
After this lecture you'll now what the course is about, and you have all the resources necessary to follow along
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Explore the oscillator page in serum, customize skins, resize the interface, enable oscillators and noise, and navigate modulators, envelopes, velocity, notes, and glide.
Explore wavetable effects in serum, including oscillator syncing, bright harmonics, pulse width modulation, symmetry and flip, remap options, quantize, and fm/am/rm synthesis.
Explore serum's wavetable editor basics for subtractive synthesis, building up to 256 waveforms, editing oscillators a and b, visualizing harmonics, and shaping sounds via top and bottom windows.
Master morphing between waves with add/remove and crossfade, compare spectral morph to regular morph, and explore sorting and import/export options for wave management in Serum.
Learn importing and exporting audio in serum, using frame-based and ft methods to build wave tables from cycles and pitch changes. Compare zero-crossing and fixed-frame approaches, then export wave tables.
Create a wavetable from an image, apply slow LFR-driven modulation, and route through a multimode filter with macro control, X and Y axis lookback points, and looping.
Explore FM synthesis through Parsha-based frequency ratios to create harmonically rich, symmetric waveforms. Build evolving sounds with oscillator modulation, filters, envelopes, and effects like distortion and compression.
Explore serum's fx rack to craft a bass-focused sound by morphing wavetable content, applying multi-stage filters and modulation, and sculpting with distortion, compression, and rhythmic macros.
Create an organic, bell-like metallic sound using modulators, filters, spectral morph, and random note actions; sculpt harmonics, normalize levels, and add movement with envelopes and delay.
Explore how to analyze a preset in Serum using the modulation matrix, macros, and oscillators, then craft a sequenced sound with filters, envelopes, and effects.
When I think Serum, I think Synthesizer, because that's what it is. But I also think:
FM, AM & RM
Custom WaveTables
Text to Speech
Sampler
Math
Polyphonic Modulation
Joseph Fourier
Steve Duda ♥
Image Synthesis
Serum is seriously overflowing with cool features, many of which often overlooked, and some features not even documented.
This is what made me decide to make an advanced sound-design course, focussing just on Serum. And indeed, it turned out to be the most in-depth course ever created by me, or on Serum in general. At first I just wanted to focus on the Serum Guru's, those of you that already know and love the synth, and are enthusiastic about diving even deeper.
But then I realised, since it was going to be a big course anyway, I might as well include the basics, so that everyone who owns Serum can follow along. Because of this, the course is separated into three different levels, over 9 hours of content:
Level A - The Foundations (2.5 Hours)
Here you will find all the fundamental information required to understand the rest of the course, and subtractive/wavetable synthesis in general.
We talk about Oscillators, Waveforms, Basic Filters, Envelopes, LFO's, Note Modulators, Effects, etc.
Everything is explained in great detail, with plenty of examples and context to make sure that the topics really "click"
Watching this part of the course will provide you with a strong foundation on subtractive synthesis as a whole, and of course on Serum itself.
Level B - The Depths (3 Hours)
Here we descend into the depths of Serum, we explore custom Wavetables, Image Synthesis, FFT Bins/Additive Synthesis, Hybridizing, The Formula Parser, and much more! You'll understand this for example:
[sin(sin((abs(-2*x)-1)*pi*z)*pi)]
Math is really cool when you want to figure out the universe, but it's even better when you can use it to create custom Wavetables
Level C - The Experiments (3.5 Hours)
At this point you're going to have a very thorough understanding on everything that Serum has to offer, even more than the manual would offer. But, we also need examples.
So this last part of the course is designed to give you as many real-life sound design examples as possible, it serves as a creative cookbook for tons of delicious Serum recipes.
Among other things we'll dive into; using LFO's as Wavetables, creating organic sounds with the Noise Oscillator, Audio Rate Synthesis, Custom Tunings, and Polyphonic Modulation.