Sound Design in Serum

This term I want to really improve my sound design. The genre I want to produce, drum and bass, focusses heavily on creating unique sounds that make the producer stand out. The synth that is mostly used in the industry is Xfer's Serum (https://xferrecords.com/products/serum), so this what I will use. I want to be able to understand what each of the knobs and settings do, so I can confident inside of the synth. My end goal is to be able to create a bank of serum presets made by myself, to use in my future productions and create a tutorial explaining how I made the patches. I also want to make basslines that are powerful and similar to artists I aspire too, like Hybrid Minds, Kanine and Subsonic. I am going to achieve this by watching a multitude of youtube tutorials of how the synth works and examples of patches to reverse enginner to understand how the sound works. Here are some examples of tutoirals I will watch.

week 1

This week I have started looking at the basics of Serum and learning about all the different aspects too it. This includes the ocilasitors, which is the part of the synth that creates the sound. On this digital synth, this is stored as a wavetable. According to this website, https://blog.landr.com/xfer-serum/, wavetable are "a method of generating sound based on a single sampled waveform expressed as a table of values." There are so many to choose from in Serum, as well as making your own. You can also change the unison, how mnay of that sound wave is beng played and other minor addjustment knobs that I do not really understand just yet. Serum has two occilators, a sub and a noise generator. Serum also has a filter to control the sound produced by the wavetables. These could be low pass - only allows the low end through, a high pass - only allows the high end through, or a band pass - allows only a "band" of frequencies through, high or low. These can be controlled with wet/dry mix, cutoff, fattness and drive. Serum also has an envolope, this controlls the sound by changing the ADSR. This website perfectly explains what that means with audio examples, https://www.musicianonamission.com/adsr/. It says that the Attack is how long it takes from the key being pressed to reaching it's peak volume. The Decay is how long it takes for the sound to reach it's secondary volume. The Sustain is how loud the secondary volume is, this is the only parremeter that is not measuerd in time. The Release is how long it takes for the sound it fade out after the key has been let go. Serum also has an LFO, Low Frequency Oscillator, which is used to modulate different parameters of the synth. It is unaudible, and just contolls differnt parts of the synth.This works by drawing a pattern and then dragging it onto a parameter, such as the filter cut off or wet/dry of an effect. This allows the sound to have movement and makes it much more intresting. The final crucial part of Serum is the effets section. Here you can add things suvch as distorsion, EQ, reverb and compression. An advantage of using the effects in the synth instead of external plugins is so that they can be modulated by the LFO. Below are some photos of Serum. Next week I want to start making my own sounds by watching Youtube tutorials on how the synth lines are made by my favourite producers.

week 2

This week I watched a tutorial on Youtube on how to make the lead/bass preset for Kanine's tune - "Higher". Here is the original tune.

Below is the video I watched to learn how to make the patch. It ws really intresting and taught how to pitch one of the ossiclators up seven semitones, to create a perfect 5th, which makes the synth sound thick and full. I then too what I learnt from the video, and experimented to make it sound unique to me. A way I did this was modulating an EQ bell curve. This sweeped throug certian frequenices, boosting them which created intresting textural harmonics. I also mapped the distortion amount to the LFO which gave the sound movement and made it sound gritty. I then saved the preset, and created my own bassline using them. I've added drums and created this very basic sixteen bar loop. Screen shots of the presets and the basic tune can be found below.

Next week, I want to dive to dive deeper into the oscillators and understand what the differnt warp modes mean.

week 3

This week I delved into all the different warp modes inside of Serum. I have watched this Youtube video to understand what each mode does.

After watching the video, I have defined what each of them do, so I can refer to them in the future if I forget.

• Sync - Increasing it creates a repeat of the waves, this leads to the sound sounind brighter and higher pitch.

• Sync Window - does the same thing but sounds much cleaner as it fades off the end

• Bend+ - makes the sound "thinner", and called the "black hole effect" as it pulls the wave in on itself, manipulaing the wave table. Really nice for movement in sound.

• Bend- - does the same as Bend+ but the opposite, it makes the sound thicker and give the sound some body.

• Bend+/- - combines the two together. Turn it too the left makes it thinner, the right makes it fatter.

• PWM - Pulse Width Modulation. Most commonly used on square waves. It pushes the sound to the left. Good for modulating, makes the sound gritty. 

• Asym+ - shifts the wave to the left.

• Asym- - shifts the wave to the right.

• Asym+- - combines the two together. All of these work really well to modulation and too add movement to your sound.

• Flip - Phase inverts the wave, by flipping it upside down. On Serum is does not sound too good as the transition does not sound too clean.

• Mirror - puts a mirror line on the wave and inverts it. The further the knob is turned, the more to the right the mirror line is. Works really nice for dubstep and movement

• Remap  - shaping the wavetable. Allows for custom wave tendencies, transitions from the wave table selected into the one tat has been created.

• Quantise - distorts and reduces the quality of the wavetable.

• FM - Frequency Modulation is one of the hardest warp mode to understand. Basically it uses one signal, from one of the wave tables, called, the “modulator” to modulate the pitch of another signal, the “carrier”, that’s in the same or a similar audio range. This creates brand new sound with a different timbre without the use of filters.

Since learing this, I have but some of them into use by creating my own patch. I have created a dubstep-esk growl bass using FM warp. I have also added lots of effects, some noise, modulated an EQ bell curve (a trick I learnt in Week 2), and other than that it has been lots of trial and error. Turning random knobs, seeing if it improves the sound, if it does I keep it, if not I put it back. Here is two gifs of the patch, to show the modulation and a bounce of the sound I created.

Next week, I am trying to arrange to meet talented producer Bare Up, either in person or virtually and hope that he can share some of his wisdom with me.

week 4

This week I jumped onto a Zoom call with Bare Up. He is a really talented music producer from Devon, who has had releases with Murdock's Rampage Records and Sigma's Beats Bass Life record labels. I really rate his sound desgin, espically for his bass sounds. They sound gritty and punchy, whilst still being clean enough to have a clear melody. Here are some examples of his music.

In the call we talked about how he makes his tunes and utilises Serum in his workflow. He went through how he makes his patches, while giving me some advice on how I can make my own sounds. He talked about how he immediately brings the octaves down and brings up a saw tooth wave, to create the distorted, narly sound. He often keeps the unison to one, and only adds more when the sound needs thickening, often to fill the space of a song when no other melodic instruments are being played. One of the most important things he said to me was to use the noise oscillator, in particular white noise. This adds dirt to the sound. I have taken these ideas and created my own patch in the style of him. I made it mostly by messing around, trying out different wavetables, drawing in an LFO to modulate the wave table postion and modulate last weeks warp mode, FM. Here is the bounce of the patch I made from scratch, as well as a GIF of the patch. The first is without white noise, the second is with. I much prefer the version with because it sounds much more gritty and dirty, which is the sound I am trying to recreate. It is such a good tip!

week 5

This week I have found Serum skins online to make synth look cooler. I learnt how to add them and install the right ones from this website, https://blog.landr.com/serum-skins/. I have also delved into the FXs, Matrix and Gobal tabs in order to understand them at a deeper level. Inside of Serum, there is lots of bulit in effects that sound really good. A bonus of having them inside the synth is so that they can be manipulated by LFOs and filters in Serum. I personally really like the distortion that it has, it really adds some really narly texture and harmonics, without causing any digital distortion that ruins mixes. It also allows to add a filter pre or post the distortion, which is shown in the photo below, so you can really tailer the sound to your liking and gives you the choice to decided if their are some freqeuncies you do not want to distort.

Another cool effect in Serum is Hyper/Dimension, it acts as a really cool artificial widenting tool to make sounds sound thick and have much more pressence. The core effect that most people use inside Serum is the multiband compression. This comes from the third party plugin OTT, made by Xfer as well. According to this website, https://www.productionmusiclive.com/blogs/news/explained-ott-compressor, OTT stands for Over The Top compresion and the main idea of using it is it pushes the loudest parts of your sound down while pushing the quietest parts up in volume. The result is no dynamic range and an extremely squashed sound. It can be used on lots of different insruments: drums to make them sound thicker and crunchy, bass to pump the dynmaics or analog strings to make them sound much brighter. Below is a synth string patch with normal compression and one with OTT compression. The second has a much brighter, pleasent tone.

After messing about on my own, I have worked out what the Matrix tab does. It allows for modulations to be programmed much more mechanically. It allows you too set the source of the modulation, the destination (what the modualtion is going to effect) and the amount that it will change by. It is really useful because it allows you to change paramters that can not be altered otherwise, such as the master tune. Here is a screen shot of the Matrix on a bass patch of mine.

I have used what I have learnt here into practise to make some patches of my own. First is a bell sound. I have included two effects, reverb to put the sound in a space and make it sound atmospheric and a slight bit of delay that is set to ping-pong mode so that it pans from left to right every 1/4 beat. The envolope has a quick attack, decay and release, which gives it the instant hit that is ctrucial when creating any sort of lead. Synths with long attacks would be much more suited towards pad sounds. Here is a GIF of the patch and a bounce, with an arpeggio.

Next week, I hope to meet up with a year two student who is a drum and bass producer called TAWK and learn from what he does when makeing his patches inside of Serum.

week 6

This is such a cool tip!! He also showed me how to manipulate wavetables to make them sound unique and to add different harmonics too. This can be done by pressing on the little pencil icon in the corner of the wavetable. It brings up this window in Diagram A. After some messing around, I came up with this wave. It is still a sine wave, just with my own personal harmonics in order to make it unique, this is scene in Digram B.

Using this technique, combined with some LFO modulation on the volume and on the cut off of the "Combs" filter, plus some basic effects such as reverb, I have made my own "Jump-Up style" bass wob. Here is a bounce and a screenshot of it.

We then went on to start on making a tune that could be used for my FMP. It is a bootleg of "Do I Wanna Know?" by the Arctic Monkeys. We have alreday used my Bare Up-ish reece bass init and I feel it is going to be really good!! Overall, getting in the studio and just watching somebody use the synth I want to use, while making sounds I want to make, was really helpful. I was able to ask questions when I needed too and learnt so much more from it than I would have by watching YouTube videos.

To sum up, I am really proud of how far I have come using Serum. I started of knowing very little to now understanding what each setting does, learning from different experts and starting to curate my own presets to use in the future. I would of maybe liked to make other things that were not just bass presets, but that will all come in time, I now just need to keep practising and perserving with this skill to fully master it.