5 Power Tips for Supersaws in Serum

hey guys this is echo sound works and you are checking out a serum tip and trick tutorial video on a DSR in this video I'm going to show you five different tips tricks or techniques that will get you better more cohesive sounding super saws so I get I get this question a lot actually whether it's through social media or email a lot of people seem to be struggling with getting super soft sounds that sound clean and fit well in a mix in serum and it is I would say the number one reason for that is you're doing too much so for instance if we compare the kind of like the quintessential super saw hyper saw soft synth which is probably Silent One arguably Silent One or silent is comparing it to serum you have a lot less options right with with silent you load up your saw waveform choose your voices your voice count which can go only up to eight and then you detune they are and then you have a control for stereo with two that's really it outside of choosing maybe a slightly different way for maybe like a pulse or a triangle saw that's really all you can do well with serum you can obviously use wave tables you can obviously have more control over how the wave tables are moving with warp modes all that sort of stuff so there's a lot more going on and there's some pitfalls that you can kind of stumble across in that process so let's dive right in alright so the first thing that you want to be aware of when you're trying to get a good sounding super saw or hyper saw is you want to use a saw waveform you don't necessarily want to use a really complex wave table this is where I think a lot of people run into their first issue in serum when they're trying to get a super sauce down now one of the biggest benefits to a wavetable synth is obviously being able to move and you maybe modulate an LFO or an envelope through the wave table positions through the different frames or cycles well with a super saw that gets kind of messy because if you have a really intricate wave table and you're detuning so there's a lot of voices and you're spreading out the detuned unison voice is out wide and then you're moving through the wave table positions where it might change from like a saw to a square to like a triangle to something grittier it's not going to be a cohesive clean sound especially comparatively to silent right so first thing you want to do is load up one or two oscillators of a saw waveform now I like to work with sometimes a default just typical saw waveform or I like to do like a variation of that maybe like a rounded saw waveform or maybe something with a little bit of noise introduced so like this one is technically still I was still caught a saw it's going to have a saw type sound so if I play this right now right it sounds like a saw but it's a little bit different let's turn this down spree loud there's the default saw and here's this rounded one right it's just a pinch different and if we add more voices to it that those differences will start to add up so that's the first thing you want to do all right the second thing you're going to want to do is introduce voices of unison and then detune and blend those together now serum goes up to a unison count of 16 now that can be quite a lot quite a lot of voices especially if you're using two oscillators so a pay up if we do a quick history lesson on super saw as the original super saw was seven I believe access virus has a version that they call the hyper saw which is eight so I usually go anywhere from about six to twelve so let's just go to ten right now so here is oscillator a with the default saw waveform with ten voices of unison D tune at about halfway and let's turn to blend it about half way so the de tune as you can see here visually is basically going to spread out those detuned voices so the further up you get towards one the more you here because it's spreading it out away from the center voices now the blend here will disproportionately are proportionately depending how you're looking at blend the two the Center voice the center voice is with the actual voices of Eunice and so these yellow ones are the ones in the center and these green ones are the unison voices so if we turn the blend all the way up and the detune all the way up we get a crazy weird sound you [Music] all right so when you're going to be working with a monophonic sound maybe it's like a drop to a trap song or main room or whatever you can tend to boost the unison in the detune up a lil bit higher if you can be playing chords maybe like all a future based that sort stuff you want to keep it a little bit more conservative all right so that being said I'm going to set have the settings to about right there all right so now that we have that set up on oscillator a let's go over to oscillator B and let's do the same thing but I'm going to give this less voices of unison okay and this one the second oscillator source I like to pitch up or down then I'll typically turn that down a little bit okay that helps spread out and create more voices and just a thickness that works especially for a lead sound okay so there is what you're going to want to do in terms of unison counts D tune and blend within the oscillators alright so the next thing you want to you want to address is the sub and noise oscillators and if you want those to offset active in your sound I personally definitely almost always use the noise oscillator with a super soft sound I think it can help create a interesting and unique texture in serum that you can't get with other synths because you can import your own custom noise samples or you can use a bunch of the already included ones which are quite unique now in terms of the sub oscillator you wouldn't want to really stick a sub maybe like a sine sub with it but you want to at certain points in your productions whether you're using it as lead a chord or whatever it might be beneficial to use a saw wave form in the sub that then is pitched an octave lower than the rest of it so for instance it was sound like this right now you all right that sounds bad right there if we turn the level down a little bit and if we change this to mono and turn up the glide it still is pretty noticeable but that will be reduced once we start to filter things and start to EQ but if you're using a super saw as a drop sound maybe it's a trap song maybe it's any genre that you have main room in each honor that you using a super saw sound as a drop you're just gonna have bass and kick typically there so it might fill out the mix more to have something there now and also the sub cannot be detuned right it doesn't have the unison in D tune so it gives your sound something in the middle so it's not just out left and right because of the blend of the D tune in unison voices which is kind of nice so let's keep that there for now and let's turn on the noise let's go to a weird one here let's do like an air can from the organics alright let me play a chord with this will sound quite nice with the low octave - from the sub so we turn down the noise let's turn down the glide a little alright so this is the point in which when you're making a super soft sound before it has effects before has filtering before you've messed with envelopes LFO modulation that's for stuff if it doesn't sound good and clean here and kind of kind of what you're ultimately going for you probably messed up in the first two steps and you need to redress it it still should sound like a cool super saw style sound right now alright so let's move on to the next tip [Music] alright so we're now onto the fourth tip now this fourth one is actually be happening in the effects slot so I'm going to do real quick is I'm going to load and effect chain because you can save these in serum which is really cool so let's just do the X - a chord patch here and let's turn let's turn on the delay let's set the EQ first the compression second and let's have the reverb happening last okay so that all looks right I'll change this to a ping pong delay so now we have some effects so the sound will be coming to life a little bit more so let's check this out [Music] okay then we have the multiband compression on let's take that off so there's less differentiation in the frequencies that we heard in the last clip right so I've taken out some of the low frequencies here with this EQ again we can roll that back and I boosted some of the highs okay so let's turn the air can noise down a little bit alright so now we have some delay some reverb is sounding kind of cool there's this little Hyperdimension section on the effects rack that can do some really cool things you have the dimension expander which is cool in its own right if your massive either you'll know and understand what that is there's also this hyper which will just detune sounds which is really cool so if we crank this up right it's adding detuned to our effects till a whole sound of serum now in that regard in the last video I said that you can't really detune the sub well now you can for instance if we turn off oscillators a and B and the noise and we keep this hyper on I'll turn off all the other effects right now that's coming from just the saw waveform in our know we are in our sub oscillator so you can actually detune that you right you can read trigger it so this will also affect the noise as well let's turn off the subs you can hear this right it's making the noise basically wider and almost like it's creating like this detune use and so this is another great tip in trick now I don't know if we necessarily need it for this exact sound that I'm making but we'll have it on and I'll just turn it on lightly so we'll go to five voices of unison let's turn on the sub the AUSA today and also to be turned down the whole sound oh so this is what we have you can also use the sub as not a sub or lower frequency offset you can use it as a third oscillator to create another saw sound and then is being detuned or still bit more Center specific because it's not D tuned as much because of the hyper and dimension all right let's go on to the next tip and trick alright guys so the fifth tip and trick here is to use your warp modes on the oscillators now the warp modes basically will move in between or kind of change what's happening with the frame that you're on in your wave table this is another reason why using a wave table that has a lot of information maybe it changes from like a saw to a square to a sign to some other wave form can be a little bit tricky to make it sound clean and cohesive when you're making the super soft sound so I haven't I have an LFO shape here I just quickly drew in you can use any LFO shape you want doesn't matter we're gonna load up Bend plus and minus because it's a good one to start with so if I have it in the middle on the warp mode control here for Bend plus or minus it's like the warp modes not even on now if I turn it to the left it kind of pinches the wave and will be more nasally sounding so let's turn off oscillators be in the sub and noise turn down the right so that is what we got and then we turn the Bend up to the minus side almost sounds like a square sound right alright if we get into that though I do wanna point out that I did add a filter and I did add an envelope that's adding like a quick tick to the sound by modulating into the coarse pitch of oscillator a so let's bring back oscillators be the sub and noise now let's turn the been plus or minus back to its default positions about half way and let's modulate a little bit and I'm going to hold down option shift on my keyboard so it's going plus and minus with this and I have the LFO set to my called it an envelope there so I can go I met LFO but I want to set two envelope right and we're doing the same thing here on oscillator B but let's use a different shape let's just do Bend - okay and again I just want a little bit of movement because it's going to help make the sound a little bit more three-dimensional cool so let's play this real quick right now if we take the envelope up on the attack on the envelope one be more of like a future based type chord sound we do but right now we have a nice clean large sounding super soft and we're just doing very basic things so there you guys go there is the five tips and tricks I lied here is a bonus tip and trick five sounded better for the title but I did want to show you this one because it's actually really cool one so go to your global page once you have your sound pretty much made now there's this whole section right here called unison and you can change a lot of the sound of your super saw sound by messing with these controls for instance the width here this will basically allow you to have higher unison voice counts but while still having a cohesive sound for chord sounds so if we were to turn these two down to like 50 the sound is not going to be as wide and it may actually be a little bit better for phase correlation so let's bring up a phase analyzer here so here it is at 100 and 100 basically at pretty much stereo or in the middle of the phase correlation mirror let's turn down to 50 and 50 or around there on both of them right we have better correlation we still have the big sound so if you're having trouble getting it to fit in the mix mess with the width control sometimes I very rarely have it up at actually 100 now next you have this warp function and as the hot tip says here it adjusts the warp offset of the different unison voices so if you're using a strong warp function we're not using a strong one we're using a subtle one you can make it you can exaggerate the fact or reduce it a little bit so with ours let's turn it up on oscillator a let's actually turn it way up on oscillator B and let's let's keep it pretty much at zero for oscillator a right so we got a really nice big clean sound still now next you have down here we have different stack modes and this actual field if we have a stack feature and then a different mode rather one of my favorite modes is super I just like how it sounds so let's play this again it's a nice sound and you can mess with these different algorithms for different types of sounds but my favorite is super now next you get the listed let's go to the stacks these will basically stack different voices maybe it's a plus octave higher than knocked the knocked if you're currently set at maybe it's below or sometimes it's even cores and you can just kind of tab through these so here is in here that's kind of really high pitch now here's a seventh or +7 so we got 5th in there center- 12 this is really cool one for big chord sounds [Music] right it just sounds really big now this one's even Center it then it goes down to center negative 24 so I like using to leave sometimes these 12 with the one times and it which means to be higher so now we have both of those active on both of the oscillators so this should be a huge super saw sound now let's play it real quick [Music] alright there you guys go if you have any questions or comments let me know below like I said at the beginning of the video I am echo sound works thank you so much for watching guys I'll see you next time

Channel: ADSR Music Production Tutorials

Views: 192,274

Rating: 4.9648623 out of 5

Keywords: supersaw serum, how to make supersaw serum, future bass supersaw serum, supersaw, xfer serum, xfer records serum, xfer serum tutorial

Id: KnbAOrM62Ks

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2017