Author Topic: SERUM Tips & Tricks  (Read 54671 times)

The Next

  • Subsonic
  • Posts: 5
  • Honor: 0
    • https://soundcloud.com/onlythenext
    • https://twitter.com/onlythenext
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #15 on: January 10, 2016, 07:38:12 am »
Serum is awesome! In Love with this one.

Mat Zo can you please told us some tips and tricks on how you use this one? Also i read Kill The Noise reddit and he say that you and him use Serum in absolutely different ways. So can you please talk little bit more about it? :)


p.s. Love Kill The Zo project so much!


Astroreign

  • Sub Bass
  • *
  • Posts: 25
  • Honor: 1
  • Always open to FL collabs!
    • Astroreign
    • Astroreign
    • View Profile
    • My Wordpress
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #17 on: January 10, 2016, 09:35:16 am »
One trivial thing that took me a long to figure out in serum was how sometimes when modulating a parameter with an lfo, the lfo would modulate on both sides of the center point of the knob and sometimes it would begin on the center. To toggle this setting open up the modulation matrix and click on the arrows that point like this <-> and it will change to this -> and vice versa. Super trivial but also really annoying.

-deño

Is this the same reason why an automation will start at the left of a knob, go all the way to the right, and then pause a bit before going back to the left, when if I drag the same LFO over another knob it'll just go smoothly the whole time? =/

Austin K

  • Sub Bass
  • *
  • Posts: 22
  • Honor: 2
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #18 on: January 10, 2016, 11:28:15 am »
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.

MindDisorder

  • Subsonic
  • Posts: 17
  • Honor: 1
    • thisisminddisorder
    • https://twitter.com/MindDisordered
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #19 on: January 11, 2016, 09:01:12 am »
One little stuff that led me to some interesting experiments:

There is the filter effect, which is fine to double the main filter, but there is one specific stuff in the filter that's fun to use is the Reverb one. This might mess things up, but playing with cutoff and res (especially while modulating them) can create so really interesting bits

glorkglunk

  • Subsonic
  • Posts: 3
  • Honor: 3
    • https://soundcloud.com/feeeeeeeeelix
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #20 on: January 11, 2016, 09:12:45 am »
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.
« Last Edit: January 11, 2016, 09:42:52 am by glorkglunk »

SadNip

  • Subsonic
  • Posts: 4
  • Honor: 0
  • 100% queer
    • SadNip
    • SadNipp
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #21 on: January 15, 2016, 07:30:12 pm »
with proc: squarify you have to normalize the wavetables directly after

felyxsnow

  • Subsonic
  • Posts: 10
  • Honor: 1
  • Techno / House / Progressive
    • felyxsnow
    • felyxsnow
    • View Profile
    • felyxsnow.com
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #22 on: January 15, 2016, 11:00:05 pm »
Wow. This thread is a goldmine. Thanks to everyone for the tips and info!

Reuben James

  • Subsonic
  • Posts: 6
  • Honor: 0
    • reubenjames
    • reubenjames_
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #23 on: January 16, 2016, 02:49:44 am »
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.

I'd love to hear some examples of this if you don't mind.

Elytal

  • Subsonic
  • Posts: 3
  • Honor: 0
    • elytal-the-rush
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #24 on: March 03, 2016, 10:00:31 pm »
Yes, would be nice to make noise stereo.

daimon

  • Sub Bass
  • *
  • Posts: 43
  • Honor: 4
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #25 on: March 06, 2016, 05:48:26 pm »
Hello guys, I'm more looking for tip than offering one - do you have any tips on reducing CPU usage by Serum? Cymatics Future bass presets go apesh*t on my CPU, only simplest plucks are without cracking but even those starts to lagg when I play it with few other vsts. I have no problems with any other vsts, I can run maybe even 10 Massives at once and no problem but not a single Serum with these chord patches...
I have also kinda weird setup:
Windows 64bit running 32bit FL Studio with 32bit Serum
Would it be better to run it on 64 bit even though its 32bit DAW?

Sorry for confusing post, if it doesn't belong here, delete it

bryan

  • Sub Bass
  • *
  • Posts: 142
  • Honor: 28
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #26 on: March 06, 2016, 06:00:58 pm »
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.

Mussar

  • Administrator
  • Mid
  • *****
  • Posts: 631
  • Honor: 252
    • mussarmusic
    • mussarmusic
    • View Profile
    • My Site
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #27 on: March 13, 2016, 06:03:47 am »
A few things that should be pointed out for anyone looking at Serum that might not be immediately obvious:

  • You can import LFO shapes as single cycle waveforms by holding Option/Alt and dragging them to the oscillator window. Great way to get basic waveforms a few seconds faster than digging for the Analog->Basic Shapes wavetable if you have a bunch of custom wavetables, and you can do neat little tricks like drawing a waveform and applying warp modes to it based on that waveform, etc.
  • If you're not using the dropdown menu of serum often, you might have missed the Resample Osc A/B Warp and Resample to Osc A/B. Resample Osc X Warp takes one sweep of that oscillator's warp mode from 0% to 100% and creates a new wavetable out of it, and Resample to Osc X takes the entire patch you've been working on and creates a new wavetable out of it.
  • Serum's "Hyper" FX mimics a sort of global unison for your sound, so if you're making super saws instead of having a high unison value on the individual oscillators you can utilize the Hyper FX as a means of splitting per-oscillator and per-patch FX: anything you want to affect the individual voices of your synth goes before the Hyper FX module, and everything you want to affect the entire patch goes after.

Arktopolis

  • Low Mid
  • **
  • Posts: 209
  • Honor: 54
    • arktopolis
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #28 on: March 16, 2016, 09:53:33 am »
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).

SadNip

  • Subsonic
  • Posts: 4
  • Honor: 0
  • 100% queer
    • SadNip
    • SadNipp
    • View Profile
Re: SERUM Tips & Tricks
« Reply #29 on: March 20, 2016, 03:11:57 pm »
in the wavetable editor down where it says "formula" or something, type a phrase or word in with quotes surrounding it and BOOM!
Instant text to speech