A Comprehensive Guide to xFer Serum Synth

A Comprehensive Guide to xFer Serum Synth

Are you sick of relying on presets and samples? With Xfer Serum / Serum VST, you may create a distinctive sound design and stand out from the crowd with your music creation.

What exactly is Xfer Serum / Serum VST?

Steve Duda of Xfer Records created Serum VST, a simple wavetable-based software synthesizer. It comes with 450 presets and 144 wavetables. Serum VST features dual wavetable oscillators, as well as a dedicated sub and noise oscillator, for unrivaled sound quality and flexibility.

It is a really important tool for improving your sound design and music production, and we advocate using serum to obtain those ideal sounds that your current samples and presets can't provide.

Who exactly is Steve Duda?

Steve Duda is a well-known music producer and software developer. He's collaborated with legends like Nine Inch Nails and Deadmau5. Steve founded Xfer Records and created the well-known VSTs LFO Tool, Cthulhu, and Nerve.

Xfer Serum Advantages

GUI that is visually stunning

Xfer Serum provides rapid visual feedback in a pleasant and accessible manner. For a more detailed look at the wavetable contents, the wavetable display can be altered between 2D and 3D modes.

Custom Wavetables can be imported and edited.

Xfer Serum not only comes with a ton of excellent wavetables, but it also allows you to make your own in a variety of ways. For example, you can directly input audio samples into the wavetable editor to create a unique wavetable. Serum VST provides numerous tools for analyzing and reshaping these audio snippets into whatever bizarre wavetables you can conjure up. Draw directly on the waveform using a range of shape tools and adjustable grid-size snapping. FFT (additive) is used to generate or change waveforms. You may even use formula functions to build or process waveforms. Other operations like as applying fades, crossfades, normalizing, exporting, and much more are available via the Processing menu.

Manipulation of Wavetables in Real Time

You can edit the waveform itself in a separate realtime process called Warp, in addition to navigating through the set of wavetables (up to 256 make up a single oscillator). This enables FM/AM/RM/Oscillator Sync and a variety of other waveform modifications, including "Remap" modes - a graph editor for generating your own bespoke table manipulations.

Amazing Filters

Serum contains all of the filter types featured in LFOTool as well as some brand-new ones such as Flangers, Phasers, and Comb filters, all of which can key-track to the musical note you play. Dual filter types allow you to control or morph between various filter kinds. Get creative using unconventional filter processes, such as downsampling, or novel filter types, such as the dirty-sounding French LPF.

Modulation using Flexible LFOs and Envelopes

Drag-and-drop connections between mod sources and destinations are supported by the modulation system. Do you want an LFO to adjust the cutoff of a filter? Simply slide the title of the LFO to the cutoff knob. This LFO->Filter connection is now visible in the Mod Matrix. In other words, you have two options for creating and updating modulations: sometimes a list is useful, and other times you just want the task done quickly and easily.

Ultra Pure Oscillators

To play different frequencies, wavetables require digital resampling. This method will produce audible artifacts if not handled with care and a lot of number crunching. Artifacts indicate that you are cluttering your mix with undesirable tones/frequencies (perhaps unknowingly). Many common wavetable synthesizers are dreadfully awful at artifact suppression. Even in high-quality settings, some produce artifacts with levels ranging from -36 dB to -60 dB (level difference between fundamental and artifact). This is clearly heard, and it is frequently dampening the highest desired audible frequencies in the process in order to suppress this unpleasant sound.

In Serum, the default oscillator playback employs very high-precision resampling, resulting in an incredibly inaudible signal-to-noise ratio (for example, -150 dB on a sawtooth played at 1 Khz @ 44100)! Because this necessitates a large number of calculations, Serum's oscillator playback has been extensively tuned utilizing SSE2 instructions to allow for this high-quality replay while without straining your CPU any more than the normal (good quality) soft synth currently does. Load up Serum, and we believe you'll notice both what you hear (solid high frequencies that extend flat all the way up to the limits of hearing) and what you don't hear (no unwanted muck or aliasing gibberish- simply nice, clean sound).

Integrated FX Suite

Inside Serum, an effects rack with ten effects modules allows you to take your sound all the way to the finish line. Effects can be re-ordered in whatever order you like. Almost all effect parameters can also be used as modulation destinations. This is particularly effective with monophonic synth sounds. For example, use an LFO to regulate reverb size or dry/wet, or velocity to change the amount of distortion. numerous of these effects and modes were designed specifically for Serum, thus there are numerous unique effects to pick from, such as Hyper, which simulates (extra) unison quantities, or a dual-waveshaper, which lets you to morph between two independent wave forms.

Delay, Reverb, Hyper / Dimension, Flanger, Phaser, Chorus, Multiband Compressor, EQ, Distortion, and Filter are some of the effects available.

Skins made to be used

We've all experienced the boredom of staring at the same synth for hours on end. With Serum's custom skins feature, you can simply switch out the aesthetic for a new or even retro look.

The Noise Oscillator is used for sampling.

The noise oscillator allows users to drag and drop audio files into Serum, giving it sampling capabilities. The noise oscillator may be run through any of Serum's filters and FX, making it a powerful sampler.

Superior Unison

Serum allows you to employ up to 16 voices by stacking a single oscillator. Each wavetable oscillator has a number of advanced unison characteristics. Stack settings enable note (e.g., octave) layering to provide a broader sound with a single note-press. Set the Unison WT Pos setting to have all the voices have their own waveform at the same time, or have them all skewed differently with the Warp control. A multitude of tuning options per-oscillator allow you to achieve the desired sound blossoming or swarming.

Serum FX can be VST effects plugin.

Serum comes with SerumFX in addition to the normal version of the synth. This is an insert style plugin that may be added to any processing chain, whether MIDI or audio. This allows you to use the LFOs, FX, and even oscillators as post-processing on ANY audio stream, including live!

Adoption in Industry

Serum is one of the most extensively utilized synths in the music production industry, thanks to its powerful features and incredible sound. There are numerous preset expansion packs available on the market to help you expand your sound arsenal. Some of these are direct quotes from professional producers you may aspire to sound like.

Serum VST Restrictions

Excellent sound quality and comprehensive modulation capabilities are not free. Serum can be CPU-intensive. However, most modern machines should be able to run several instances without issue. Serum also lacks a dedicated arpeggiator. However, if you're handy with modulations, there are a couple workarounds that yield highly useable results.

Serum VST Worth

Serum is now available for a bargain price of $189.00. Don't worry if that's a little too much for your budget. Splice has a Rent-To-Own plan that costs $9.99 per month for 19 months. This plan allows you to check it out for free for three days before canceling or pausing it at any time, with no hidden fees or interest. Once paid for, Serum is yours to keep, along with your personal authorization key, which can be used on two different computers.

Conclusion

Purchase it if you are serious about music production. Serum is a wonderful, simple-to-use soft-synth with unique capabilities. It has crazy versatile modulation, high-quality sound, and a cheap pricing. Serum VST will help you save time and create your finest music yet.

This synth is already one of the best and will most likely continue to be upgraded and expanded with new features. If you're still on the fence, try the demo!

Back to blog

Leave a comment

Please note, comments need to be approved before they are published.