From the course: Learning Serum

Serum overview - Serum Tutorial

From the course: Learning Serum

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Serum overview

- [Instructor] Before we dig into the basics of Wave Table Synthesis, let's take a look at the Serum interface so that you'll know where the important components are located, how to access the different views, and how to recall and save presets. So if we start at the top and we click the word Serum, you can set the display size. I'm at the default 100%. Next to that, there are four tabs for the four main views of Serum. So we're currently looking at the oscillator tab, but if you want to add effects, you can do it here on the effects tab. If you want to look at all of the modulation routing, you can do that on the matrix tab, and on the global tab, you can see your global preferences, and some additional parameters for chaos LFO's, unison, and oscillator settings. Now heading over here to the right, if you click on where it says init, that is the selector for your presets. So if you want to pull up a preset from this menu, you can do that by choosing a folder, and going in and choosing a preset. And then once you're within a folder, if you want to move back and forward in the list, you can do that using these two arrows. The one on the right to move forward, and the one on the left to move backwards. You can also go to this browser button, and this shows you an entire list of all of the different presets in Serum, and you can actually select one of these to audition it. Alright, if you want to save a preset, you can do that by clicking on the save icon that's next to the preset selector. Once you click on that, you'll need to give it a name, and then go ahead and click the save button. I'm going to cancel out of there so I don't save over this preset. Next, there's a menu just to the right of the browser button, and this includes some important things like being able to reinitialize Serum back to the default preset, and other items like if you want to find your Serum presets folder, you can just click this button, and it will take you right to that folder. Alright, let's close out of there, and let's finish this top row by just reminding you that the master volume for your output of Serum is located up here in the upper right-hand corner, and you'll often need to come up here and adjust this level, so that you don't get too much output. Now below that, on the oscillator tab, we have our four oscillators. And that includes oscillators A and B, and the sub oscillator, and the noise oscillator. You can enable or disable these oscillator's by clicking on the on, off buttons in the upper left-hand corner. You can do the same thing with Serum's filter by clicking on the button in the top left-hand corner. Now, if you want to route any of your oscillator's through this filter, you'll need to check the corresponding check box here. So, A for oscillator A, B for B, N for noise, and S for sub oscillator. Below that, we have all our modulators. We have our envelope's and our LFO's, and also our macro knobs, and our direct assignment of the mod wheel. All of these modulators can be assigned by simply clicking on the tab, and dragging and dropping them on the target parameter that you want to modulate. So now that we know how to navigate the Serum interface, where the important devices and parameter's are located, and how to load and save presets, let's get started.

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