Serum is the first synthesizer from Xfer Records, creators of the enduringly useful LFO Tool. Its aims are simple: to be a ‘dream synth’, which in this case translates to a wavetable synthesizer producing high-quality sound from a ‘workflow-oriented’ interface. Wavetables were first developed by Wolfgang Palm of PPG, the concept later taken up by Waldorf and Access (amongst others). The distinctive sound is derived from groups of digital waveforms, known collectively as wavetables. Movement and tonal complexity are introduced by scanning the table, either manually or by modulators such as LFOs and envelopes. Perhaps because of the potential for complexity, it’s a synthesis type well-suited to the graphical world of VST-land, hence the many examples that exist, trumping the older hardware in fidelity and in the number of wavetables. Available in VST, AAX and AU formats (both 32- and 64-bit), Serum is much deeper than its unencumbered panel implies. It ships with a large vault of prepared wavetables and an extensive toolkit to roll and shape your own. As dreams go, it’s a good start... Plain & Simple After a brief and pain-free installation, you’re presented with an interface of unparalleled directness and welcoming clarity. Given the number of messy, confusing and inconsistent synth panels I find myself juggling each day, this one is a delight. I couldn’t even find fault with the grey background as it perfectly highlights the subtly coloured wavetables, filters, envelopes and LFOs. I doubt anyone will seek the manual with any great urgency. Aided by a crack team of patch designers, Serum ships with approximately 450 factory sounds. A quick perusal reveals a wealth of sweet pads and bright, fuzzy strings, as you’d probably expect. Equally impressive, though, are the hard, deep and cutting basses, plus more snappy ‘plucks’ than a harpist on speed. Strolling through the collection, you’re left with an impression of shimmering uppers and rock-solid bottoms, peppered with razor-sharp leads. I did find it odd that the obvious capacity for atmospherics and cinematic sound design wasn’t more fully explored, whilst simultaneously relishing doing so myself. Tables In Motion The four possible sound sources consist of two independent wavetable oscillators, a sub-oscillator and a deluxe noise generator. It’s an architecture as familiar as it is logical, which means there’s nothing to stop you plunging in right away. Selecting a single oscillator unprocessed by filter or effects, I began auditioning the factory wavetables. They’re selected from categories such as Analog, Digital, Spectral, User and Vowel, and while the names give a good idea what to expect, it’s the pervasive clarity that hits you. With over 140 tables to choose from, I could have happily spent days selecting wavetables and manually hurtling through them using the ‘WT Pos’ knob. Instead, I set an LFO to automatically update the position, achieving the task by simply dragging the header tile of a chosen LFO to the knob in question. This is one of several methods of assigning modulation and took around a second from thought to execution. The modulation range is shown by a blue arc, which in this case I extended around the knob in order to scan the whole table. You can see how many destinations each modulator has by numbers on the header tiles. A long-time fan of wavetable synthesis, I was eager to make an original table. In Serum, a wavetable consists of up to 256 single-cycle waveforms, known as frames. Although it’s straightforward to edit an existing table, I already felt confident enough to start from scratch. A click of the pencil icon in the graphical window of either oscillator opens the wavetable editor. This is a fully stocked carpenter’s shop offering table construction by means of imported audio, drawn waveforms or mathematical formulae. The drawing of waveforms is one of those arts that seems incredibly exciting — until you try it. Fortunately, there are far superior ways to populate a range of frames. Serum can dynamically interpolate (ie. fill in the gaps) between waves using either crossfading or spectral morphing. It’s therefore entirely under your control whether the final table has smooth, buzzy or glitchy transitions. If you opt to import a WAV, either into the current frame or to fill the whole table, you shouldn’t expect regular sample playback, although it is possible for the resynthesis process to create material that’s recognisable — speech and drum loops are great fun to experiment with. Anyone who’s spent unhealthy hours in near-darkness probing Waldorf’s ‘19-20’ wavetable will testify that a lot can be achieved with a minimal assortment of syllables, and Serum can cram in whole conversations! The maximum table size weighs in at around 2MB but most are much smaller. If you import data from large WAVs, it is truncated when the table is built. The manual features tutorials aimed at creating high-quality wavetables from the output of other soft synths. However you choose to do it, your creations (or favourites from the factory tables) can be exported for use externally. Initially the supported formats were 8-bit (aimed at certain hardware modulars, eg. Wiard) or 32-bit WAV. Cheekily, I requested another option and was quietly stunned to see an update posted on Xfer’s forum soon afterwards. Serum now includes 16-bit WAV export too, which by happy coincidence is perfect to feed the PCM oscillators of my Roland V-Synth. My blagging wasn’t entirely selfish because plenty of other instruments can benefit from exotic digital waveforms too. The effects rack can be dynamically re-ordered and most of its parameters modulated. The effects rack can be dynamically re-ordered and most of its parameters modulated. Remaining within Serum, there’s a huge number of ways that waveforms can be manipulated. This powerful magic is stored in the lengthy Warp menu. Warp’s modes and parameters are unique to each oscillator and the results can sound like a mega-sophisticated tone control one moment, a psychedelic waveform twister, wrapper and bender the next. The less adventurous may prefer to start with a familiar process such as PWM, but even this isn’t fixated on squarewaves — it’ll squeeze anything you throw at it. At the other end of the adventure spectrum, user-customisable ‘wave remaps’ are probably the pinnacle of advanced waveform squishing. Whatever Warp mode you choose, each is a great candidate for modulation, from sources located a few pixels away. Continuing to cherry-pick through the Warp menu, there are various types of sweet, clean-sounding sync and a quantise option that turns everything decidedly nasty and rate-reduced. After that it’s extremes all the way, courtesy of AM, FM and RM (Ring Mod). All these modes force the otherwise pristine oscillators beyond their usual comfort zone. With wide-spread waveform mashing taking place, the best way to grasp the effect of each Warp mode is to switch to the 2D view. With a single click, the scrolling wavetable becomes an invaluable real-time waveform display. Last but not least, voices may be stacked in a powerful unison mode. The extra voices can be detuned for extra lushness, but the freakiest stuff comes with the introduction of Warp or wavetable position offsets. This makes each unison voice unique, although with a corresponding CPU cost. All your modulation connections in one convenient location. All your modulation connections in one convenient location. The sub oscillator is basic (and no less useful for being so), but the noise generator is a bit special. It’s a stereo sample player loaded, as you’d hope, with noise of every colour. But it doesn’t stop there. Joining the noise are sampled ambient whooshes, windchimes, vinyl crackles, dripping water and atmospherics galore. Adding samples of your own is as easy as dropping them into Serum’s ‘Noises’ folder, remembering that stereo samples consume twice as many voices. This could be an issue if you’re prone to extravagant CPU-taxing chords. 血清光滑的界面掩盖了极其灵活的波形合成器。 血清是Xfer Records的第一个合成器，是持久有用的LFO工具的创造者。它的目标很简单：成为一个“梦幻合成器”，在这种情况下，它被翻译成一个波形合成器，从一个“面向工作流”的接口产生高质量的声音。 波形首先由PPG的Wolfgang Palm开发，这个概念后来被Waldorf和Access（以及其他）采用。这种独特的声音来源于一组数字波形，统称为波形表。运动和音调的复杂性是通过手动或调制器（如LFO和包络）扫描表来引入的。也许因为潜在的复杂性，它是一种合成类型，非常适合VST-land的图形世界，因此存在许多示例，在保真度和波形表数量方面胜过旧硬件。 可用的VST、AAX和AU格式（32位和64位），Serum比其未受限面板所暗示的更深。它配有一个准备好的大圆顶波纹餐具和一个广泛的工具箱，可以自己滚动和形状。随着梦想的进行，这是一个好的开始…… 素朴 在简单且无痛苦的安装之后，您将看到一个具有无与伦比的直接性和欢迎清晰度的界面。考虑到每天杂乱、混乱和不一致的合成面板的数量，我发现自己每天都在玩杂耍，这一个很令人高兴。我甚至找不到灰色背景的缺陷，因为它完美地突出了微妙颜色的波片、滤光片、信封和LFO。我怀疑是否有人会非常紧急地查找手册。 在补丁设计团队的帮助下，血清船大约有450个工厂的声音。快速浏览一下就会发现许多甜蜜的垫子和明亮、模糊的字符串，正如您所期望的。同样令人印象深刻的是坚硬，深沉和切割的低音，再加上比竖琴手更快捷的“弹拨”。漫步在收藏品中，你留下的印象是闪闪发光的鞋帮和坚固的底部，胡椒与剃刀锋利的线索。我确实觉得很奇怪，对于大气和电影声音设计的明显能力没有得到充分的探索，同时我也喜欢这样做。 运动表 四个可能的声源包括两个独立的波形振荡器，一个子振荡器和一个豪华噪声发生器。它是一种既熟悉又符合逻辑的体系结构，这意味着没有任何东西可以阻止您立即投入其中。 选择一个未经滤波或效果处理的振荡器，我开始试听工厂的波表。它们是从诸如模拟、数字、频谱、用户和元音之类的类别中选择的，虽然名称给出了一个好主意，但是它击中了你的普遍的清晰度。有超过140张桌子可供选择，我可以愉快地花上几天时间挑选波纹餐具，并用“WT Pos”旋钮手动快速穿过它们。相反，我设置了一个LFO来自动更新位置，通过简单地将选择的LFO的标题平铺拖动到所讨论的旋钮来完成任务。这是分配调制的几种方法之一，从思考到执行花费了大约一秒钟的时间。调制范围用蓝色圆弧表示，在这种情况下，我绕着旋钮扩展，以便扫描整个工作台。您可以看到每个调制器在头瓦片上按数字有多少个目的地。 我长期热衷于波形合成，渴望制作一张原创的桌子。在血清中，波形由多达256个单周期波形组成，称为帧。尽管编辑现有表非常简单，但我已经足够自信从头开始。单击任一振荡器的图形窗口中的铅笔图标，将打开波形编辑器。这是一个全货的木工车间，通过进口音频、绘制波形或数学公式提供桌子结构。波形画是看起来令人难以置信的令人兴奋的艺术之一——除非你尝试一下。幸运的是，有很多更好的方法来填充一系列帧。血清可以动态内插（即，填补空白）之间的波使用交叉衰落或频谱变形。因此，最终表是否具有平滑、繁琐或小故障的转换完全由您控制。 如果选择将WAV导入当前帧或填充整个表，则不应期望有规律的样本回放，尽管重新合成过程可以创建可识别的材料——语音和鼓循环非常有趣地进行实验。任何在接近黑暗中度过了不健康的时刻来探索华尔多夫的“19-20”波形的人都会证明，用最少的音节组合可以取得很多成就，而血清可以填满整个对话！最大表大小大约为2MB，但大多数都小得多。如果导入数据 |
血清合成器 Xfer Records Serum v1.36b8 + 
合成器 Native Instruments Massive X v1.4
合成器 Roland VS XV-5080 v1.0.2 PC
合成器工作站 KORG TRITON v1.3.1 PC MAC
巨型合成器 Spectrasonics Omnisphere v.2.
合成器 Steinberg Padshop Pro v1.2.20 CE 
合成器 reFX Nexus 3 Full v3.4.4 PC/v3.3.
螺旋尖塔合成器 Reveal Sound Spire v1.5.1
CZ 合成器 Plugin Boutique VirtualCZ v1.3
合成器 reFX Nexus v4.5.17 PC/v4.5.13 MAC
低音合成器 Native Instruments Massive v1
合成器集 Tone2 Instruments Collection 20
