Serum In Depth

1. Intro: All right. Welcome to a in depth beginner serum tutorial. I'm actually filming this introduction at the end of recording. It took me out last few weeks of just banging it out. So it's a monster. I have a little script here of things I want to say at the beginning. It is a monster, but it is. It is beginner monster status. Meaning I'm I'm literally going through every knob and telling you what it does with an example. So if you want to learn this and you want to learn everything pretty much everything about it, this is gonna be the tutorial for you. I thought I'd mention some stuff. I've been posting tutorials on here for a while. This one will be cut, jump cut together because it was so much information. Also, just so long that it was, It would have been impossible for me to do it like off the dome. So I fixed. I'm fixing the volume issues in the past. That's the one of the biggest things I've been getting on. My videos are if they're like all we liked it, but I couldn't hear it very well. It's because I wasn't maximizing volume at the end. So I'm gonna run all this tutorial through a premier and get all that volume even doubt, because I know that's probably frustrating. Uh, let's see. So two things I want to mention I'm not covering. I'm not covering the wave editor. So all this I'm not going to cover because this tutorial is already super long, and that is a very advanced section of the other thing. I'm not going over is every single knob of every single effect. So just be aware that this is literally every knob on the front here how the effects work, how this whole matrix work and how automation in general works. And then all these global settings and then the menu, a few key commands. I wanted to go over the beginning. I This whole tutorial, Siri's. I will be double clicking to reset knobs so you'll see him jump to zero. That's in the global. That's a global option. So by default, this is not active DoubleClick for, uh, no double click reset. Yeah. So by default, you would have to control click, I think command, Click on on Mac to reset your knobs. So if you want to have that feature available. It's in the global. I do go over the global at the end, but not that setting. That's kind of the all the disclaimers, all the info about it. But if you want to learn everything about serum to ah, really, really solid degree, this is gonna be the destroy all for you. Thanks for coming around and let's let's get it going. 2. Preface: all right, So before we jump in, I want to quickly talk about what serum is serum is a wave table sent, and it's a subtract of synth wave table means instead of loading one wave per oscillator like let's say you loaded up a sine wave, it would be, This is this is going to allow us to morph between different waves on one oscillator, and so it's really powerful. At its simplest, you'd have, like you could do, ah, sine wave to assault wave, put them on one oscillator and then morph between them. But you can draw in a bunch of waves. You can have 100 waves and more between all those. It's really up to you. So a lot of power there. Some things I personally like about it, which I have heard that other people enjoy to, is gonna be things like the unison modes. So you get some big, wide sounds really modern big sound. There's a bunch of filters, whole bunch of filters that are really cool. The effects are all really high quality. The since just sounds good. And also for me, especially, it's it's visually easy to follow everything you Dio Almost everything you do in this synth has a animation along with it. So when you're filtering stuff, you can see how what it's doing. How your knob turns are affecting everything, which is great. It's it's really nice. I wanted to separate this section out because it's kind of, I guess, a little bit of opinion. It's things I like, who'll features blah, blah, blah. But now you kind of get an idea of what we're working with. So if you're into sound design, this is actually what you want to learn. We'll start talking about the actual knobs in the next video, so keep on going. 3. Oscillators: We're gonna start turning knobs now. Quick side note. Later in the video or at any point when I turn up the unison, it can start to distort. You'll hear some distortion, the playback. That's just because of the screen capping and running things through video Softwares and all that stuff. It's it's not. Yours shouldn't be distorting. That's what I'm saying. And just be aware it doesn't actually sound bad. It's just the representation. So we're gonna start up here. We have 1234 tabs. 1st 1 is going to say OSC, this is our oscillator tab. This is what drives our sound. Next, we have effects, which is where we're gonna find all our cool effects. We have our mod matrix. So this is controlling our modulation, which I'll get into later. And then we have our global settings. Cool. So we're starting right here at LSC on our oscillator tab to the right, you have the little save button, A little floppy disk, E. I guess some people haven't seen a floppy disk, but that's a floppy disk. This is going to save a preset. If you make a bunch of sounds and you make a cool sound you like. You can save it there to the right of that we have a menu. It says in it, which were in the initial preset. If you click this, you can search through all the presets that they have. So that's super cool. Pick all the sounds play around. It is where I started is listening in on each sound to the right of that we have cycling buttons, which is the same thing as clicking in here and saying, Oh, I want to pick that sound. This is the same thing is just left and right. That's really cool. Next up we have this button here. It looks like a little an actual image of a menu. This is gonna be our sound organizer, and you can write your sounds pretty cool. You can. There's categories play around with that same thing as searching through here just in a different view. Then we have our big menu. I'm hitting this, innit? Preset a lot. This this button just so I have everything back to normal. That's why I keep doing that. And I'm gonna go into the menu later to the right of that, we have our master volume. So this is our master for our whole sense, for the whole plug in itself. And then we have a level representing some of these presets. Come in super hot and they'll be redlining. You can just turn them down here. Great. That's top menu. Now here it oscillator a and we're gonna start at the top. The first thing you see is a blue toggle box, and this is going to be activation frost later. A. So if we play this right now, the initial patch waken here this saw wave playing If I press this, if I deactivate oscillator A we won't be able to hear anything. Because oscillator A was the only thing making sound in the center. We need an oscillator active to hear anything. That's what their job is. They generate the sound. We're gonna leave oscillator active, and they were gonna move down from here. You see this box right here? This area, if I click on that, it's gonna be similar to the menu up here. We have an option. We have a bunch of options for wave tables. So we got in log digital spectral user, vowel, a whole bunch. And that's part of the reason to center. So cool. We got a bunch of cool wave tables and we could make your own. You can either choose one here. Let's just pick 40 88 cause the 1st 1 But we also have the option to just go left and right with these buttons. Cool, Super easy. Next we have this this area and there's gonna be our pitch control first option. We have active says O C T this box so we can drag this up and down for an incremental jump in active, great up and down. And then next we have it, says ECM. So this semi tones. So there's a up and down 12 semi tones, which is inactive, incremental, and the next we have find Teoh. So this is up and down 100 cents, and there's 100 cents in a semi tone, so it's just a further breakdown. The next box we have is called course pitch. These three kind of go together and then course pitch is just another way to do a similar job. It's a smooth track between the pitches, so let's listen. The reason this is here is so we can have that option to glide smoothly through our pitches instead of always having to choose. You know, active semi tone increments. It's that we don't always want that really harsh jump. So it's nice to have that extra control of the course page. Cool. So let's move down to this visualization here. You can see this is our 40 88 wave in R two d two d mode. So we just see the current way that's active. If I click on this box, we could see the wave table. So this is the three D view. This is the whole 40 88. We've table. I'm gonna go into what that is. Side note I mentioned We're not going into the logistics of it. But if you click this pencil, it'll take you into the Wave editor, which, like I said, it's It's a whole thing. I could make another tutorial on it, but I think it could use its own tutorial. That's how intense it is. So I'm gonna keep this on R two D just to make it easy. Great. So it's the first half of this oscillator, so we've worked through All right, so let's look down at this unison box. And right now it's at one. What this is doing is controlling are voicing when our unison is set toe one. That means we have one voice perky and one voice perky means when I prosecute down thats wave is playing one time. If I increase this number, though, let's go to five now when I press one key, this offer is playing our way of five different times. Sounds a lot different. Waken Keep going Weaken Goto higher numbers. When you increase this unison number, your CPI is going to take a bigger hit, but you get a really cool sounds. That's the balance there. If we look right, we can control us a little bit. Right now we have a D tune, we have D to knob and it's at halfway set to halfway by default. I'm gonna pull this down Now we have five voices with no details, So all five boys are having their playing the same pitch. If I increases determine what we're going to do is give each voice a little bit different pitch you can you really hear when you turn on the knob, but that's gonna spread him out and give them their own space. Next to the right is our blend knob, and there's going to mix our center voice or voices with our side voices. When our blend is that sent all the way it zero we have our central voice very prominent on . We can barely hear our side voices. If I bring this up to 100,000 weaken. Mostly here are side voices and not so much here. The central voice. The thing to note about this is is with the unison. If you have an odd unison value, you're gonna have one central voice like this five. If you haven't even unison number, you're gonna have to central voices. It's gonna be a little bit different sound. Just be aware of that. Even a nod matters great. So that's are using control. I'm going to resettle this stuff as we move on to just make things clear. So back to the normal moving right. We have a phase and random knob. I'm gonna pull this random, not down for now, and we're gonna talk about the phase. So what this knob does is going to allow us to choose where we want to start our wave when we pressed down a key If you imagine these waves air cycling really, really fast, we get to control where we want to start. You can see this when you press down this this knob, a yellow tracking bar pops up and that's gonna be our selection point. You can choose where you want and then with the random knob is is going to be increasing arranged. So we have a arrange. That serum will pick a random spot to start our wave. So let's look at that. So it's at 0% and it's just where we chose. And as I increased this knob, we're getting a a lighter yellow area. This could be useful if you have phase cancellation and some waves air cancelling each other out. I'm not gonna go into that right now because I want to continue on with this tutorial, but it's nice to have, and I would encourage you to go look up kind of what phases and how things can cancel out. It's another topic that's these two phase and random. Great. So let's look at this wave tail position knob next. This knob is huge. I personally and turning this knob all the time when I'm designing a new sound. What this wave table position knob allows us to do is track through our wave table. If you remember, I b, I keep saying that the wave table since let's pick a wave, they will block all that. This is what's controlling that. Let's listen here and let's look through the two D view first. A lot changes in the sound, and you can see the wave is actually changing as we turn this knob, if you want to think about it. In that way, it's most simple. Imagine it's transitioning between two different ways. There's options for more and weaken make really complex wave tables. But that's the, I think, the simplest way to think about it. So let's let's do it again with the three D view so you can see it in this way as well. Theo, that's pretty cool. We can see how it's changing in what the shape looks like in that three d view. Let's move right from there. I'm gonna switch back to the two D view just because I think it's easier this is gonna be our warp knob. And by default, this work numbers off. What this is going to do is it's a further change in our current wave. It's not a wave to a position knob. It's a modifier for for our wave. Let's click in here. There's a big menu of a bunch of different things we can pick. Let's do what's do Bend because, yeah, it's picked Bend because it's not changing anything right now. So we picked a bend mode. We picked a wart mode. They all do different things. And that's important to note. Let's watch real quick. You see, when we turn this bend mode up, its squished the wave in. If you'll notice, though, if we go into three D View and we turn this knob, it's not gonna change anything. We can only see the effects of this in the two D in two D view. Great. Moving right. Really easy pan and level pan. We're gonna choose where we want our sound in the stereo field left and right, and then level volume. Great. That's gonna be oscillator. A The cool thing about knowing oscillator A is. Now we know oscillator bia's. Well, we just cut our learning in half. Now we're gonna look left at this sub and noise oscillators. They're all oscillators mean. They're all sound generators. The sub and the noise are gonna be a little bit different. They're gonna be simpler and therefore easier to understand a little bit quicker. So we got the hard ones out of the way. That's great. Let's look at this sub. This sub oscillator right here is designed to help us create a frequency below the sound we're currently designing. It can give us a nice beef to our sound. Nice support and it can be used to get a nice, clean fundamental to Let's activate this first things first we got the activation. Their great Let's listen in here a sine wave sign away for our sub oscillator directly to the right of that, we have a direct out button. So this direct out button when it's active means that our sub oscillators going to skip the filter. It's going to skip our effects and it's gonna come directly out the output. Let's say we have a sound we've designed, like oscillator, and also later be are going. They have this filter modulation. They're doing some webs. We got phasers on stereo effects. All this stuff we've done all in on our on our patch. We don't want our low frequency r r sub frequencies always to be affected by those kind of effects. You know, a lot of times we want to clean low and we want to controlled low end. We don't want it pushed out in the stereo field we wanted just centered. Nice foundation. This direct out button is useful for getting that clean sound getting that controlled sound . So it's an option you have there. Directly down from there. You can see the 1236 wave shapes we have for us up. So here's where it's a simpler We don't have these wave tables, these crazy wave designers, but we don't really need that. We just want this little bit of control so we can pick a nice wave shape for our sub and then run with it from there. Next is octave control, so the only pitch control we have for this oscillator is a knock tive. This could just help us lock down where the where we want this frequency to be located. You could get a super low sub base or you can just get maybe one octave below. Just beef up to sound a little bit. That's what this is here for. But like I said, there's no fine to know. Course pitch. It's just the octave. Next we have easy pan and then level. How loud is it? Great. We got those down. Here's a quick example. Here's with oscillator A on, uh, let's drop the activewear way. Just really simple way. Got that. That frequency below the sound were designing. That's what it's useful for. The last oscillator we have here is our noise oscillator. The noise oscillator has a a bunch of different sounds in it, like stuff like in harmonic stuff like like wind chimes and white noise kick attacks. A lot of cool stuff. This could just help us further customize our sound, get some unique stuff. There's a lot of useful things we can do with it. So let's activate this. Take a listen. If we turn this up a little bit, you hear that kind of white noise occurring? Great. Down from there, we have a menu like the other menus. We've seen. We can either click here to get a drop down menu of all our different noises or we can cycle through with the arrows. Cool. So down from there we have to toggles. We have a a narrow and this toggle is gonna be one shot mode. The default mode is not going to be in one shot mode arse noises going to cycle. So here's an example. If we pick it kick attack, kick attack one, This is should be a kick drum the tick of a kick drum. You know, by default if I play this, it sounds like a weird, creaky door or something. Doesn't sound like a kick drum. The reason is, is we're not in one shot mode. So our noise oscillator is cycling like our other oscillators Dio That's that kick noise over and over and over again. Super fast. If we want to do something like give our patch a kick transient, we gonna want to activate one shot mode. Now let's hear it. Great. Now we just get that one tick that click, and it's gone. That's what this one shot mode is useful depending on the type of noise, something like your white noise. You wouldn't want that to, you know, loop and cycle. But something like your kick attack a short transient. You don't want that to cycle like that at all. That's what that is. The next thing down we have is a picture of a keyboard with a toggle, and this is going to be our key tracking. So right now I'm actually going to take this out. We're gonna get back to that creaky door sound. But if I click through on the keyboard thing, it's the same noise on every single key. We can change that if we want. This is going to enable pitch tracking. So it's going to act more like our other oscillators that when we play a different key, it's gonna play something different. Let's keep it in one shot mode, next phase and random. So we had the phase and random knob from her oscillators. Remember, we talked about what that means that the phase knob allows us to choose where we want our oscillator to start. This is actually a little bit Ah, very clear example. Right now, our phase is set to the beginning of our sound. You can see it's the knob is turned all the way down. So it's going to start at the beginning of our sound and we're in one shot mode with this kick attack. So we get that whole clique if we track farther into our sound. Now we're starting 50% the way through our sound. If you imagine a kick drum is a very short sound, we're not gonna hear very much at all. We don't hear anything. It's too far in because if you imagine the kick hits and then it's like Sorry, this is in the way the kick hits and then it's gone. So we want we really do want to start right at the beginning of this kick so we get that full effect. If we start back here during a tale, we don't hear anything, so that's actually a really clear example. And then the same thing. We have a random knob weaken, turn this up and have serum pick a random area from a random area to start our sound with the kick drum. We're gonna hear some in here and not the It's the other parts cool. That's phasing random. Next, we have a pitch knob. Actually, let's turn this off. This is just picking the beginning pitch of our sound, so that's pretty straightforward. If you want to drop that kick sound down a little lower, you can do that if you want really high, like white noise or something just so it really sits in that top end, you can pitch, pitch it however you want next pan and level. So Pan left and right level volume. We know that. And then So that's the noise. Oscillator done. We've gone through all of the OSCE layers, all the things that are generating noise. Sorry, generating sound we've covered. That's great. That's a huge chunk of the synth knocked out, and now we really understand a big part of this synth. Next up, we're going to talk about the filter, and then we're gonna continue on from there. So keep going 4. Filter: we got our oscillators done. Gray Oslo A B sub and noise. We know what all these do. We know what the sound generators do in our synth. Where these air going to go next is right right over to this filter right here. So we're going to start at the top of work our way down. The first toggle is going to be our filter enable. This is gonna turn our filter on it off. Let's listen to this real quick thes sound pretty used to here and now when I activate the filter, you can hear this particular filter. The default low pass is gonna roll off that top end. You can hear it pop into action there. All right. Next is gonna be a menu similar to these other menus. If you click on this menu here is you're gonna get a drop down menu and then this is lists of all your different filters. There is a whole bunch in here definitely play around with ease. But the other nice thing is, there's a lot of variations of the simpler filters. Super nice. A lot of ah, a lot of sense will have, you know, maybe six filters, and that's it. So that's part of the reason. I think the Synthes so cool is there's there's so much to play with here. Great. So now we know how to click their weaken do same thing. We got the arrow keys here. A tractor like that. Let's keep it on the Yeah, let's keep here. All right. Next we have a little picture of our filter. What we're gonna do is if you click on this real quick side note, if you click on the picture, it's going to switch to this green image, and this is going to show us the phase shift that's occurring where this filters active. I'm not gonna go into that. I just wanted to let you know that that's a feature you can see. It's it's the math behind how these filters work. Cool. Next down we have 12344 toggles and I'm gonna talk about the 5th 1 last. But these four toggles are all going to be similar. So you see a, B, n and s. We've worked with a B NNS That's oscillator a oscillator be our noise oscillator and herself Oscillator. This is really simple. You know how we activated the filter? This is just activation for each oscillator. Nice bit of control there. Like I mentioned with the sub oscillator. Sometimes you don't want your sub frequencies to be influenced by the the filters. So this is another area where you can control that instead of just hitting a direct out. So that's really cool. Let's listen real quick way Have the filter active. We have a active Well, if I activate oscillator, be no. Here it comes in really loud. It's not being affected by this filter at all. Ah, cool. Really straightforward. Just toggles on and off. You've got to be active with the corresponding oscillator to have it affected the filter effect, the oscillator. Great. So this last toggle right here, this picture of a keyboard is going to be key tracking for our filter by default. This is off. And if you see, I go up and down the keyboard, thief filters just sitting where it's at. Sorry. Let me d I'm deactivate that the filter is not moving. It's just sitting where it's at. But if I click this on our filters, gonna follow the keys. You see it's opening up as we go up the keyboard and then shutting down as we go down. That's nice for a more expressive synth. All right, so let's look at these six knobs now. First off is gonna be cut off. What cut off is controlling the frequency at which are filter is working for this low pass . What that cut off is going to be is where our filter starts to roll off the high end on other filters. It'll do something different, but that's just what this cut off knob is doing. So let's take a listen. Let's turn it so you can hear its opening up and shutting down, and if you hold it, click and hold. You can see what what frequency they cut office set at. You go all the way down. Eight hurts all the way up to, you know, 22 k Nice, cool. So that's that's gonna give a lot of your like clubs and your go. A lot of cool expression can come from modulating this. This value here next right is going to be our resonance. This is related to the cut off what the residence is going to be is a boost of the signal at our cut off point. Let's listen to what this sounds like. So this is with no resonance on. I'm gonna pick this residence way. Heard a little bit of change. You see this big spike here? Let's move the cut off now and listen. Sorry. It's probably really aggressive. Let me turn it down a little bit. You can get crazy with this one. You really hear that? How that filters affecting the sound as we track up and with the cut off, if you pull this cut off down with a low pass, it's a more transparent filter. But once you start bumping that residence, making that wow sound and you can really hear the effects of the filter there, that's what the residences. Let's keep this down. I was set it up right? All right, Next is going to be a pan. This is a new interesting Na bit's going to be a cut off offset. It's not just a left right pan. It's going. What it's going to do is when it's centered. We have our filter affecting our sound, just exactly at the cut off. How it is, how we've heard it so far. Once we start moving this pan left and right, it's going to offset this this filter a little bit. So if we move it left with this low pass, let's do this. Let's move it. Really, Really. Listen eso the when we move it left. The left side is getting less of this filter effect. It's getting its. That sounds like the cough is raising and we get a little bit of gain. Jump. See that? If we go all the way, you can look at the level the level meter up there. Personally, I don't see pan panning options available on a filter, so there's an interesting knob. Lock that down a 50% cool. We're gonna go next down to these three. So we got Dr Fat and Mix. Dr is going to be what it sounds like. It's a it's a it's a boost to the signal is gonna distort the signal a little bit, uh, and see the gain that the gain jump. Ah, if you even doubt the gains of you a bead Max drive and a and no drive and you match, you match their gains. You would also be able to hear a little bit of color that comes in with the drive knob. It changes the sound a little bit, kind of be set up a little bit. Next we got fat. Is this a variation knob? It has a different effect for different filters. The the default on this default low pass it's It's a fatness knob and it kind of gives it a little. Oh, here it goes. It's going to give it a little bump, a little bit of beef nous. Let's move it over to a see here. I just went to a different low pass in it. It just has a dash there. It's not doing anything. This isn't gonna change anything. Let's go to a here. This is one of the more interesting filters. Let's way. This has a few different points. What this is going to do is change our secondary frequency. We have our first cut off on this this filter through this cut off and then this variation knob is affecting a different cut off. You got to different knobs there. Just be aware of that check and see if this knob has is active. When you're playing around with the new filter because you can get some cool effects with it. And then let's move right to the last knob is going to be our mixed knob. This is gonna be a dry wet for our filter. Right now, our mixes that full sore filter is 100% affecting our sound. Let's pull this down way. Pulled it down to zero. So our filters no longer affecting our sound, you can go halfway. You can do some parallel filtering here or just kind of lift sound a little bit. Get a little bit more of the high end back. Cool. All right, that section is a little bit faster. Next, we're going to look down here at this envelope, and then we're gonna move on to this whole second half, and if you keep going, we're gonna keep chugging away at this scent. So see you 5. Envelope: but we got our oscillators and our filter done. What we're going to do next is dropped down to the second half of the synth, and we're gonna look at this box right here. I'm outlining it with my cursor. We have three tabs here. There's gonna be our envelope control. Let me initialize this real quick. This is important. I want to mention before we jump in. Envelope one is driving our synth by default. What's that mean? That means that if we control the knobs here, if we turn knobs on envelope one, it's going to affect our sound from the default. Let's do it real quick. Here are sounds fading in and we'll talk about what that is in a second, this important note because if we turn knobs on envelope to or envelope three, it's not gonna do anything by default because they need to be mapped somewhere and we'll go over that as well. But let's just grab this pulling up to, so that's important to note. If you're trying to change the dynamics of your sound right off the bat and it's not and the knobs aren't doing anything, it's because you're in the wrong envelope down. We have the visualization of our current envelope, and then on the right, we have two sections. The 1st 1 is a button, and this is going toe. Fill our view with the current envelope, So if you click that, it's gonna lock in when I turn knobs, it's gonna keep it all full if we unchecked that we have a zoom control. So I click and drag up and down, and if we move the knobs, it's not going to fill it back up for us. It's up to you how you want to do it. I'm gonna activate that right now. Just for clarity's sake. Let's go down to these knobs. We have attack, hold, decay, sustain and release. Sounds like a lot of knobs, but once we start going into him, you'll see there's a flow to it. Let's start with attack. If you see our taxes 0.5 M s 0.5 milliseconds, that means with our envelope, one are driving envelope. If I press a key, it takes 10.5 milliseconds for the sound to come in. Let me pull this knob up to one second around one second start to get an exact. But if I press a key now and hold a key ah, you see it's going to take about a second for it to come in. So it fades in like that. That's what the attack is, how quickly the sound is coming in, how, until reach our maximum amplitude quickly. I want to jump back up to the visualization because if you see when we turn a knob, the visualization changes and you can see right here. This note is changing when I turn the knob. So let me grab this node real quick. You come up and grab it and you'll see the attack times changing. Same thing, these air, the same thing you can do, either one. The reason I wanted to point this out is because there's a few things on this on this visualization here that are not present with the knobs. And that is if we look down here, there's another node in between the very start of our sound and the attack time, and what this is is changing the character of the the sound as it comes in. It's gotta curve to it. There's just nice controlled. Have you just control. How how you want your envelope to act. And it's also useful when you're mapping things too different parameters that are not just the volume or amplitude. All right, so we got that out of the way. Let's default that real quick. Next we have hold, I'm going to come back to this. Let's move over to these two knobs. Decay and sustain. If you see that these knobs have milliseconds or seconds, there's one knob this sustained non that is not in that unit. It is in DB right now. It's at zero db and I'm gonna drag that down to negative Infinity db. But now let's play the sound. I'm holding the key down. Let's do an unexamined all before. If I hold the key down when the sustain is at zero db, it's gonna play. If I dragged this down, I'm holding the key. It's gonna fade out like that. Let's think about a guitar or something. You plucked the string, it's loud. It's gonna get quieter as time goes. So that's why this knob is useful. Still holding. Uh, it's already a more expressive sound. Now we can go back and look at these other other two knobs. The decay is going to be related to the safe, sustained meaning. How long is it going to take for us to get to the sustained level? So right now it's at a second. We could turn this up 23 seconds, still holding. It took a lot longer to reach that sustained level we could do short. Now it's percussive, a short, percussive sound. We're gonna go back in the one more. The reason I had to control of Sustained First is because the hold is basically on extra feature. If you heard about a DSR, that's Ah, the acronym for Attack, Decay. Sustaining release hold is in some sense, so it's not in some. It's just ah extra hold time at the beginning to add more control. If the sustains at 100% the hold is not doing anything devalues changing, but it's not going to change a sandal. That's why I pulled this sustained down and then introduce you to the hold. Ah, let's pull down the decay time. We have a quick, short sound, and then now let's pull up the hold for a little bit. Let's go over to the final knob, The release knob. This is basically how long the sound holds on at the end, we pull the sustainable. In the past I've been holding. These knobs are holding the key down. So I'm holding you down. It keeps going. Keeps going. I let go The key. The sound stops immediately. That's what the releases. How long is it gonna take to stop the sound? After I've pulled my hand off the key, let me hold him down. So we pulled up our attack or it's our release to 700 millisecond. Let's to a second. So now I'm gonna pull my finger off. It took a second for it to fade out completely. Ah, like that. Now let's look at all these together. If you'll see it's it's very clear in what? In what each control is doing, the knobs are ordered in a way that makes sense. Attack how quickly the sound comes in hold how long you're holding before the decay and sustained levels start coming in decay. How long it takes to get to that sustained volume that you've chosen and then releases at the very end. Once the sounds, once you're done pressing the key. How long does it take for that sound to fade away? Those air, all useful controls. And like with other things in the synth envelope, one envelope to an envelope, three are all have the same parameters. We don't have to learn what each of these tabs is. The only Like I said, the only important thing is that to knows that envelope one is controlling the dynamics of our sound. I want to show you one more thing that is going to come in. Excuse me. We're going to deal with more later if you notice when I clicked. Envelope one, there's arrows perpendicular to each other. If I click on this, click and drag this value, we can map this envelope to whatever parameter we want. Teoh. So let's take envelope too. And map it to wave table position. All right, I'm gonna pick on actual wave table, not the default. I'm gonna go over these map ings in another video, but I did want to show you that this is how we take the the envelope or whatever controller were using and moving it to a parameter. That's gonna be the whole envelope section and then we're going to go into the LFO is next . So keep on watching 6. LFO: we got our envelopes done. Let's move right to the LFO section. We need to have LF owes, mapped to a parameter for us to hear it, for it to be audible cause it's not mapped anything by default, and we'll go into this whole process and all the things you can do with it in a later video . But for this one, I just wanted to show you it happening, so it wasn't like blindsiding you. So let's listen to our oscillator real quick playing that wave playing this wave here, let's turn the wait till position. Not real quick thing to remind us what it does. It's tracking through the wave table. Let's drag LFO one and drop it on here. Waken here it sounds like it's turning the knob for us. What this is is an LFO that's a low frequency oscillation. Basically, it's a signal that's moving at a certain rate, and we have control over a whole bunch of this Ah, bunch of the parameters of this LFO Right now it sounds pretty simple. It's just sounds like it's turning the knob back and forth. So let's look at the grid here on LFO one I'm gonna start off by grabbing this top node and let's listen to what the sound does when we move it around. That's a quick ramp down. You can hear it restarting very quickly is ramping up on restarting quickly and then in between. It's like a smooth transition up and down thing if we all grab a node. So I pressed all I'm clicking and I'm dragging its going to snap this note to the grid, which is really nice. You could get some precise shapes. If you want to create a new node, double click anywhere on the grid. If you see we made a new white filled node which weaken drag around just like this in any way we want, we can all drag it super nice. And then, if you'll notice the's Ah, there, unfilled notes. They're empty nodes in between our white filled ones and these air going to be our curve controls. So it's gonna change the curve here like this. Let's look so there's also gonna change the character. Let me get rid of this one, and let's just play around with curves on these Theo, just spending a lot of time at the bottom, quickly jumping up Theo a lot of time at the top and then ramping down quickly. If we all grab these nodes, it's going to change every curve. So let's bring this other note. We just weaken double click to bring it in. Double click to get it out, double click, get a new node. And then what I'm gonna do is all drag. And if you look at every curve is changing, that's important to note. When you're all when you all drag one of these, you can just snap individual nodes. If you're all dragging a curve note, it's gonna change the whole thing. Last Key Command is gonna be an interesting one. What we're gonna do now is all control. Click and drag to the left and right. So let's do that. Let's pick this note right here. All control, click drag to the right in this instance, and you can see when, after a certain point, the nodes around this point you can see the left and right. Ones here in here are changing color. This is gonna be like a awaited movement of these points. Any point that gets a color is going to move together with the other colored points. And then the farther you drag it, the more it's gonna affect. Right now, we all drag and we just touched these notes, these nodes and their purple right now, if we move these, you can see they're kind of moving. But not much. If we click all control, click drag, right all the way, we went all the way. Now that's yellow. You can see it's moving with it, and it's affecting a lot more. This will work if you add a bunch of points, all drag boom so those it's gonna be these are all affected and just a little bit on the sides. The farther you go now, they're all gonna move together in a in a similar fashion. This is kind of an interesting feature, so that's cool. I'm gonna right click real quick and you see, we just had a drop down menu appear. If we look at this section here, we have three options for our shift key function. We have flat ramp down and ramp up what this section is. It's showing us what we can do with our shift key, but let's click flat by defaults on flat, but I'm clicking it again. If you saw I clicked it, nothing happened. We have to shift, hold, shift and click on our grid, and now it's going to create a flat section on our grid. If we right click and click ramp down, it's going to change what our shift key does. I clicked. Ramp. I clicked. Ramp down. If I shift, click on the grid now, it's gonna create a ramp down. See, it's a different shape. It's not flat. It's that ramp down. And then we have 1/3 option ramp up. Let's actually just click in the same spot. See, now it's different. Ramp up. That's what this area does. I'm gonna go into these start points and Luke back points in a second. After we've covered some more, we need to change some parameters to have those audible and have them actually work 22 options at the very bottom, though we have flip vertical. This is gonna flip, are are LFO vertically and then flipped horizontally and get some crazy. Actually, let's let's do a simpler shape so that it is more. It's easier to see someone get rid of all these also, what you can do if you click drag. You can ah, select multiple nodes at one time. Let's flip vertical. It flipped our triangle on its head. If we flip horizontal because this is here, let's let's move this over here. Flipping horizontal like like this is not gonna do anything because it's even on both sides . So if we if we off center this, though, and flip horizontal, see what it did, just flipped it that way. Great. That's a lot of the things we can do with the grid. Let's look down here to this first section here. This is going to be says it's a folder icon. If we click this, it's going to be a bunch of pre created Ella foes for us. So let's grab something gunshot. Theo. Just cool. Crazy l opposing Grab. There's some nice side chains in here so you can get that pumping sound. Let's go back to basic make kind of that, simply that easy shape and then below that we have our grid option. This is basically how many separations on our grade we have. Let's drag this down. You see the grid behind the LFO is changing. This could be useful for your snap. Remember, we all click. If you were really want to get precise, you can you can increase your grid or, if you don't want so much small snapping, just want big snap points. Um, sorry, I just clicked a weird button. I think you just have, Ah, small grid. Just nice control. Put it back at default. Let's move right to our mode. By default. The mode of our LFO is off. Let's click. Let's look a trigger real quick. These two modes are just extra ways for the L A photo act. So a trigger mode. That means now when I click a button, let's slow this down. Theo. What is happening now in trigger mode is every time I click a new key, it's going to restart this LFO. It's tracking Preston Yuki. It restarted started. If we don't have that mode on way, compress all these keys and the LFO is not going to restart, its just going to keep looping at its current rate. You just keep going on president bunch of keys and it just keeps Lupin. Let's go to trigger mode and then we're gonna go back up and right click. And if you see in trigger mode, we have a start point option, which is nice. Let me make a new node right click Select start Point sat start point here, Theo. Remember when I said in trigger mode pressing new keys is going to restart the LFO? We can choose at what point we want that to happen, Theo. You see, that's pretty handy if we go into envelope mode. Envelope mode is going to play through the this LFO one time and then stop. So let's listen, Theo. Theo makes sense Why it's called envelope moated acts. Maura's an envelope, which happens one time, then it does liken LFO. A cool feature with this envelope mode is a loop back point. Let me click. Add a note here at the end. Let's make it do something crazy. Actually, Great. We can set the Luke back point. Let's listen. Remember I said the envelope mode means it will play once and stop. This is a an adjustment to that theme. Now it will keep going. Once you add a loop back point, the envelope will play once and then it'll loop back at where you set that loop back point without a loop back point. It's gonna act ones like an envelope with the loop back point. It's It's going to act again, more like an LFO, but in a very different way. It's going toe loop at that Lou back. Now, we're gonna look at this section in this section here. If you look at the first toggle, it's activated. The BPM toggle is activated, and that means serum is going to be sync up with our DWR Metrodome in there. And all these knobs are going to be in time except smooth rate rising delay. They're all gonna be split up in this in this way. See, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes and bar. That's how it split, which is really nice to keep everything in time. Let's say you're doing dub step webs. You want your webs in time. The drawback to this non issue a drawback, but just the way it works is when we change this rate knob thes pretty big jumps, and it's very audible and sudden. This mode could be nice to just pick a rate you want and then fly with it. But modulating it in this in this way, in this mode can be distracting and maybe not as musicals you want. So if we uncheck this BPM mode were into hurts. You see, we have 100 hurts up here. Zero down here. It's a smooth transition. When we turn this knob theme, there's no big jumps in the air like notches. Almost. This could be nice if you have, ah, pad that maybe you want to start off with a lot of modulation and then kind of tame down. And it's not really it doesn't need to be in sync, modulating this rate concerned Really nice in this mode. Let's change it back, all right. The next button we have enabled by default is anchor mode. I'm not going to go into it a bunch. It has to do with modulation in your D A W, but real quickly what anchor mode is doing if you change the rate. Remember I said that the BPM rate is staying in time with the song. If you modulate this rate, let's say you put a ramp in in your D A. W. On the on the rate anchor mode is going to make sure that it's always staying in time. If you take off anchor mode, the LFO can start toe loop in in like off positions if you get what I'm saying. But like I said, I would show you. But e. I don't think it's important for what this tutorial is covering. Great. That's anchor mode. These two options down here are not enabled by default. We have triplet and dot Let's activate triplet. Now we've added new options to our rate in BPM mode, we have eight. Note. Triplet eight Note. 16th Note triplets 16. Note unchecked that dotted weaken do dotted Notes. 16th Note eight. No trip dotted Quarter note. Quarter. No dotted Cool. Let's look at this rise not right here. What this knob is going to do is add a ramp to the output of our LFO, and that sounds confusing. But let's listen here and we're going to figure out what it does. So I wanna play this sound with no ramp, no rise. Let's listen pretty standard exactly what we've been working with. The LFO is just gonna track and start and keep looping. Let's add a to borrow rise to this LFO sounds a lot different if you here at the beginning . We can't really hear our LFO at all. You can't hear its effects because that's what this rises, adding that ramp and at the beginning that the outputs gonna be closer to zero. And then, as time goes, which we control as time goes, we're going to reach the top output of our LFO, and then it's going to sound more like how we imagined it. So it's almost like a fade in knob for your LFO. What this might be useful for if maybe, you, uh, drought on LFO that does some vibrato or something, and you don't want it to come in really aggressive librato every time you press a new key on a lead or something. But when you hold a key down, you want it to rise in and start doing that and start getting that nice vibrato. So it's more expressive. Be really cool. Let's let's turn this off. The delay is a little more straightforward. This is just gonna add time before the LFO starts. Let's listen again, which is normal. Cool, and then let's add a bar delay because this one's gonna be more audible through. Sounds pretty straightforward. It's just not gonna play the LFO for a bar. Let's look at our final knob in the LFO section. This smooth knob. This is going to be a sort of transparency for our LFO. That's really nice. Let's listen to our sound without any smooth. Let's turn up the smooth there like 85. Now listen to this last part of the LFO. I'm gonna play the sound and drop the smooth all the way down. Listen to this end part so you can really hear what it's doing. It sounds like more of a glide through the LFO, and it doesn't sound like it's tracking it exactly on these lines. That's really nice. Let's say you you built out in L. A full you really like you mapped it a bunch of places you like the sound for the most part , but it sounds a little too aggressive. This smooth not could be a nice final thing to turn up and really get that musical sound. So that's the smooth nub. And with that done, that's the whole LFO section done. We're gonna keep going right and see in the next one 7. Utility: moving on from our LFO section. I reset the synth. Mostly we're gonna look at this box and the box below it right there. These are gonna be sort of utility for our synth. They're not gonna be as big and obvious a czar. Oscillators filter enveloping telephones, those air like the really big ones. But this section is still really good to know, and it's gonna make your since more expressive if you know how to utilize it. Let's look at this first tab V e l o. There's gonna be our velocity control. Let's just quickly map this to our way of table position. So what velocity is referring to is, how hard are you hitting each note? I have a MIDI keyboard over here. It has velocity sensitivity, which means if I hit a note on this piano over here, it's going to control its going to register how hard I hit each note. If you're on your keyboard on your computer, just your computer keyboard. It's not gonna be able to do that, So if you're confused at why it's not working, it's because you're MIDI controller or whatever you're using. As hardware needs to have that capability. That doesn't mean if you don't have a midi keyboard, you can't use velocity. You're just gonna have to control it in your d A W which I do a lot. I honestly probably control it. Him idea w more often than I do use it live. But this is gonna be nice for the demonstration. I'm gonna press a note really soft on my mini keyboard on. We're gonna look at this green node, so it's really soft and barely, and it's going to stay near the bottom on oppressive, medium hard, just kind of normal president. Now it's near the center and then I'm present really hard. Now it's at the top. This velocity control is going to control our knobs depending on how hard we hit the key. A common velocity setting would be mapping your velocity to level, because if you imagine a riel instrument like a real piano, if you press the key softly, it's gonna be quiet. If you press a key really hard, it's gonna be loud. That's a perfectly good mapping to use. But just remember to be creative, you could do it with anything. The cool thing about this velocity here is we also have the similar controls to how our telephones were. So if we double click, we can add a note here in this in this grid. And if we grab this curve weaken, get a curve going, get some accelerated velocity or decelerated. Same button commands, Double click. You know, the old drags what we talked about in the LFO section. Same things apply here. That's our velocity control. That's super cool. We're gonna move right to this next tab called Note. Let me get rid of our velocity control real quick. Move on, muscle up about. I'm gonna take note and drag it to wait till position similar with velocity. This is going to be a feature that tracks our change tracks. A change in our in our performance are playing velocity is how hard you hit The note note is actually going to track what keys you're playing, and it's going to make changes accordingly. I'm gonna use this the keyboard down here just cause it's easier to see and we can watch it . I want to play near the bottom. You can see if you can see as we play different notes. It's changing our wave table up and down. You can add expression as you're moving across the keys you known as you're playing an instrument. Not every string or key or, you know everything is going to sound exactly the same at every point. Not ever. It's not the same wave shape. Everything is always going to be a little bit different, so we can use this note control to add a little bit more musicality in a sense of a more natural sound as same with velocity saying with our Ella foes, you can press double click to add nodes. Double click to remove. All right, moving on. Let me remove this. Let's look down next to this area here. This area has controls that don't need to be mapped, but it's gonna be so it's gonna be audible right at the get go once we start messing around so that school a little bit easier to follow. Let's look here first we have it, says Polly Here, this is our political me control. A polyphonic synth means that we can play multiple notes at one time, and we could do things like chords. Right now. It's at eight. By default, which means we can play eight different thing. It's gonna play all those sounds. Let's drop this to to now. It's only gonna be able to play two voices at one time, So let's dio So what just happened when I went over? The voice limit is it's gonna take the first. No, we start playing is also going to be the first note out. Once we cross that threshold, that's Polly. Let's look left now to mono of we click mono. You see our Polly option goes away and it's a 0 to 1 voices this so it forces it into Amman , a phonic synth. That means we can only play one Theo pressing multiple notes. But it's not playing anything more. No matter what we do, it's only gonna play one time. This is really nice for Leeds when you don't want a bunch of notes hanging onto each other and cluttering things up. I usually set mono for my bases and my leads. We go down to this leg Otto tab and we activate it. What this is gonna be is a control on our LFO riel. Quick. What I'm gonna do is put another lfo and then put it into trigger mode without Lo Gatto on in trigger mode, Who slows down. Remember what Trigger Mo did it. It resets the the, um lfo every time we play a new note like this, you know, let's put this in mono and activate Lagat toe. So that means, Theo, it's not going to reset when our notes are overlapping. It's not gonna research the fo, which can be which would be a very audible jump. Having leg Otto on makes it smoother sounds. Sounds nicer. Let's take it off quick. Unless you want that attack on every single note theme, then this. Look out tomorrow. The thing to note is having the trigger mode off. Theo is not the same thing. It's not restarted. It's actually not the same thing because with trigger mode on and Lo Gatto on, they're similar. You see, my overlapping notes are not resetting, but if I play individual notes, it will reset. So if we have this Modoff and we got off, it's not resetting its sometimes nice to have it reset when you're playing individual notes because it has some cool attack on your synth, but you don't want to resetting when you're sliding around and playing cool notes, runs and everything, you don't want a cool attack to happen. That's are voicing Tab. Let's look at this section right here next to our virtual keyboard. This knob here is gonna be the big knob of this section is gonna be our porta mental knob. See it says Porta, right here. What is going to do is going to activate a slide between notes with no port aumento. You see, it's just picking each note exactly and starting it exactly when I pressed the key. If I turn this port aumento up and play overlapping notes, meaning I'm holding on to the first note, well, I activate the second note we owe. You can hear it sliding into the next pitch. Got some controls over there. You can turn it up a bunch, keep it just a little bit for some flavor, and then to the right of it, we have a curve here. It's a box, says Curve, so you can control the character of the slide. This would be a quick slide, Theo apartment Theo, so it slides quickly, and then here is going to be a delay almost delayed slide. Theo. So, you know, play around with that. Get the character you want. Two things we have always. This tab is not checked. What always is going to do is activate our port aumento even when it's not two notes that are overlapping. If you notice right now, let me turn import mental up. If I press two notes without overlapping them, there's no Parlamento e o. Sometimes you wanted to always have Parlamento. That's what this this check does. Always Porta meant. So now when I press notes, it's going to slide into it, the next one we have scaled. So let's do this. We turn always off a scaled parlamento will adjust thespian, depending on the distance, the speed of the port aumento, depending on the distance between the notes. If you notice I have my porta mental time set pretty high. So let's turn scaled. Offer a week long that is, with skilled on short distances will have ah faster slide. Long distances will have a longer slide school and do an active thes longer than this. If you want a long port aumento at times and not all the time, because that long Parlamento takes a while. This option is really nice. So you can do cool runs in the in the smaller areas. And then, you know a big jump will have this really cool slide effect on it. That's this pitch control section. This pitch slide control, Let's look left. Now passed this keyboard onto this tiny area, these air to Nam's they're going to be handy dandy. We have our mod wheel here. That's this knob and then we have our pitch bend. These two knobs are what you would find on a typical midi keyboard. They're not gonna be on every Midi keyboard, but they're very common. And that's why they're put in serum like this. The mod wheel. Right now when we turn the mod wheel, it's not going to do anything. Turning it up and down. Have the LFO on from last tutorial. But let me take that off. Move all destinations models not do anything because it needs to be mapped somewhere, and then you can access it well, playing the keyboard live, so that's what it would be useful for. We'll go into how that works in a second, but for this I want to keep this in this area to the left. Now we have our pitch bend. This is a little unique wheel here. Let's listen to this theme you can hear. It's pulling our pitch up and down, depending on if we pull the wheel up or down. And if you notice if I click drag up and then let go of the mouse, it's gonna snap back to the center so it could be nice to add embellishments and quick, you can flick it up and it'll drop that. It's also on the mini keyboard in that same way. That's why this wheel is useful if you're playing a it run, you know if you're playing something on the Midi keyboard and you want some cool, quick Pitt shifting pitch bend. That's what this wheels useful for if you notice to the left of the pitch pitch bend wheel , we have two boxes with dashes, so it goes, well, dash box what this is and then in the boxes to you what this is, it's how far is our pitch bend going to pull our pitch up or down right now, it's at two semi tones up and negative two semi tones down. We can move this up or down. Move this up, maybe do a knock. So that's this area here pretty quick, but it's good to know our last utility section in this. This pain, the since, is going to be this area right here to the left or envelopes. This is our macro and Maada control area. This this top tops tab says mod on it, and thats gonna control our mod wheel. Like I said, our model right now doesn't do anything. But what Weaken Dio? Let's map it. Click drag map. Now our models are affecting our wave tail position. So if you have a midi keyboard with a mod wheel, you could put this anywhere you want to add cool flavor to your sound. Really simple, really simple. It's useful for when you're playing live and you can do anything you want with that, like with all these these ah map ing's Sorry, I'm tryingto click buttons will thinking below that we have our macro controls so you'll see these 1234 knobs with that Don't do anything. They're blank. What we can do with these is also map these two Whatever we want. And as you can see, once we map something, it's gonna call it, give it a name and we can rename this if we want. We can name this intensity and then let's throw a filter on this. We have that filter cut off down. All right. You can match these to as many as you want and these air useful to have, um, a bigger control of your sound. You could map a bunch of different things you like, and you want to control in one batch altogether. And then you can control in your day w and modulate it. Or if you have a knob on your midi keyboard, you could map it there. Let's listen to what we just made. We just made the intensity knob. Right now, we can't do anything really cool here. I can impose filter up a little bit, but what you can see in in practice, you know, you can see what it's doing is it's when we turn this knob. This source is controlling all the parameters we selected, which is super nice on. Then you could name whatever you want that is going to be all our utility sections. We've learned the front face of this since this is everything we've learned every front, front piece of this scent. I'm going to skip over effects in the next video and we're gonna move to the Matrix tab. 8. Matrix: Welcome to the next big section of our serum tutorial. We're gonna jump right over into this matrix tab when we hit this matrix button. The top half of our sense is gonna change into a giant list and it could be very overwhelming. But the cool thing about this is it is just a a list of every mapping we've created in our sound. When we mapped up LFO Oneto waived till position like this. Click and drag, We've already started our matrix tab Are matrix line going? See? Now I clicked back into matrix and we have a mapping set up here. That's what's cool about it. It's not gonna be a totally new section. It's gonna be a lot of extra control, though, Which is we always like that. We know what lfo one does on. We're gonna look at a few of the the labels here, so we have source and destination thes. They're gonna be really big. These will make sense when you think about it this way. We took LFO one and we said, Hey, we want LFO one to control our wave table position. And so we clicked it and dragged it and Now it's doing that. The l. A. Phil one is controlling wave to opposition. So our LFO one is our source. What do you want to have being the controller? And that our destination is the parameter we drag it to in this case wave tail position. What do we want? To be controlled already? It makes a lot more sense when you look at it that way, at least for me. For me, having a list is like this is overwhelming and just seeing it happen like that Super easy, super quick. And now we know the terminology. We're gonna keep going now and learn a little bit more about this. We figured out source and destination. Let's look at a mountain now. What amount is going to be is how much we allow our source to affect our destination. As always, let's listen and mess around with this. This slider is going to be the same thing as grabbing this blue icon and pulling it down. If you grab this icon and pull it down to, let's say 50% and look back here at this matrix, you'll see that this sliders at 50% as well it's not something completely new. It's just another representation of that parameter, which is great. Let's listen to what amount does now that we know the definition. Theo Theo, for this example specifically, if you imagine our LFO is making is turning our knob like this back and forth. This amount is how far we're allowing our LFO to turn our knob. If you pull it down to 2% the LFO is still tracking through its whole. It's it's whole shape, but we're only allowing it to control a smaller and smaller amount. So that's what amount is and what you'll find as your as your designing and mapping things out. For me. At least I'm I'm tweaking the depth, the amount they're all the time. I'm grabbing these in locking him in. It's super easy and super quick. That is amount done. Let's look at this curve real quick and I'm gonna change this source so we know what the source is. What what is controlling our waived till position? I'm gonna changes to the mod wheel. Remember Mod wheel? Is this wheel down here? There's going to be easy to hear what this curve does. Let's play play what we have. We have our mod wheel affecting our wave table position. 100% all the way. Let's turn our knob, Theo. Great. That is acting exactly as we would we would expect it to. What is this curve doing? This curve is going to be similar to this curve down here in what? It is not in what it controls. But you remember how we mess with these curves in the old tutorials, curves their curve here. We've seen this before, which is great. And this curve is going to add an acceleration or deceleration to our mod source to the the effect Armand source has on our destination. Let's pull this down and turn up the Oh, let's do it. Really, Theo Armada. Well, we're just turning it from 0 to 100% and at by default, would be affecting it, affecting the knob. In that same way, it would be turning our knob in sync. Basically, with our mod wheel 0 to 100. Great. But when we turn this curve up or down, we add an acceleration and deceleration to that. So if you heard it, kind of, I was moving the knob Normally nothing was happening, and then it kind of jumped up. If we're at negative 99 here, that's just more control over how your sources are affecting your destinations. You can play around with that because it'll have some crazy effects when you're used it with Ella foes envelopes, you can use it with all everything. It's all gonna affect it in a little bit a different way. We got half this done already. Perfect. Let's move to the type. Our type is going to be a selection between, you know, polar and bipolar mode, and that sounds confusing, but it's very simple. Right now we're in uni polar mode, and if you see the selection point of our knob when I turn this knob, the selection point of our knob is going to be the bottom point of our modulation amount. If I click and drag this halo, you can see it's it's coming down from its top point towards the selection point of our knob, and then if I push it up, it's gonna increase from that point if we click this and now we're in bipolar mode now, the selection point of our knob is going to be the center point of our modulation amount. If you see here now, it's going in two directions. When I grab that icon and pull up or down what serum will do? Is it kind of it guesses which knob used and it picks a mode for you. Something like panning Channing's in the Centre and You Pan left and right, it's gonna automatically be in bipolar mode. See, like that wave table position by default is gonna be in una polar mode. A quick thing to mention this slider is not gonna change whether you're in uni polar or bipolar mode, so just be aware of what motor in quick key command. If you shift Ault, click this blue icon right there. It's going to change your mode for you. It's not really complex and game changing. It's just a taste thing, depending on the knob like cut off on my filter, I think usually it's bipolar. Yeah, yeah, usually cut off on filter it maps. It is bipolar, and I prefer to have my cut offs in una polar mode. It's just a preference thing. Just remember that key command and you can switch out of it when you want. All right, let me drop this down. Let me turn the filter off when you to pulling moment. Great. We're gonna jump over to this ox source now, and this section can be confusing, but I'm gonna set it up in a way that I think will be most clear. A quick side note about this section as well. I looked up in the manual. I tried to look up exactly what this OC sources doing in technical terms so that I could describe it 100% correctly. That's what I'm trying to do with everything and use correct terminology, but I couldn't find anything. So disclaimer on this section. I'm going to describe what I I think is happening, but I'm not sure it might be incorrect information, but we're still gonna understand what it's doing. If you're really into technicals and you can look up and find exactly what it's doing, feel free to let me know are put it in the comments. But I wanted to disclaim that before I continue because the rest of this tutorial before and after I'm trying to make everything clear. Correct, and that's it. So we have our LFO source controlling our wave table position destination and we know what that sounds like by now. Really straightforward. What are ox source? Sounds like to me it's doing is it's creating something right in between these it's creating a almost a controller in between our source and our destination. So that's why I'm picked the mod wheel, our models at 0%. But this is all set up how it was in the past. I'm gonna play a note now. Theo, nothing's happened. I'm gonna turn this model up Now. What sounds like to me is happening Is this ox sources like a gatekeeper between our LFO, our source and our destination. When our model is at 0% it's saying no lfo your you can't come and control our wave your position at all And then when you turned up each percent list, they were at 50%. Was that the model of saying Okay, LFO you can control our destination 50% on it. It's open up. It's like OK, do your whole thing. I'm gonna do another example with envelope too. I set up a little thing here a little a little curve decaying curve at the beginning, it's at maximum. It's gonna say OK, LFO one, you can do your thing, but it's going to decay and start pulling back on that on the allowance of modulation there . So let's listen thes decaying. So, like I said, it's confusing. It can be confusing, especially when you have one thing interesting. Another thing which is controlling another thing. But that's why I said it up like that. Let's go back to the mod will. We did our ox source. We kind of get what's going on here. We have mod and curved to the sides of it. These air going to be tied in with our ox source. Let's look at moderate quick. If you see we have a star in this box, this star means it's in multiplication mode. Remember how our model at 0% said nothing's coming through? It won't let the LFO controller waved a position at all. And then, as we moved it up, it was like OK, more, more, more, and then we 100% and it says yes, 100% LFO controlling way field position inverted. We have multiple equated inverted and what that means is gonna be the opposite. So you see our models at 0% it just flipping it. It's flipping it. So our models, at 0% on its reading everything through a turn on it's gonna let lesson lesson through. And then lastly, we have bypass mode. This one's a little different because this is completely bypassing the modulation. If you look back here, we see our blue halo is great out. We've bypassed our modulation, which means it's not good for her. But we didn't delete the mapping, so that was a little different. The 1st 2 here are in relation to the ox source. The last one is just a bypass in general. Then we have this curve over here. This is a curve for ox source. And so, if you remember, let's pull this down instead of just being 0 to 100% straight up. It's just gonna change the character of that, you know, we've covered that last piece of the matrix is going to be this final output slider. If you remember our amount, slider was controlling how much LFO one is affecting wave tail position for this mapping or in general terms, how much our sources affecting our destination. There's going to be similar to that. But it's going to be kind of global, and at the end it's just a final output. So if it's if this slider is sorry, let me get out of this mod wheel. So it's affecting it all the way. If this sliders at zero, we're not gonna hear modulation at all on, then turning it up. It's gonna be more and more and more until it's 100%. There's that one thing I wanted to add at the end. The reason I showed you this matrix two is there's a few things like this ox stuff control over the ox stuff. And then there's There's some options here that are not available just in this view, from glad dragging and sliding things, things like chaos, one chaos to that's gonna be a sort of like random, random output generator. Most of these options are here. Remember, we can click drag all these things. There's some things that are there, and it's just nice to have the Matrix. Now that we know what everything does in the mod Matrix, I want to go over the right click menu over here Back in our oscillator view. If you see right now, we have some some options When we right click a a parameter but they're great out. So let's change this to LFO one classic. Now we have all these options available so I can explain them for one working first option . We have his bypass modulator elephant one so we can't hear our modulation anymore. Remember when we went in here? Now see, this is the same thing. When we picked the version, we can go bypass under this mod option. It's going to stop the source affecting the destination, but it's not going to remove it. Next we have removed modulator. So if you accidentally map something up and you don't that source to be controlling the parameter anymore, you can remove it completely. So I right, click, press, remove modulation or remove room modulator, and it's gone completely. So L a full one is no longer mapped up and we can see it's gone from our matrix view. Okay, the alternative to that. If you have multiple map ings like this, you can remove all modulators that will get rid of all sources connected to this destination Reset control for you. Move this A browned Utkan click Reset control to bring it back to its default position. Mod source. This is kind of like working backwards a little bit instead of being like Okay, I want lfo one to control wave toe position. You can start with your destination and say Hey, what do I want to actually control this knob? And you can pick, you know, lfo one envelope, mod wheel Whatever you want to dio I don't use it a lot personally, but if that's the best way for you to think about it, then great. You can use that. Okay, Sorry. Let me remove many cc. There's some There goes this option Midi learn, which is next on our list is going to open up serum into a mode that accepts midi controls . So if you have a knob or something and you hit midi, learn and turn a knob it's going to map that knob to whatever knob you pressed many learn on. You can mess around with that if you have a live set up and then finally we have locked parameter. This one can be a little confusing, cause If you imagine I locked the parameter, why is it still allowing me to move it? That's what my mental process was at the beginning. What it's doing is is locking parameter meeting. When you switch patches, it's not gonna move at all. It's locked into that position when you're changing changing patches. So that's all locked parameter does. That's the whole Matrix section, and next we're going toe quickly. Look at effects. I'm like I said, I'm not going in super deep, but that's gonna be the next section, so keep on going. 9. Effects: I'm gonna pretty quickly go over the effects section. I'm gonna show big picture stuff. I'm not gonna go over each knob on each effect because that would probably double the length of this tutorial. If people want, I can make a separate tutorial, Just let me know. But for this, this tutorial, it's already really long. And I wanted to really go over how this synth works and not what these effects the effect suite is. All right, So if we look at the lefts area here, we have a list of all our effects. Super cool. If we click these boxes, they'll start to popping it into existence and they'll be affecting our sound. A thing to note is that order matters for effects in general. If you click and drag these effects, they will be reordered. And you only have to worry about the active effects order. Don't worry about deactivated ones. For example, let's let's just put Flandreau distortion. It can be hard to hear, especially with such a simple sound. So I'm going to describe it if we have a distortion and then flame jer that signals coming out of our oscillator and then the signals going down our effects rack. So it's gonna hit the distortion, our signal's gonna be distorted. And then that distorted sound is going to hit our Flander next. It's going to be flinched. So if we flip that it's gonna be the opposite. Our sound is gonna come out of our oscillator tab and down our effects is gonna hit that Flander. And then that flanges signal is next going to be distorted in practice, something like a compressor. You might want to put your compressor last because in in general compresses gonna be taming squishing down your sound control and dynamics. And you'd probably want that after your Flander, which is making your signal go all wobbly and crazy. Be aware of that. And like I said, there's no hard and fast rules. But just be aware that order does matter Cool, pretty global stuff on the far right of our effects. Here we have power, little power buttons and these are just bypasses. But similar depressing this big box. But we get to still see it. It won't be in effect. It won't affect our sound. We can control the knobs and just be is like a quick. Like I just want to hear what it sounds like without it. Great. And then to the left that we have a mixed knob. Most effects have this mixed knob, so you could do something like parallel distortion. Pull this down to 50%. Have our signal's gonna be distorted. Half is gonna be clean. And then that's gonna go down into our Flander. And so on another cool things you notice are this bottom half of our Synthes still is still available, which means we can map LF owes envelopes All this stuff that we've been mapping in the past , we can do that here in our effects to which is really cool. Let me pull off all these something like, Let's just do something real quick, you hear? Was doing this throat through left on that. Perfect. That's literally all. I'm going to go over and effects. Like I said, if you want me to go over everything, let me know. And then we're gonna move on from here into our global tab, and then I probably gonna open a few menus and talk about that real quick for the sake of thoroughness. But that's gonna be effects. And we're through 75% of these tabs. Good job. Keep going 10. Global: All right. Welcome to the last tab of this serum tutorial. We're going to look at this global tab. We're going to start in the top left with We have chaos one and chaos to These are two knobs that I mentioned in our Matrix Matrix tutorials. So Chaos one cast too. Their signals based off, I'm pretty sure, complex, complex waves. But what it sounds like is a kind of random frequency generator. Let's map up our chaos. One to our wave table position. Kind of like what we've been editing a bunch here. Make effect all the way and we can hear what this sounds like A right way. It sounds kind of like an LFO, but it's it's more random, and it'll start jumping in Peking and spiking ways. That's why it's called Chaos. So we have 123 check boxes here. First one's gonna be BPM sink. This knob is a frequency knob like with RLF owes weaken changes to be PM sync mode. So it's separated into, like quarter notes, half notes, all that good stuff. Next we have mono, so it's pull us back down. If you remember our mono button here, it changed our synth from a polyphonic synth, which means we could play a bunch of notes into a mano phonic sands, which means we could only play one at a time in a similar fashion. Let's do chaos one to pan because that's easy to hear. Osler a panting Okay, without mono on, we can press multiple notes, and we'll, each note added, will have its own chaos frequency going with it if we press mono than each one's gonna follow one. Chaos frequency Ellis. If you listen to the pan and you can hear them all jumping to the left at the same time now instead of randomly so that could be helpful to kind of tame your chaos a little bit last we have sample and hold. What this is going to do is going to take a ticket almost like a screenshot of this frequency, and only allow that to, and it's gonna hold that. So it's going to sound like hard jumps because it's taking a screenshot almost of that section that frequency and then jumping to the next one. Let's listen to the oh, it's gonna be a lot different. It's not smooth anymore. On then what you can do if you use BPM sink in this mode every turn. Let's turn mono on Teoh. It almost sounds like a step sequencer with random values. May is jumping to random points in our wave tail position in panning, but with these activated, we can kind of control it and change the character. That's chaos one and then Chaos to is the same thing. Perfect. What we're gonna do now is jump down to this unison editor, a global unison settings, if you remember, actually let me initialize again. If you remember from the earlier earlier tutorial, the oscillator tutorial. We went and looked at this unison box and this de tune and blend. Remember what that does? No, it's adding more voices. We have control over this, and that's why I wanted to show the global tab because it's really cool what you can do with it. On our left, we've oscillator a a and then on the right. We have also later be also to be right here. So I'm just gonna look at oscillator. A. You can control them at the same time with these middle boxes, middle sliders. But I'm just gonna look at left first, we have range here and this is going to be how far we d tune in semi tones by default. It said it too. And if you hear me theme access set at two semi tones of R D tune. But we can turn this up. I'm actually gonna play it. Well, I turn it up so I have r d tune knob turned full. You can see that spread is getting bigger. I just pulled it up to an octave. I usually keep the d tune down here, too, because you can kind of lock in this cool like, full big sound without getting totally out of whack. Next is with this is gonna be how wide are d tuning effect is because when you hear mono way, when we start to pull this knob, you hear the voices come in and they they take up more of the stereo field. We control how wide we want that to be. I just pulled it from 100 to 0 and now we have four voices de tuned, but they're all pushed down into the center. So it's still mono. If you feel things were getting crazy, pushed out too far and you want toe tame it a little bit in here. You could use that. Next is this warp setting here. There's gonna be a unison warp if you remember our D tune. What that did to our unison voices kind of spread him out in the stereo field, and each voice is getting a different pitch, and that's what our detail is doing. This slider is kind of its works in a similar way, but it's it's in relationship to our warp type. So we have to have a warped type active, and we have to have our unison type active. I'm gonna pick a warp type, and we're gonna listen to what that sounds like. It's adjusting our sound, but every voice is getting the same adjustment. This is going to change that if we pull us all the way up to 100 it's going to do similar to what are De Tune did where each voice is getting a different amount of that war perfect , and it's going to spread out in the stereo fields. Let's listen to that thing Sounds very different here. Let's some turn the knob. All the way up that without this warp slider turned up every voices at this Max setting where with its on some of them are at a lower setting. You get that crazy story effect? All right. Next is our wave tail position. Unison! This one's gonna be easier to understand. Now that we've done our war Penis in, there's going to be a similar effect except using our wave tail position knob, which is great because we've been using that this whole time. Let me take the sink, Modoff. They're so and then I'm gonna pull down the D tune. We solve four voices going on. We know exactly what that's gonna sound like. We've been doing that this whole time for the sake of obvious difference. Let's turn up this wave Tail position, Unison mode to 100. Well, we've turned our knob all the way up. Waken See, it does that same thing. Each voice is getting is placed a different at a different point on our wave tail position , which is really cool for these examples. I've been turning the knob all the way to 100 return the slider 200%. It might be cool to just come in here at the end and tweak um, like maybe 5% to 10% something like that, just to get that more unique sound. Next we have Stack. This is going to be, if some options to see if we start moving the slider up. It's gonna have a different is going to say 12 1 times 12 2 times. And what this stack is going to be is adding, adding notes on top of our current note. Right now, when we play a note, it's just playing that key, and that's it. Once we start turning up the stack mode now, it says 12 1 times. That means it's playing 12 semi tones, up inactive one time. So it's playing one octave above our our current key. Next is 12 to. That's what this stack mode is doing. It's It's adding notes to each key that you play cool. The last thing says mode, and then it's set in linear. These are just algorithms for the voicings. They're gonna have pretty minimal effects on the sound. It's hard to hear. It's hard to hear that. It's just it's a cool option tohave. It's the internal stuff There's, like a lot of math that goes into creating this d sounds. And so this is a tweaking over that. All right, I'm not gonna go over to preferences. The one that I do have active is this default except double click to reset controls. I just like having that on so I can double click. But a lot of these air, just personal preferences. You can read it and you see what what it's doing. All right. So right on this area, we have oscillator settings on the left. Here we have two boxes, oscillator and oscillator. Be with the label pitch tracking below them. Let me reset. This cools. We're back. What this is is is it's very basic. It's. Do we want our oscillators to follow our keyboard? Makes sense when you click the keyboard. You want to hear the notes by default usually, but this is an option to turn that off. So if we turn that off and we probably note it's not gonna change, depending on the key, we play. Actually, let me, Theo. It's all the same thing. It's basically just staying on one pitch, no matter what. So that's also today and as later be pitched tracking to the right. We have quality. We have one times draft two times and four times by default, and from most presets, I've gone through its. It's two times quality, which is it's a good balance between audio, fidelity and CPU power, like if you put it in four times, it's gonna take more CPU. So that's just for your reference. One times this draft quality is like a lower quality. Just be aware. Probably keep it into if you can, and it would be a good, good middle ground. There's a little lock icon right here. There's gonna lock your quality, meaning when you start switching around. I'm do that. We switch over to another preset. See, it's into two. There's gonna lock your quality. So if I initialize my preset and go to four times, click that lock button and then go to another preset. It's going to stay in four times when, by default they were saved in two times. You see, it switches over Um, next up. Sorry I was getting ahead of myself. We have noise. Fine. A little slider here it goes up a semi tone or down a semi tone that is for your noise. Let's pull up a something will hear it. Wind chimes Let me turn it out to It's just a fine tune for your noise. Little, little, tiny extra thing Last we have our overall tuning and this is default in a It's in 4 40 hertz. That's are a note. This is default tuning, meaning we all tune our instruments to the same frequency. And it's all about relationships between notes. I know some people who record in 4 32 so there have been times would have to turn it down. But I'd say 99% of the time it's keeping him for 40. I'm not gonna open tuning files. That's gonna be everything I want to cover on here. That's all of the global tab. I'm going to quickly go through a few of these menu things because I think they're useful. Not everything but a few of them and then will be 100% done. We're just gonna look up in this menu and I'm gonna bang out a few of these. Not everyone but the ones I think are useful and easier to comprehend and would be useful for a beginner. So we got about you. Learn about the since you can watch the little graphic go see who made it all that stuff. Read the manual. If you If you click the that read, the manual is gonna pull up the Internet and it's going to pull up the serum manual, which is really nice. A lot of good information in there. I'd give it a read. It is long, but I'd give it a read. We have load presets, so click that button and you can find a bunch of presets, which would be similar to clicking these side buttons and scrolling in through here or searching a sound in here. What did I just dio load present in it preset? That's the zeroing out that's getting back to the default, and that's what I've been hitting this whole tutorial. I love this button I used. I should bind it or something because it's it's amazing. Super handy, innit? Modulations. This one's cool. This is going to be a bit different. So let's say we have an oscillator we like. We're like, Wow, we set this up. I like all the settings here. I got a cool warm going. I'm loving it And then I have all these modulations. Let's say we modulated LFO We did that. We put telephones on everything and put envelopes on our panel and all that stuff. And then we were like, Wait a minute. This is just making my sound messy. I don't want I don't want to go through and remove everything. What? We can dio Is it this in in modulations and it'll clear our mod matrix Super handy revert to saved this Cool. Let's say you load up a sound and you start messing with things like I'm gonna do. I turn off the noise and I'm like, I want to Let's see, you just ruined everything. You know? I run the sound. I don't like it. You can get this revert to saved. It's gonna take you back to the loaded up initial preset. What you can also do is press forward and back. It's not gonna overwrite things when you start messing with things unless you save it. Okay, Another Let me, innit? Preset like always. All right. Next is copy oscillators. This is handy if you just want to copy everything from one oscillator over to the other and vice versa. We could say Cool. I like this oscillator. I love it. I want it on. Be copy. Also, they also like to be same thing, the opposite. I'm not gonna go over rendering. Okay, then effects to here at the bottom. Each preset has his own effects. You can see that if we want to keep our effects. So let's say like, Oh, I love my hyper just dimension distortion and phaser weaken locker effects chain. And then once we move, presets is gonna keep our effects Chain, you see, is overriding their effects chain with our effects chain. That's something cool you can dio. And then you can save your effects chain if you use it a whole bunch and loaded up a few And for any time If, let's say you do a bunch in depth stuff and you're like, I'm using this on every since save load. Great, innit? Preset. That is everything. That's everything. So that was ah, beefy tutorial. I know that if you made it to the end, Nice 11. Ending Words: All right, everyone, that is the whole in death serum tutorial. If you made it this far, I applaud you. I'm sure you're probably sick of me. But that's that's that. Having all that information is going to be more than I think. From what my perception is. Most people would know about this since. So, like I said, maybe book market hit it in chunks. I know it's a monster I also wanted to mention if you did make it this far. Thank you for watching. I appreciate that. Put a lot of time into really making this as as clear and as correct as as possible. If you like what I'm doing, if you could follow me on like Instagram or, you know, Facebook, all that stuff I've spot. If I make my own music as well, that would be handy. The name is Imparato. All that's my It's on my teacher page and all that stuff. I got the links there. Uh, that would just be super handy because you know it's music industries. It's it's hard and every every follow. If I if I helped someone, I'd like to know that it can be. It can be. We could be unsure. You know, we I post a lot of tutorials. I don't get a lot of feedback. I've gotten a few messages here and there. But, you know, I I honestly don't know if these are even helpful. So if you got this far and you wanna shoot me a message, you know, that would be awesome. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear from anyone who's into this stuff. Thank you for watching. And as always, if you have an idea for tutorial or you want me to go in on more more of this stuff, just let me know and I'll be glad to make another tutorial. So So you guys good job key making music piece out.