Serum – Resample to Oscillator
2 min readSerum is possibly the most extensive sound design synth ever made. It’s ability to load wavetables, and even create them from samples provides endless starting points, NI Massive pales in comparison to the depth of wavetable editing that Serum offers. One limitation, or should I say, apparent limitation, is the presence of only two oscillators, plus a sub oscillator. This is where Serum gets deep. We can Resample the current patch to one oscillator to extend the range of sound we can create!
As you can see in the image above, we have a somewhat complex patch. Let’s assume that I have also spent half an hour tweaking all the FX and really like the sound I’ve made. What I can do is render the whole patch to one of the oscillators.
A few things to note:
- It takes a 1 bar sample of the sound, so you may want to tweak your LFOs to span one bar.
- It overwrites whatever wavetable you assign the render to, so make sure you save the wavetable if it is heavily edited.
- It simply renders to a wavetable osscillator. Any modulations on that oscillator need to be removed. You will also want to turn the filters, sub, and FX off because they aren’t turned off by default when you render. (Remember all of these are “sampled” into the new wavetable so keeping them on will double the effect.
Once you’ve resampled, you will see a bar’s worth of the wavetable. I normally then go into the editor and remove the latter half because it is normally all the same sound.
Once you’ve resampled, you can rebuild a whole new patch from scratch. You can resample as much as you want and really have infinite possibility!
