Using Serum
- Dec 14, 2016
- 2 min read
To better understand synthesisers I decided to research a popular wavetable synth and learn tricks from an avid user, Simon Nguyen who also allowed me to use his plugin and create sounds and custom presets in Serum by Xfer Records. First I will be discussing the different part of the wavetable synth pointed out to be and their function by Simon.
Serum has two main oscillators, OSC A and OSC B with also a SUB section which acts as a third oscillator that produces specific wave shapes played back at a low frequency. There is also a section for producing noise. The filter section can be used for all sections, OSC A, B, Noise, and Sub. There is also a modulation section, Envelope adjustment windows and LFO windows. The sounds that I wished to recreate was the bass line in a trap soul track, Recognize - PARTYNEXTDOOR ft. Drake. To achieve the sound the following tutorial was followed then adjusted according to taste to create my own interpretation of the baseline.
Firstly a saw tooth wave was used in OSC A and pitch down by 1 octave then adding 8 voices of unison to thicken and add a fluid feel to the sound. OSC A was also detuned by 0.06 and added blend to around 85. To add stereo width OSC A was panned to the left by around -20 to the left. The envelope for Osc A was given an attack of 344ms with a gentle curve for a smooth attack. Around 500ms of release to add some overlap to notes. OSC B used a Pulse width mini modulator pitch down 1 octave with 6 voices of unison detuned the same as osc A and where the wavetable controls the pulse width, that was moved to around 133 then this oscillator was panned to the right by 20. A triangle sub was also added and pitch down 2 octaves with the level brought up. As for the filter, the MG Low 12 filter was used across osc A, B and sub and the drive was pushed up around 35% fat to 50% and the cut off to around 450hz. Next to the wavetable control osc A, add FM via sub and push no higher than 20% and also on osc B pushed to around 11%. This adds some distortion sounding elements to thicken up and make the sound grittier.
Serum also has its own FX section which was used to add compression and EQ respectively. The threshold was pushed to -26dB with a ratio of 2:1 and make up grain of around 10dB. An EQ was used post compression to bring out the low-mids. firstly chaning the first EQ point to a bell curve at 155hz, gain up by 10dB and a Q of 44%. Low pass was used on the second EQ point, gain boosted by 1dB, Q of around 40% and frequency of around 2.5Khz.
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