Five features in Serum beginners don’t know about

SERUM remains to this day one of the best VST synths on the market. It has a huge range of sounds and is one of the best synths to use for any genre of music.

Its popularity means that it has a huge amount of downloadable presets and wavetables but for those wanting to design their own sounds, they must learn the features of the synth.

This guide highlights five features that most people don’t know about when they first open Serum.

Make your own waveforms

One of Serum’s coolest features is that you aren’t limited to factory-built waveforms. If you click on the edit button in the oscillator window you are able to dive right in and edit the shape of the wave.

You have two options here, firstly there is the additive synthesis at the top, where you can add harmonics. The leftmost bar is the root frequency and as you move to the right, you add new, higher-pitched harmonics.

This is all great for experimenting, and if you spend some time, you can really learn the depths of how different waveshapes are made. Challenge yourself to make square or triangle waves to see what frequencies make them up.

Second is the actually wave drawing tool where you can add shapes as you please. This comes with a selection of shapes to choose from and you can edit the grid size to get even deeper control.

Remember, this is a wavetable synthesizer so you have a huge amount of different frames to play about with.

The morph menu is especially good because you can morph between different wave shapes to create complex wavetables.

Import samples

Serum lets you drag in WAV files to use as wavetables. It does this by dividing the sound up and lets you use Serum as a kind of sampler.

Do note that this won’t work as well as a dedicated sampler due to the nature of the wavetable synthesis, but if you sweep through the wavetable position you get a good approximation of the sound.

What this works best for is designing new sounds that might be beyond your reach.

Human vowel sounds (such as in the image above) can make cool synth presets and if you like a sound in a song, you can chop out the sample and reverse engineer it with your own flavour.

Render oscillators

Rendering oscillators is a great way to add depth to them. While Serum may seem limited with only one warp option per oscillator, you can render the warp and then add a new one on top to get whole new sounds.

You can also resample whole Serum presets into an oscillator to them build it up further. This removes much of the limitations that seem to be present at first glance when looking at Serum.

Turn pictures into sound

You can also load PNG images into Serum to create wavetables. Audio Ordeal has a brilliant guide on this if you are interested.

In the image above, I loaded the screenshot of Serum from the previous point and turned it into a wavetable. The dark parts are the low points on the wave, and the bright parts make the high points on the wave.

You can see in the rightmost corner of the wavetable that there is a rectangle that is quite flat. That is the white menu with the rendering options.

As mentioned before, check out the guide for more details.

Global settings

The global settings are a place that people rarely dive into, but this should not be the case.

You can change the default tuning to match unconventional instruments or if you’d like to tune to 432Hz, you can (Check this link here where Audio Ordeal debunks the myths around 432Hz tuning).

There are also cool tools like the Chaos settings which add a bit of variance to the sound and you can tweak a number of features to have microtonal pitch bends or full octave bends – whatever you desire!

Stack is another cool feature which allows you to stack oscillators on top of each other for much thicker sounds. Many advanced tutorials recommend you explore the stack options especially because they really broaden what is available in Serum.