The dream synthesizer did not seem to exist: a wavetable synthesizer with a truly high-quality sound, visual and creative workflow-oriented interface to make creating and altering sounds fun instead of tedious, and the ability to ?go deep? when desired – to create / import / edit / morph wavetables, and manipulate these on playback in real-time.
IMPORT YOUR OWN AUDIO / CREATE CUSTOM WAVETABLES WITH EASE
Serum has a Wavetable editor built right in- you can create your own wavetables in a variety of ways. Import audio directly from audio files – Serum has a variety of methods and options for analyzing audio for breaking it apart into individual waveforms. You can import single-cycle wavetables of course, as well as many at once (with in-built sorting options, or manual re-ordering). Morph between various wavetables using standard linear interpolation (crossfading) or via harmonic/spectral morphing. Draw directly on the waveform, with optional grid-size snapping and a variety of shape tools. Generate or modify waveforms using FFT (additive). Create or process waveforms using formula functions. Processing menu options allow you to do the other tasks you would want, such as apply fades, crossfades, normalize, export, and much more.
ULTRA-CLEAN OSCILLATORS
Playback of wavetables requires digital resampling to play different frequencies. Without considerable care and a whole lot of number crunching, this process will create audible artifacts. Artifacts mean that you are (perhaps unknowingly) crowding your mix with unwanted tones / frequencies. Many popular wavetable synthesizers are astonishingly bad at suppressing artifacts – even on a high-quality setting some create artifacts as high as -36 dB to -60 dB (level difference between fundamental on artifacts) which is well audible, and furthermore often dampening the highest wanted audible frequencies in the process, to try and suppress this unwanted sound. In Serum, the native-mode (default) playback of oscillators operates with an ultra high-precision resampling, yielding an astonishingly inaudible signal-to-noise (for instance, -150 dB on a sawtooth played at 1 Khz at 44100)! This requires a lot of calculations, so Serum?s oscillator playback has been aggressively optimized using SSE2 instructions to allow for this high-quality playback without taxing your CPU any more than the typical (decent quality) soft synth already does. Load up Serum and we think you?ll be able to notice both what you hear (solid high frequencies, extending flat all the way up to the limits of hearing) as well as what you don?t hear (no unwanted mud or aliasing gibberish- just good, clean sound).
MODULATION – WORK THE WAY YOU WANT TO
The modulation system allows for drag and drop connections between mod sources and destinations. Want an LFO controlling a filter cutoff? Simply drag the LFO title to the cutoff knob. This LFO->Filter connection will now appear in the Mod Matrix as well. In other words, you have two views/approaches for creating and modifying your modulations: sometimes a list is nice, other times you just want the job done fast and easy.
REALTIME WAVETABLE MANIPULATION
In addition to moving through the set of wavetables (up to 256 make up a single oscillator), you can manipulate the waveform itself in a separate realtime process referred to as Warp. This allows for FM/AM/RM/Oscillator Sync and many other ways to modify the waveform, including ?Remap? modes – a graph editor for drawing your own custom table manipulations.
FILTER TYPES
Serum includes all of the filter types found in LFOTool in addition to some brand-new ones. Flangers, Phasers, and Comb filters all of which can key-track to the musical note you play. Dual filter types let you control or morph between filter types. Get creative with atypical processes for filters such as downsampling, or the unique filter types found nowhere before, such as the dirty-sounding French LPF.
BUILT-IN SUITE OF EFFECTS
An effects rack with 10 effects modules lets you get your sound all the way to the finish line inside Serum. Effects can be re-ordered to any configuration you want. Virtually all effect parameters are also available as modulation destinations. This is especially useful on monophonic synth sounds. For example, apply an LFO to control reverb size or dry/wet, or velocity to control distortion amount. Many of these effects and modes were built just for Serum, so there are many unique effects to choose from, such as Hyper, which simulates (additional) unison amounts, or a dual-waveshaper which allows for a distortion you can morph between two separate wave shapes.
ADVANCED UNISON
Serum will let you stack a single oscillator to use up to 16 voices. Each of the wavetable oscillators have a number of unison advanced parameters. Stack settings allow for note (e.g. octave) layering to get a fuller sound for a single note-press. Set the unison voices to all have their unique waveform at once with the Unison WT Pos setting, or have them all skewed in a different way with the unison Warp control. A variety of unison tuning modes per-oscillator let you get the stack sound blooming or swarming like you want.
SPECS
Serum comes with over 450 presets, 144 wavetables.
Available as VST, AU, AAX both 32 and 64bit.
System Requirements:
CPU with SSE2 | Windows XP/Vista/7/8, or Mac OS X 10.6 or greater | VST2.4 , AU or AAX compatible host software.
1.04b4 Feb 7, 2015
?fixed: tooltip values for mod matrix curves in 1.04b3 were showing an incorrect value (-98 or -99)
?fixed: tooltip values were getting slightly cropped on right-edge in some situations (FX with mod destination depth)
?fixed: typeable values for FX controls were drawn in an offset location
?fixed: typeable values would not appear on knobs if a modulator was assigned+visible
?fixed: typeable values would not appear on some numeric displays
?fixed: typeable values were mistakenly appearing on shape selector on WT Editor
?fixed: potential crash pasting wavetables with voices active
?fixed: potential crash assigning mod sources from matrix menu with voices active
?added: poly aftertouch mod source
?added: new graphics library, this might have currently unknown issues on older OS?s or obscure hosts.
KNOWN ISSUES: no tooltips on windows, fx bypass by alt key is not working.
PLEASE NOTE (VERY IMPORTANT!!!):
1) presets/songs saved in 1.04b4 will not open in earlier versions of Serum due to the addition of poly aftertouch.
2) There have been a lot of changes under the hood to support new graphics libraries.
Sort of a bad ‘combo’ in the sense if the new graphics code is causing a “major” issue/nuisance, you may wish to revert back (though please tell me about the issue) However if you save, you won’t be able to reload that in the older Serum version. Therefore I would recommend to “save as..” on any songs/projects, just on the off-chance you want to revert back to 1.04b3 (though I doubt that will be neccessary, and prefer to move forward / and if something big comes up I will have b5 up ASAP).
While I don’t expect any issues (in fact it should be better if anything, and seems as such here) it is to be considered ‘beta’ software.
1.04b3 changes Jan 28 2015
?fixed: double-click tapeable values had additional issues (appearing when undesired, such as adjusting mod depths)
?fixed: unneeded gfx redraws if OSC1 was in dd mode and OSC2 was in 3d mode
?fixed: uneeded gfx redraw on VU meters if output is (near) silent
?fixed: wavetables now load + process 150{83c93de8c9bf92b09b526c8ece7da73c325d55368c444eba1a4531e14f6c453a} faster (preset loading benefits as well).
?fixed: stuck notes whilst changing wavetables
?fixed: FilterFX was displaying wrong Freq after preset change
?fixed: pitch bend on oscillators had the rare potential to shut down playback (100{83c93de8c9bf92b09b526c8ece7da73c325d55368c444eba1a4531e14f6c453a} meters, silent output)
?fixed: audible ?whine’ when changing between presets both w/subOsc ?direct out? and no notes yet played on new preset.
1.04b2 changes
?fixed the issue mentioned in this thread regarding pop-up typeable values obstructing some menus.
1.04b1 changes
?fixed a problem with arrow switches relating to double-click text values
?fixed a problem with the Velo/Note graphs relating to double-click text values
?some internal graphics changes to try and reduce/remove Yosemite graphics flicker.
BIG THANKS TO TEAM P2P
ENJOY
PLEASE SEED THANKS
Size: 28.92 MB
