5 Powerful Tips for making Supersaws in Serum.
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.
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.
Let’s dive right in alright. 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.
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 detune. ‘
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 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.
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 so there is what you’re going to want to do in terms of unison counts D tune and blend within the oscillators.
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.