SERUM Review
I’ve put off this review for far too long, the one the only, the classic: Serum. Xfer’s Serum is the softsynth to change all softsynths, while many great plugins came before Serum, some design principals and a core set of useful features really cemented themselves into many future synths since the inception of Serum. This review is a little tricky, as I’m covering this one over a decade since its release such as Current and Pigments, and after seeing countless “clones” and synths inspired by Serum, including the free Vital and the massive PhasePlant. You are likely already familiar with Serum and in many ways it has been sort of a “benchmark” for all these synths since. So with this all in mind, I’ll keep this review fairly short and to the point as damn near everything that can be said about Serum has likely already been said by others.
Oscillators:
The core to Serum is a pair of very clean wavetables oscillators. These come with a wide variety of fun wavetables, particularly wavetables that excel at heavy and gritty bass. Each table also gets a phase distortion effect, these add another dimension to the oscillator control on top of the table position. Notably you can FM between tables for some aggressive distortion. Many synths have since improved upon this formula by offering a second oscillator effect or even more, but Serum really nailed this down. Serum gave quite a lot of control over the phase, tuning, and unison of each oscillator, letting you really dial in the character as you please. To add to all this, you even get a built in wavetable editor, something that is still not as common as many of us would like it to be.
I wont dive too deep into the editor, but it’s quite capable with frame by frame edits, drawable wave shapes and partials, a slew of tools and utilities and even a formula parser for the mathematicians out there. Being able to resample Serum’s output into a wavetable, then edit said table in Serum allows for recursive experimentation and endless sound design.
Filter:
Serum’s filters hold up to this day, with dozens of options to chose from that all sound incredible. You have the classics with modeled LPF, HPF, BPF etc. a wide variety of phaser and comb filters, effects like ring mod and sample rate reduction, and even the notorious Reverb filter. In more recent times a single filter seems incredibly limited, but even with the now standard dual filters fouun on most wavetable synths, I think it’s safe to say we all wish many of these serum options were available in these more modern synths.
Effects:
The Serum effects rack is quite cool, ten effects that can be rearranged in any order you please. They all sounded great, and there were many surprises hidden in these effects. For myself, this was the first time I saw effects controls as potential modulation targets. I can’t say if it had been done before, but seeing all of the effects as yet another set of controls to modulate was very exciting to me. For basses the phaser, flanger and chorus could be frozen, then modulated by LFOs to create custom motion rather than the traditional swirling. As well, having a multiband upwards compressor built into the synth meant you could polish up a sound before it even hits your channel strip.
Modulation:
This is where Serum really made sense for me, for one, the drag and drop system is quite fun and intuitive. No longer did I have to labor in the mines of modulation matrixes, I could simply drag and drop, almost like an invisible patch cable. The matrix is still available, and is sometimes necessary, but you could do nearly everything from the synth panel. On top of this luxury, the “MSEG” LFOs found in Serum were the first time I really enjoyed creating custom modulation curves. up until Serum I was used to endless scrolling MSEGs that hosted attack and release phases, they were always difficult to edit and really play with. While some will say Serum’s looping style LFO is more limited, these limitations really made it ideal for creating grooves and rhythmic motion. It’s dead simple to add steps or play around with your curve while keeping it synced to the beat.
At the time, 16 modulation slots was basically all I ever knew, Steve updated this to 32 at some point, and I’ve only rarely maxed out 64 in Vital, but looking back, 16 really kept you making sure you made the most of each modulator. Random modulation was almost a secret, requiring the use of the “chaos” controls found tucked away in the global tab. Recently the ability to modulate LFO nodes has been added opening some really wild motion shaping.
Serum’s UI was pleasantly laid out, with simple tabs, few menus, and distinct regions separating modulation from the sound engine. Xfer just simply nailed a lot with this one, and it’s difficult to give this a fair review, I almost think of this as more of a retrospective than a review as SO many new synths have come since. That said, you could still to this day make Serum your one and only synth and get by for most purposes. At least most wavetable related purposes. For awhile it was my go-to and I still reach for it for many things, namely for the wavetable editor as I find it has some still useful features not found in other editors. I wish I had more to say, Serum deserves a full review, it has been the synth I’ve personally compared all other synths to. This does mean that nearly every “Serum Style” synth I’ve reviewed offers at least something new without sacrificing too much.