Serum

The more you learn about music production, the more tools you require to produce stuff. You will obviously choose your instruments according to the techniques that work best for your style, but you may often be tempted to learn and experiment with new techniques that not long ago seemed foreign to you.

Take for example wavetable synthesis, a technique that allows you to go really deep into creating and tweaking your sounds. Now, I may not be the best person in the world to explore this advanced technique, but I’m sure you could learn more about it once you get your hands on Serum.

Now, if you’re still new to music production, Serum probably shouldn’t be the first plugin in your arsenal. Not because it doesn’t have a user-friendly interface or plenty of presets that allow to start making music right away, but because you may need a bit more knowledge in order to get exactly what you want from it. And since we’re talking about one of the most popular synths in electronic dance music, you can at least guess that you can get Serum to do, well, a lot of things.

At its core are two powerful oscillators that allow you to tweak and morph wavetables anyway you want. A wavetable represents a series of single-cycle waveforms, and Serum’s interface offers of you an isometric view over these wavetables, allowing you to really see what’s going on with your sound.

Among other parameters which you can user are a filter, a noise module, three envelopes, and four low frequency oscillators. There is also a dedicated section for effects, where you can add delay, reverb, flanger, phaser, distortion, chorus et al to your sound design.

Finally, you can use the matrix if you want to start connecting all those modules in various ways. I’ve already mentioned that Serum is one of the most popular virtual synths in electronic music production, so I won’t be the one to disagree.