Strolling through the collection, you’re left with an impression of shimmering uppers and rock-solid bottoms, peppered with razor-sharp leads. Equally impressive, though, are the hard, deep and cutting basses, plus more snappy ‘plucks’ than a harpist on speed. A quick perusal reveals a wealth of sweet pads and bright, fuzzy strings, as you’d probably expect. I doubt anyone will seek the manual with any great urgency.Īided by a crack team of patch designers, Serum ships with approximately 450 factory sounds.

I couldn’t even find fault with the grey background as it perfectly highlights the subtly coloured wavetables, filters, envelopes and LFOs. Given the number of messy, confusing and inconsistent synth panels I find myself juggling each day, this one is a delight.

Plain & SimpleĪfter a brief and pain-free installation, you’re presented with an interface of unparalleled directness and welcoming clarity. It ships with a large vault of prepared wavetables and an extensive toolkit to roll and shape your own. Perhaps because of the potential for complexity, it’s a synthesis type well-suited to the graphical world of VST-land, hence the many examples that exist, trumping the older hardware in fidelity and in the number of wavetables.Īvailable in VST, AAX and AU formats (both 32- and 64-bit), Serum is much deeper than its unencumbered panel implies. Movement and tonal complexity are introduced by scanning the table, either manually or by modulators such as LFOs and envelopes. The distinctive sound is derived from groups of digital waveforms, known collectively as wavetables. Wavetables were first developed by Wolfgang Palm of PPG, the concept later taken up by Waldorf and Access (amongst others). Its aims are simple: to be a ‘dream synth’, which in this case translates to a wavetable synthesizer producing high-quality sound from a ‘workflow-oriented’ interface. Serum is the first synthesizer from Xfer Records, creators of the enduringly useful LFO Tool. Serum’s slick interface belies an extremely flexible wavetable synthesizer.

It doesn't take long to find what you needed to do to start creating new sounds, and navigation is straightforward and relatively simple. After opening Serum for the first time and typing in my serial number, one is treated to the Oscillators panel displaying a standard saw wave display. Octave) layering to get a fuller sound for a single note-press.

Each of the wavetable oscillators have a number of unison advanced parameters. Serum will let you stack a single oscillator to use up to 16 voices. Software >Synthesizer, Virtual Instrument.

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