everyone has done this but..) an interesting trick I like to do with this is to actually use them a bit like a vocal chop like you would do with actual lyrics. if you write a melody and automate the wavetable to a different place each time it's pretty easy to do this. You can also use the NoteOnRand in the mod matrix to do this for you if you feel lazy but I tend to get better sounds when I choose them myself.  Also you can make these bubbly with the bend/asym warp modes. I find that bend will make it more bubbly but vocal phrases generally sound more comprehensible with the asym modes.

Another thing I've gotten decent results with is importing via fixed frame size in the oscillator tab (I like to use 1000-2000 samples) with short snippets of water or other foley, like a brief splash. With some normalizing and proper morphing this can sound super cool and can get vocal sounds that are just as interesting or more than say, using a percussion sound, though if you want to use them as a bass sound they might need some low end reinforcement.

Also, for making crazy bass clips to resample I like to map a ton of different parameters, basically everything that sounds like an interesting movement with the sound, to lfos with some parameters being modulated in different directions by multiple lfos to create more unique movements. Then rather than actually pouring blood sweat and tears into the automation for 23 parameters all by myself like our forefathers did I just modulate 2 or 3 lfo rates and change the lfo shapes to something interesting. This should give you some movements that sound distinctly different than hand done automation, but not necessarily in a bad way. I particularly like to automate the wavetable, sync, and a morphing filter's cuttoff and morph position and then put the multiband compression or some distortion afterword, then put another phase filter with another lfo on or something to get a particularly wacky sound. These are definitely too crazy to put the entire thing in one song so I like to render a long clip of one note and put it in a sampler after.
Also if you still really feel too lazy to automate a few lfos you can also just use the chaos in the mod matrix and automate the chaos rate. I hope you're happy you coward.

Hope this was useful! I can post examples if that's something anyone wants.

Wow. This thread is a goldmine. Thanks to everyone for the tips and info!

Yes, would be nice to make noise stereo.

Because Serum has high-quality, low-aliasing waveforms, it does take a lot of cpu.  There is a setting on the OSC global tab that you can reduce the sample rate (you might want to do draft 1x).  Also, lessen the # of active voices if possible.

64-bit DAWs take advantage of RAM in excess of 4GB. If you don't have more than that, then you don't need it. If you do, use 64-bit where possible.

The Noise OSC has huge potential for making all kinds of organic and atmospheric sounds. For example, load something like a vocal sample as noise, turn the pitch down, and play with the noise FM on an oscillator. And by pitching a white noise sample down, you can use noise FM for subtle random pitch modulation (although I guess the chaos modulation sources would do this as well).