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.

The post Five features in Serum beginners don’t know about appeared first on Audio Ordeal.

IT is entirely possible to build a synth out of a Raspberry Pi, the main hurdles are the limits of your imagination and your ability to tinker. For some, that will put them off and for others, it is a challenge. Whatever group you fall into, you’ll feel inspired by these amazingly geeky projects!

Using a Raspberry Pi as a synthesiser comes with some challenges – for starters, you need the code to generate the audio, secondly, you need to build a cool enclosure with lots of controls.

This list looks at projects of all levels. Some are DIY Raspberry Pi synths which you can build yourself, others are more of a one-off project without open source documentation.

READ MORE: Can You Produce Music on a Raspberry Pi?

The most recent Raspberry Pi (at time of writing) is the Raspberry Pi 4 which comes with significant performance boosts. I recommend you grab one of these as audio processing can be intense for such a small computer.

Alternatively, you could grab a Raspberry Pi Zero and go for an ultra-compact device at the cost of performance.

READ MORE: Can You DJ with a Raspberry Pi?

If you want to get more CPU headroom out of your Raspberry Pi to handle more powerful synth sounds, I recommend getting a cooling solution such as a fan and heatsink (the market is also kind enough to offer one with RGB). With additional cooling, you can overclock your Raspberry Pi and get a little bit more processing power out of it.

Toby Hendricks’s Raspberry Pi synth/looper

This is one of the coolest looking instruments I have ever seen, and it is all the more impressive that it is a DIY project.

In vibrant orange with an assortment of controls, YouTuber otemrellik AKA Toby Hendricks has made this awesome device.

This is one instrument I’d want on stage with me simply for the coolness factor, and that’s before the wide range of sounds are even created.

This is the kind of Raspberry Pi synth project most hobbyists dream of making. Also, otemrellik makes a lot of these videos of his various projects so definitely check them all out!

Build your own with a Zynthian kit

If you want the street cred of building your own Raspberry Pi synth, but the design prospects are daunting, you could do a lot worse than grabbing a Zynthian kit.

An Open Platform for Sound Synthesis, Zynthian is based on Raspberry Pi and Linux. What’s so great about it is that its hardware specification is public and software is open source. It is fully hackable!

UPDATE: some people report the Raspberry Pi cannot handle certain sounds in this kit. Will update more if more details arise.

If you get the bundle kit, all the parts are pre-soldered and you only need to plug the wires and screw the bolts. You don’t even need to solder anything!

A gorgeous FM touch synth

Unless you have goldfish memory, you’ll recognise this guy. Otemrellik returns to the list for another awesome project idea. In this one, he’s made a stunning touch FM (frequency modulation) synth with XY controls.

This synth offers a lot of expressive modulation control over the Y-axis and shows the sonic versatility available once you get tinkering.

NSuperSynth

This one’s a bit weird to describe. Made by Google, they say it is “an experimental physical interface for the NSynth algorithm”. It uses Magenta’s NSynth, Google’s neural network that generates sounds.

NSynth Super is part of an ongoing experiment by Magenta: a research project within Google that explores how machine learning tools can help artists create art and music in new ways.

All of the technology and design used to create NSynth Super is available as an open-source project.

The open-source version of the NSynth Super prototype including all of the source code, schematics, and design templates are available for download on GitHub.

Raspberry Pi guitar pedal

I know, it’s not technically a synth, or even an instrument, but having a Raspberry Pi as a guitar effects pedal would be a great partner for your Raspberry Pi Synth. You could plug them in together or kit out your whole band with at least one Raspberry Pi each for extra geek kudos.

What did I miss? Got a project you want added? Add your suggestions in the comments!

Disclaimer: this article contains external links to Seeed Studio

About Seeed Studio

Seeed is the IoT hardware enabler providing services over 10 years that empower makers to realize their projects and products. Seeed offers a wide array of hardware platforms and sensor modules ready to be integrated with existing IoT platforms and one-stop PCB fabrication and PCB assembly service. Seeed Studio provides a wide selection of electronic parts including Arduino  Raspberry Pi and many different development board platforms  Especially the Grove System help engineers and makers to avoid jumper wires problems. Seeed Studio has developed more than 280 Grove modules covering a wide range of applications that can fulfil a variety of needs. 

The post Raspberry Pi synth: A list of the coolest DIY projects appeared first on Audio Ordeal.

MUSICAL instrument makers Korg has announced a brand new $100 synth which you build yourself. The Nu:Tekt NTS-1 digital KIT is a unique, flexible, and easy DIY synthesizer that you can assemble, without any soldering. 

The NTS-1 is the first in a line of DIY synths from the manufacturer and will be officially released in November.

The first of its kind from KORG’s DIY-focused Nu:Tekt brand, NTS-1 packs a powerful synth and multi-effects engine into a compact form factor that you can carry and connect anywhere. Its DIY nature means it’s also very customizable.

NTS-1 is also completely compatible with their logue-SDK (which allows you to run custom presets with their other synth ranges), so it is possible to run any custom oscillator and effect content available for minilogue xd and prologue, or, create your own. 

They do note however that when using 3rd party plugins on the NTS-1, the content may sound differently than with minilogue xd or prologue, based on polyphony.

Despite its small size, this unit looks like it can deliver a good range of sounds, and while it won’t offer the flexibility of a full-sized keyboard synth, the limitations may allow for unique creative potential.

Korg has packed a large number of features into this $100 synth saying:

“Belying its size, the Nu:Tekt NTS-1 features a digital oscillator inspired by the MULTI engine as found on the acclaimed prologue and minilogue xd, along with an extremely capable arpeggiator including multiple ranges, scales, and modes, plus dedicated spatial, modulation, and delay sections, each with multiple settings to explore.

“With a single monophonic digital oscillator, one multimode filter, on EG, three LFOs, three stereo effect processors, and full arpeggiator, the NTS-1 is a very powerful, flexible, fun-to-explore synth.”

The whole DIY thing is a bit of a gimmick, with the main role of the building stage to assemble the pre-made parts.

This will give most users a sense of achievement when making the synth, but in reality, it won’t satisfy the itch of intermediate to hardcore circuit benders – unless they start tweaking beyond the manual that is!

Korg has also created a playlist of sounds made by the Nu:Tekt NTS-1 on their Soundcloud page.

The post Korg announce $100 Nu:Tekt NTS-1 DIY synthesizer appeared first on Audio Ordeal.