That's wow!

 

Here's to hoping the teams heard you.

 

There's a guy that made a whole orchestral library using Phase Plant, pretty cool skill to have!

 

@Djord Emer interesting, any link left?

 

Sounds nice. Do you have some YT link or similar?

Edited: @Synclavier beat me for about 1 picosecond. It's my bad ping fault for sure (yep I'm a sore loser)

 

Sure, Joel Blanco is the wizard's name! Here's his X account: https://x.com/lydoel

 

Last edited: Mar 29, 2025

It doesn't sound realistic, sorry. The comments on the Youtube video are all saying how incredible it is - it's very good, for a synth, but is it just me, or do none of the instruments sound realistic compared to loads of different Kontakt libraries?

 

quite impressive sound design thanks

https://lydoel.gumroad.com

 

Phase Plant uses wavetables and Kontakt can use long samples of actual instruments. To get as close as Blanco The White Wizard can get to the attack and body of sound to emulate a real world instrument is an instrumental feat...in my opinion.

 

Agreed. These are very good simulations, but still pretty fraught with caveats and limitations. Agreeably there are limitations with sample based recreations of traditional acoustic instruments as well...

What we really need is this;
- a sampler/synth that can work, in real-time, with wavetables as well as real world audio samples
- device that can take a wavetable and combine it with a real world sample and be able to afford the same parameter control illustrated in those phase plant offerings to both sound sources.
- what I notice the most in that current phase plant stuff is the interaction between the articulation and expressive qualities are lacking or limited. The ultimate would encompass being able to apply the same or specialized expression/articulation/dynamic parameters simultaneously to separate wavetable and recorded digital audio sound sources and then combine/blend the two together at the audio output to achieve a truly believable expressive instrumental matrix. This would take the best of what both wavetables and real world audio samples have to offer and combine the two to produce the ultimate quality in a synthesized instrument that would rival the real instrument itself.

Of course none of this would be truly effective in the hands of a creative/musician type without a sophisticated and truly non-intimidating and intuitive interface for manipulating synth and audio sources and the various parameters in way that inspired (instead of hampering) the creative process.

As for what Serum2 (or any other soft or hardware synthesizer for that matter) can do currently, none of them comes close to the above mentioned capabilities. Unfortunately the current state of the synthesizer arts is simply not advanced enough to accurately reproduce a truly convincing acoustic instrument in all facets of real-time sound quality, expression, articulation and dynamics.

 

Last edited: Mar 29, 2025

Yes, yes aaaand YES!!
I bought Serum2 for Electronic music, EDM, Hardstyle etc, and i installed it now and what am i doing?
I´m listening to the Guitar presets since one hour.
So much effort and love in this product, presets.
The preset Browser is the best i´ve ever seen. They demo the presets with melodies(midis) also the macros will be demonstrated.

So actually i listen to the Mariachi Guitar and have the Soundtoys Rack at the track with the Ambient Oceans Preset.
OMG it sounds so good.

What i want to say is that it can sound very natural without the "Resonances" from real Instrument like in a Kontakt Library.
I personally like that and it makes it easier to mix in Electronic Music.

 

Personally, that's what I take them for. Incredible sounding for being synth presets.
But they're good enough to be very usable. Which is no small feat.
Of course if you write a full orchestral piece you're better off with huge Kontakt libs.

 

cant serum 2 do this?

 

Joel Blanco is real sound designer (not many of them in the world)

There's an abundance of retards who mass produce saw waveforms presets with like 5 otts and 6 distortions modules on top. Not real craftsmen.

Serum 2 is nearly out and we already see like 100 preset packs for 20-30 dollars, that should give you a clue about the effort these scam rats put in this.

They should just drink bleach and die, they only make the world boring.

BRAAMMM movie trailer guys should f off too.

 

Yes. Pretty cool, and A+ for the effort, but it doesn't sound realistic at all. Nice try, though.

 

There was a beta version available for months. Having many third-party preset packs or "extensions" available right away can be good for a developer's sales. A good tipoff that a product isn't worth buying is when the developer mentions all the free expansions that will be made available later. Not that it matters for Serum, because there is no real drm on preset packs. See recent Marshmello production video with all his preset packs. I wonder why he takes all the time to add "." characters in between every word in the titles after he buys them. That file naming format is only required on Audionews. ;)

We already have enough Kontakt libraries, Superior Drummer, Falcon, and other ROMplers for "realistic" sounds. Products that try to be everything for everybody always fail at it.

 

I tried it out but, just played a few chords on a few different factory presets and it just eats my rather inferior cpu so, I guess I need to upgrade. Tbh, for 'real' stuff I think I would opt for Kontakt over synth emulations most days of t'week

 

Change the preset; not all Serum presets are generally CPU-intensive.
I made a free soundset for Serum a long time ago when it first came out, the CPU usage is lower there!

The Cosmic Trigger Soundset by CHE for the Xfer Records - Serum VSTi
https://mega.nz/file/qjhCDK6L#YlHjLWBC10fkbcdg_jAzcGIn4aWS0PFHEW2fu9CyNcs

 

I bough Serum 1 in 2013/2014 as part of an early access deal for like 90 dollars maybe. So I was pretty excited when I visited the Xfer site to find out that he a) did release Serum 2 without any pre-release marketing bs and b) that I got Serum 2 for free!

To me, the most impressive features are the Clips in combination with the Arp and modulator that can be applied. If you check the Arp presets therer are some sounds that make you drop your jaw.

One of the presets managed to bog down my 10th Gen Intel Core i9. I guess that's because of Maschine 2 doesn't support hyperthreading, afaik. I guess there's room for optimization, though.

It's cool that Serum 2 supports .sfz in it's sample player but that's not something I am particularly interested in. I think it's not made for creating authentic sounding traditional instrument patches. The legato string example is cool but to me it still sounds far from "realistic". Composers who want realistic sounding instruments should use Kontakt or whatever else is out there. On the other hand it's kind of ridiculous for slamming Serum 2 that it doesn't produce authentic sounding traditional instruments…

 

Last edited: Apr 1, 2025

Yeah it was a few of them giving my CPU 100%, I've got old hardware but that's ridiculous.

I am able to use maybe 1 or 2 instances of Serum 1 generally in my tracks and I usually bounce everything out as a rule to avoid the issues.

I know people tend to have pretty powerful machines nowadays so the CPU load isn't a huge issue but it does put me off a bit