Vital Synth VS Serum - The Ultimate Comparison Video

so we got serum versus vital which one wins [Music] well the short answer is both as this is shane here with echo sound works in this video we're going to be talking about serum and vital i've been asked to do this video a lot it recently came up in our discord because we recently launched a released a free pack for vital called origins which you can see here and we also released a free skin for vital which you can see here so since we released those two things it came up in the discord and i thought i should finally address this now i don't like to do these types of videos because i feel like it contributes to the circle jerk of youtube producers every time a new synth comes out proclaiming that it kills off some other synth that's a weird concept for me maybe it's because i grew up playing guitar the idea of fender releasing a new strat or telecaster killing off my les paul or killing off another single coil pickup guitar i have it just doesn't compute to a to a guitarist right here's another great example how many of you would love to have a original vintage moog or profit or juno [Music] i would love to have one too so the idea of just because it's an older synth means that the newer synth is better and makes the old one obsolete is ridiculous i mean just look at vintage since people wouldn't spend five six seven to ten thousand dollars on a vintage synth if they still couldn't create music right and at the end of the day these software synthesizers are tools to create music they're tools to create a connection with the listener emotionally via your music and sound so that being said we're going to do more of an objective look at serum versus vitals let's dive into a daw open up these two incredible synths and get going right so we got serum with our custom ableton skin on the left and we got vital with our custom ableton dark skin on the right that's why they look almost identical so the first thing we're going to do is just a quick couple simple listening tests because i want to show you that some things sound inherently different in the synths so before we get into all the features and things that you know one synth has that the other doesn't let's just quickly talk about how they sound i actually think serum as weird as this is to say and say out loud is a little bit better at being more analog sounding than vital serum has a rounder more kind of warm rich mid-range or at least it can alright so let's quickly take a quick listen to what i mean by that whole analog thing because a lot of you are probably scratching your head with that so here's an analog inspired patch from our pack vivid and this is in serum [Music] now it's using a custom wave table that we created from a moog voyager low pass 12 filter just a soft clipper on the effects now i tried to create a very similar sound in vital but the whole point of of when i say it sounds more analog a little bit easier with less fiddling and less fuss is it's easier to get that analog vibe i didn't want to see if i could create a one-to-one recreation of this preset i probably could but it just doesn't have the same character so i'm using the same moog voyager wave table with a saw low pass 24 soft clipper try to get the envelopes and the modulation very similar and this is what we get [Music] so it does sound different obviously because certain things aren't set identically but it still just doesn't have that same character and that's what i mean by it's a little bit easier to make serum sound analog in my opinion than vital so overall i'd say that serum can sound a little bit warmer a little bit fuller in the mid-range and it can also be a little bit more aggressive and kind of in your face sounding with super over the top distortion and filter types because it just has those features so let's take a quick listen now to the default saw sound in both of these synths so we can start to compare its kind of core sound [Music] and vital [Music] a little bit brighter coming from vital and everything else is the exact same now they're not the exact same because if i pan these out left and right and then load up a multimeter we'll hear that there's some stereo width happening [Music] which means that they're not identical so that's kind of interesting to note if i did that same thing with serum for instance it would just collapse to mono the second thing i want to compare is the unison engine right because unison is super important to tons of modern genres especially in edm so let's take a quick listen to the unison the basic saw here in serum and vital again very similar just a slight difference in sound i actually don't know which one i like more it's just i think a little different all right so the last quick test we're going to do is checking out the sound of a low-pass filter this is why i think serum starts to sound a little bit better than vital so here's a low-pass filter set to 575 hertz in both synths so here's serum and vital i just find that the serum version of the same setting is a little bit more pleasant to listen to so let's do something else though there's this fat knob in serum a lot of the in a lot of the low-pass high-pass filter types that are it's great for getting that analog sound if you turn this up the sound gets more warm more analog more round and there's really no direct comparison that in vital there's this drive knob which sounds kind of weird it makes it sound almost muddy okay so and in serum we do have a drive knob as well and they're different the drive knob and serum actually boosts the gain below the cutoff point in this example the cool thing to which is a cool thing to modulate with say like an envelope or an lfo to add more oomph to like a short snappy base or a lead or even a pluck so i believe i lied to you we're gonna do one more quick test let's check out the fm in both of these synths so they're not fm synths right they're wave table synths but we have these fm warp modes in both of them we have fm from air b and serum and we have fm from one two or three in vital so basically you have one oscillator b your main oscillator and you apply frequency modulation using another secondary oscillator to basically affect that first oscillator so with our example here in serum we have a sine wave sounds like this right and i've loaded in a square wave and oscillator b and i turned the volume all the way down and i tuned it up one octave and we selected fm from b now it sounds like this [Applause] right so usually you would put this lower [Music] [Applause] but i'm just trying to show you what they sound like at more extreme settings so you can hear so in vital that same setup sounds like this [Applause] [Music] i feel like there's more movement and kind of this weird warblyness in vital when you start to move around but let's turn this down now to about 50 in each of them [Applause] all right so enough of the quick kind of random test let's talk about the feature differences so first thing that you should notice right away is that there are three primary wave table oscillators in vital versus the two in serum serum gives you a direct sub oscillator you don't have that in vital but you don't really need it because you have that third oscillator now there's also a noise oscillator and slash sample oscillator in serum same with vital so the core makeup of the synth is pretty similar you just have this one extra full-fledged wave table oscillator now there's not a whole lot of difference with the controls and features in the primary oscillator section there is some differences with the warp modes which i feel like i need to highlight in serum you have a drop down right here for warp modes you have a few sinks bend pulse width modulation asymmetrical flip mirror remaps quantize and then fm and am and rm now in vital you have a whole separate category of warp modes this first knob is first first section these are called spectral warp modes they change the actual sound on a spectral level and then the seconds category is where you find things that you'd find in serum sync format quantize bend squeeze and pulse now you are missing a lot of the ones that you have in serum in this section of vital right now obviously serum doesn't have any of these spectral warp modes and i'm going to show you some of those right now so we're going to go to uh we're going to we're going to initialize this preset and we're going to listen to one of these spectral warp modes so my favorite two are actually low pass and high pass you can use this to filter out frequencies at an oscillator level which to a sound design nerd like myself that is freaking epic because now it frees up my filters potentially to just do creative stuff right and you have a low pass and a high pass you also have this shepherd's tone which is crazy for creating risers all right so before we move on to some other comparisons let's quickly check out two of these really unique spectral warp modes these are ones that i have a lot of fun with it's called harmonic stretch and in harmonic stretch so here's a bass preset from our pack origins or free pack for or for vital and it's a brass slash respace check it out [Music] right crazy filthy sound so this harmonic stretch is being applied to this brass stab which is a wave table from a pack code if i turn this off it's just a brass step right now this harmonic stretch is almost adding like a bass sound to this sound and you can see what it does to the waveform right it spreads out the harmonics it stretches the mount left and right but at low amounts it almost makes it sound like there's a base layered in with this brass tab which makes it seem like there's actually four oscillators [Music] all right so now we're gonna move to the sample oscillator in vital and compare that to the noise oscillator in serum because it's basically the same thing so it might look like there's more going on with the sample oscillator in vital because you can actually see the waveform and there's some bigger buttons but you actually have more control there's a deeper feature set in serum so you can drag and drop samples into both of these and you can also load them up from drop down windows as well now the key difference in my opinion where vital lacks is that it does not have a way to change the start point within the sample so for instance if you load up a sample and you don't want to start right at the beginning there's nothing you can do you'd have to trim that sample outside of vital and re-import it in serum you have the phase knob so let's go through these controls here the button you have the same button the little key track icon key track icon you have a one shot mode or a loop button just like you do in serum then over here you have this random it's kind of like a randomizer so when you when this is engaged every time you hit you trigger a key or a midi note the start point will happen at a different point it'll basically just be randomized we can do the same thing here with this random control in this random knob in serum and you can actually modulate that in serum with an lfo or with anything really you can't modulate any of these buttons in vital right i can't drag anything on so the sample oscillator is a lot less flexible now there's actually a really cool hidden modulator in serum that a lot of people don't use but i use it all the time so check out this tape loop preset in serum [Music] right really gorgeous sound crazy sound that's just coming from the sample but i'm actually modulating the phase randomly using what's called note on random so it's going to randomly bounce through the starting point of my sample and it can do some really crazy cool things so you don't have that at all in the sample oscillator in vital all right so now we're going to take a look at the filters one more time because at the beginning of the video we just kind of quickly touched on how they sound a little bit different i think they sound better in serum but now we're going to touch on something that vital has over serum and that's routing flexibility so in serum we have one filter right on the front page right in vital we have two now you can also get very specific with how you route sounds into and out of the filters so here's a key patch from our preset bank for vital origins and we're making use of two filters check it out all right you get the idea so we have two oscillators active and a sample oscillator oscillator one is going into filter two which is a low pass filter oscillator two is going into filter one which is a comb filter and our sample oscillator is going into both of those you can't do that in serum right now i can also get very specific with how the filters work with each other i can route filter one and filter two to kind of work in in tandem i can do series or parallel can't do that in serum and there's been lots of sounds that i've created in serum where i wished i could so there's one win for vital over serum in the filter section but now we're going to check out something else in serum that vital doesn't have serum has a bunch of really nice miscellaneous slash ie unique filter types right we have sample and hold ring mod combs all passes reverb the distorted comb i could go on and on you don't have that many unique filter types in vital you have some format filters a few comb filters and a few phaser filters so let's check out how these uh unique filter types in serum can create cool sounds so let's load in this right here where we have this distorted comb so check it out [Music] now if i were to load up a more basic filter it's not going to be nearly as cool now if i go in and we load up another miscellaneous for instance i'll pass all right you get the idea you're just missing some of these really cool unique filter types like i know a lot of people like the reverb filter and serum and you just don't have that in vital so overall it's kind of like a stalemate yeah you have more flexibility in vital but i think serums but filters sound a little better and you have more unique filter types so again this is what i said in the beginning of video both all right so moving right along now we're going to go to the envelope section the envelopes are pretty darn similar we have three envelopes the first envelope is our amp envelope and we can use the other ones to modulate things like turn one into a filter envelope or whatever we want to modulate now the controls and the way they work are very similar you can go into any of the the envelopes you can double click and drag out to change your envelope shape or you can change it with the knobs you do have a delay at the start of each of the envelopes in vital but that's the only difference really between these two things now moving on to our lfo or other modulator source we have the option to use up to eight lfos in both synths if i were to start to modulate this with four five and six more lfos appear just like in vital if i use five right and it goes out to eight now the way in which you create shapes is again very similar in serum you double click to create points you can move move those points around same thing in vital now vital does give you these brushes where you can paint in different uh different shapes essentially so if we want to create like a step sequencer we can turn this on and just brush but we can also hold down shift in serum and do a similar thing so really really similar now there's one key difference i think with uh vital is that you have this key track mode for your lfo which allows you to do audio rate modulation which is like a whole form of synthesis you can do some crazy things with it that's a video in and of itself but you can do some pseudo kind of fm pulse or fmpm style sounds with it so that's definitely something in vital's favor you also have this stereo which i'll show you on an initialized preset right now so here is our initial patch we're going to take the sterile we're going to modulate the filter here with this lfo just a simple cut off and we're going to turn our stereo up so it offsets the left and right signal of this lfo and you get this nice stereo effect so if you want to try to create like a really wide sound you could actually use this on unison on detune and it's just going to accentuate that effect so that's something that it has that serum does not now serum gives you this smooth knob as well which is really nice to avoid pops and clicks especially with kind of side chain style lfos so it's too similar to say which one's better they're just a little different but not much now in serum we also have this velo modulator and note that looks like the lfos and the envelopes it looks like we don't have those here but we actually do there's down here we have velo and we have note which you can use to modulate different sources we also have these mpe pressure and slide which we actually do have in serum but you have to right click and go to mod source to access those mpe's and of course you have a stereo control down here which you don't have in serum which is pretty cool similar to the stereo control in the lfo and then we have the random which again you do have in serum you can right click and go mod source and you have note on random one and two and we do have these random lfos which we do have in serum basically the chaos now in terms of the effects which is the last thing we're going to talk about i think the effects in serum sound better especially the distortion and saturation effects there's a lot more distortion types too in vital we have one two three four five six whereas in serum we have well it looks like almost too many to count in front of you i think it's like 13 14 maybe 15. so you are missing some filter or some distortion types for sure i will say though that the delay in vital is quite nice you have this mid ping pong mode which is pretty interesting versus ping pong all right so it's kind of getting uh it's leaving a little bit of the sound more centered so it's i think it's a more of a mix friendly ping pong delay so there's also a difference i think in the reverb i personally like the reverb sound and serum a little bit more but let's be honest a lot of us turn those things off when we're actually mixing our tracks with the presets and the very last thing i want to touch on is the compressor and the multi-band mode in this compressor so i think the multi-band or the ott in serum sounds a lot better which makes sense because steve doodle actually made a full ott plug-in and released it for free because he's a goat like that so you know i i wouldn't expect this to sound as good as that but it is there at least so you can get those kind of glassy ott style sounds but i think the effects in serum a little bit better overall but you have a similar set of effects the only effect that's actually missing outside of the distortion modes that you don't have access to is actually this hyper and dimension everything else is pretty much a one-to-one copy or clone and let me know which one you like more if you're using both serum and vital let me know which one you think is of the better synth or are you like me do you think that you should just use both because why not all right guys thank you for watching i'll see you next time all right so that's going to sum up this video if you guys have any questions or comments you can post those below and we'll get back to you as soon as we can if you guys aren't subscribed to our channel you know the drill hit that subscribe button the support really does mean a lot to us and if you guys haven't ever checked out our website echosoundworks.com definitely head on over there there's a ton of free content samples loops and presets and of course there's some premium sound sets and sample packs as well and lastly if you guys use instagram consider giving us a follow we run a lot of contests giveaways and promotions on that platform and i think you guys will like what we're doing over there all right thank you for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: Echo Sound Works

Views: 30,424

Keywords: vital synth, vital vs serum, vital synth review, is vital better than serum, is vital the serum killer, serum vs wavetable, vital review, wavetable vs serum, serum presets, serum killer, vital wavetable, matt tytel, best free synth, vital synth sound design, vital synth tutorial, vital synth vst, serum vst, echo sound works vital, echo sound works serum, vital synth future bass, vital synth presets free

Id: w6b9yY8J2fs

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 25 2021