SERUM 2 Review

Xfer’s Serum 2 offers more oscillators, engines, filters, modulation effects and more. The highly anticipated sequel to Serum is here and there’s quite a lot to talk about. The updated UI is wider to fit everything and has a nice subtle polish compared to the OG version, hopefully we’ll see a Promethium skin at some point for this one. All presets are backwards compatible, so you’re not loosing anything by moving over to Serum 2, and all available packs will be usable as well. This is enabled via a “Serum 1 compatibility” toggle in the global tab to ensure exact replication, which leads me to believe some DSP is likely improved. There’s a lot of new stuff to unpack here, so this review will focus exclusively on what’s new, be sure to check out my Serum 1 review if you are somehow unfamiliar with Serum all together.

OSCILLATORS

First and foremost, we get one extra oscillator in Serum 2, this really opens things up quite a bit, especially when you consider all the FM routing possibilities. Furthermore, each oscillator now gets two simultaneous warp modes. I’m a huge fan of multiple warp modes or osc fx, having two or more in addition to wavetable position allows for multiple dimensions of sound design and motion. This can be especially pertinent when using any oscillator effects for subtle motion, as well as for opening up options when it comes to macros. There’s new warp modes added, including both FM and phase distortion and quite a few different saturation options.

What I am most excited for is the inclusion of new oscillator modes, no longer is Serum just a wavetable synth, now it is capable of multi-samples, granular and spectral synthesis. These new synthesis methods put Serum 2 into the more advanced world of Hybrid synths, being able to mix and match various synth engines gives new depth to preset creation and sound design. Even just using one at a time, these allow you to cover various sound styles and techniques all in one synth. At this point granular is fairly common in these hybrid synths, but spectral is quite exciting and rather rare.

Granular: The granular engine is fairly typical, it sounds great and clean with plenty of options for window shape. The density goes up to 30 grains with a length as low as 0 ms with 1 ms resolution. You get the normal randomize spread for all of the grain controls. What is less typical is still being able to use the two warps you’d find in the wavetable oscillator (which can also be randomized) as well as 16 voice unison if the 30 grain density wasn’t dense enough. The grain rate gets high into audio rates, but creating a keytracked curve was a bit of a challenge

Spectral: This is likely my favorite addition to Serum, I love spectral effects, and even less common, spectral resynthesis. Being able to combine this with the various engines in patch design allows for a new array of sounds for atmospheres and basses. This spectral engine has a pleasing blurry quality great for smooth textures and rich harmonic density. The included spectral filter lets you draw any filter curve to remove or boost frequencies. You can apply unison and the wave warps here as well, but there’s an additional inclusion of spectral warps unique to this engine. These can spread partials, boost harmonics, gate frequencies below a threshold, twist phases and even apply masks or vocoding from other oscillators. Enough otherworldly sound potential lies within this engine that it could be a powerful synthesizer all on its own

FILTERS

A few new filters have been added here, mostly various modeled filters, but the new disperser style “diffuser” filter is really fun, as well as the Comb 2 filter.
The real news here is a second filter. The difference between one and two filters is quite significant. Sometimes you really need to use one filter just to sculpt your tone, at this point you are left with little for motion.
A new mixer page has also been added to Serum 2, here you can set all your levels and panning, set various signal paths including filter balance per oscillator.

EFFECTS

The effects received a major overhaul, before Serum had one instance of each effect in a serial layout only. Now we get three effects channels, multiple instances of each effect

and multi-band or mid-side splitting paths. I’d like to have seen a parallel splitter as well, but the bus channels more than make up for this. Being able to arrange effects into various configurations and being able to load multiple instances of each effect is a massive improvement. Chaining copies of the same effect can lead to a wide array of experimental techniques. Also gain staging EQ and distortion will bring new levels of polish to presets.

A couple new effects have been added, as well as some new modes for the reverb. The new Bode frequency shifter is really cool, it has a delay built into the feedback path and even a blurring diffusion control. The addition of a convolution reverb is great, you can use this to create bodies for physical modeled instruments or to create realistic reverb environments on you patches. There’s a good amount of included IRs and the new reverb modes also make for a significant upgrade in reverb styles.

MODULATION

There’s been some changes to the modulation section, you can now use up to 10 LFOs, however, the chaos modulators from the original global section are missing. Instead we can switch any LFO to one of three chaos modes: Lorenz, Rossler, and S&H. Lorenz and Rossler are nice controlled chaos based on strange attractors, they each have separate X and Y modulation outputs. The new Path LFO mode lets you draw a vector path which produces X and Y modulation outputs, in effect this allows Serum 2 to be capable of up to 20 LFO sources.

The path and 2D chaos modulators are great for modulating LFO points. In the previous version of serum, LFO point modulation was nice to have, but often times you’d run out of modulators before even being able to utilize this feature to its full extent. Making the LFO point modulation even more exciting this time around is the modulation remaps, The feature that single handedly made me fall in love with Vital has found its way over to Serum 2. You can now remap any modulation, this means that so long as you plan to keep multiple LFO shapes at the same LFO rate, you can simply remap a simple ramp into as many LFO shapes as you desire.

ARP

Finally Serum 2 has added both an ARP and a midi clip player. Each of these have a key range that allows you to switch between various snapshots much like many Native Instruments synths. The arp is nice to have, and it’s vey fun to play with the snapshots while playing different chords to arpeggiate. It’s a feature I’ve seen before, but it just seems a bit more intuitive here.

The clip launcher though is incredible, being able to store melodies and rhythms into a preset makes Serum 2 almost more of a groovebox than a synth. I can imaging a setup with simply a few instances of Serum 2 and just using snapshot swapping to perform a set. It’s also worth mentioning each clip snapshot can contain automation for macros and even probabilities for note attributes. There is so much potential to be unlocked from this new clip system.

We’ve all waited a long time for Serum 2, and with so many Serum clones and alternatives making the rounds since the inception of the original, this version has a lot of competition. I think it’s a solid upgrade to a classic synth and in many ways is almost my perfect dream synth. While it is not a modular beast like Phaseplant, I actually tend to prefer these hybrid fixed layout systems. Extensive modulation, custom FX layouts, and multiple oscillator modes are the perfect playground for experimentation. The clip launcher and spectral oscillators will likely be the main reasons I return to Serum 2 often. I think Xfer really took this classic to the next level and modernized it significantly. If there is any feeling of let down or disappointment, it is that this upgrade isn’t as revolutionary as the introduction of its forerunner. I say this not as a criticism of Serum 2, but to praise Serum for it’s legacy, I point this out not to highlight it as any form of issue, but to soften the expectations that come from such high anticipation.

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