New Toy! Serum Wavetable Synth – Week 1

This week my task was to get to grips with Serum, a wavetable synth plugin. I don’t think I’ve used a wavetable synth before. If I have, I’ve not got into so much depth to understand the theory behind the programme, so there were some new concepts to explore and definitely some new ways to think about sound waves for me.

Serum felt like a very intuitive tool and I’m glad I started this grand exploration of my creative practice here.

Any new patches or interesting effects I made I chucked out to an audio file for posterity in this playlist.

(Any new sound (called ‘patches’ from now on) made by modifying existing ones that came with the plugin and which still sound fairly similar to that original have ‘HFEdit’ in the title. Any that have ‘(Violin)’, ‘(Harmonica)’ or ‘(Brush Hit)’ were made by importing audio of those particular sounds in various ways to create a new wavetable as a starting point for the new patch)


Diary notes:

6/12/21

  • I loaded the ‘FX 16-Bar Riser [FP]’ patch and it made me want to do sound design again. Which is weird because I don’t enjoy foley or concrete/realistic type sound design. But this very nearly changed my mind! Only nearly, mind
  • (Really if I’m honest I only want to sound design spaceships. Sound design for other real world stuff is dull.)
  • Every patch I pick randomly is really cool and inspiring and immediately playable for ostinatos or hooks.
  • I had to increase the zoom of the plug in interface to 130% 😬 EYESIGht fuzzy. Do I need reading specs?
  • The documentation that comes with the plugin is excellent. The manual is great – really clear English with a logical progression through the synth’s capabilities.

  • Hit a wall at 2pm. Took a little break. TOO MUCH INFORMATION CRAMMED IN MY BRAIN.

  • I covered a LOT of ground today – all the way to making wavetables from scratch and morphing between subtables within them.
  • There are ways to import recorded sound as raw material – hooray! Tomorrow I’ll look into it further (is this my focus for the whole course?).

  • Question to email the developers about: if there are more than 5 LFOs, how do I edit LFOs 6-8? Can only see 1-5. Sometimes LFO5 doesn’t even appear on the interface. Is this is a bug? A design flaw? An oversight?
  • Audio can be imported as either ‘Noise’ (which is just a straightforward stereo file sampler).
  • Or as a Wavetable – this creates really unexpected effects (hooray some more!)

I really enjoyed this from the manual:

Poly (Polyphony) number box 

This box sets the number of simultaneous notes which can be played. Sometimes, often for CPU reasons, you would want to place a limit on the simultaneous notes. For instance if you were sending a furry of notes (arpeggio) to a patch which had a long release (say 10 seconds) this could end up being a whole lot of voices, were there no limit (and your CPU would probably overload). Typically speaking 8 is enough and 16 is generally a bunch. This box is greyed out (as pictured) when the Mono switch is enabled.  

Haha – “a bunch”. Love colloquial stuff in official documentation. Feels like a human has written it (I mean, I don’t know who else would have written it – maybe an AI – but sometimes these plugin manuals feel like they’ve been written by a humourless expert who can’t remember what it was like to be a beginner.)


7/12/21

Thoughts

  • Being able to slowly wallow in the the manual rather than feel the pressure to search for the most important/most easy to action information as quickly as possible is luxurious.
  • Today I revisited and applied things I learned yesterday.
  • I played without an end goal.
  • I’m inspired by experiments. I got lost in flow.
  • Is this my ‘style’ (my ‘voice’)?: Taking normal traditional classical musical recorded audio and putting it into some electronic thing to generate completely different new material.

These Youtube videos were useful in addition to the manual. I searched for ‘Xfer Serum tips and tricks’ and watched anything that mentioned hidden or advanced methods.

https://youtu.be/JVCH-IiDmnc

https://youtu.be/RJPs-HhyJqY


8/12/21

Really got the hang of Serum today – made lots of brand new patches rather than modifying existing ones. I feel like I understand it as a whole instrument now. Whilst Serum tends to lend itself to dark, serious and aggressive sounds and types of music, I’m leaning towards the ‘lovely’. Light, well-rounded, tinkly/twinkly, smoothed, bell-like (and some of them today definitely felt Christmassy! 🎄✨).