Serum has been one of the top wavetable-based software synthesizers for quite some time, a direct competitor to Massive. It predates my getting into Eurorack, and I used Serum’s wavetable editing tools to create banks for the SynthTech E352/E370. But other than that, my usage of it really fell off during my modular era.
In recent years when I wanted to do wavetable stuff I usually turned to Vital, a free competitor that was a bit more modern and had some fresh ways to manipulate its wavetables. But that was really just a once-in-a-while thing.
There have been rumors of Serum 2 development for quite some time, but I guess part of me never thought it would see the light of day. However, it was released last night — and amazingly, a free upgrade for Serum owners. That license I bought used back in 2016 is really paying off now.
The major features that are new to Serum 2:
- 3 primary oscillators instead of two.
- New wavetable banks, new filters, new FX, new warp modes.
- Wavetables can interpolate instead of needing to morph in the editor.
- New oscillator modes: multisample, sample, granular, spectral. All have nice factory content for each.
- Oscillators and filters can be modulation sources. This alone is huge (and part of why there are three oscillators and some additional tuning modes for them now.) It also allows feedback modulation!
- New routing/mixing options
- New clip sequencer and arpeggiator
- A whole lot of small changes/improvements. (Such as wider possible ranges and alternate modes for unison, which I love…)
In short, it’s dreamy. It’s not perfect — it will not drone without externally holding a MIDI note on message (even with the clip sequencer), and I’d still like to run MPE pressure through a slew limiter and other modular-ish tricks. But I could 100% make an album just using this (and some additional effects) and be happy, if I hadn’t already come up with a plan.
I have, finally, sold off all of the modules I was wanting to let go of. I still have Xaoc Tallin sitting in a drawer, because between it, Ana 2, and Legio — all 6HP — I’m not sure which two I want to keep. I haven’t done much with the Doepfer octal VCA since getting it (in between album projects) so I’m not sure what my VCA needs will really be. (I am mostly keeping Legio in case some killer must-have firmware is released for it, because I’m not really in love with any of the existing ones.)
Pretty much this.
A reasonable person would say: if the building has a Pizza Hut sign, the owner has a a Pizza Hut franchise, and the shop sells Pizza Hut brand pizza, it’s a Pizza Hut.
Transphobes would tell you: if it has this roof, it’s a Pizza Hut. The physical form of the building as it once was is its destiny forever.
They would tell you: even if that iconic roof was removed and replaced with a completely different design, it is still a Pizza Hut. Because that’s what it was “at birth.”
They would tell you: if a construction company started building a Pizza Hut, but then the plan changed before the roof was finished, and it ended up with a different shape: it’s a mutilated Pizza Hut.
They would tell you that if somebody opened a sub shop in a building that had this roof, it’s not really a sub shop, and it has an unfair competitive advantage over “real” sub shops.
If they saw a building that had a roof that looked kind of like Pizza Hut and kind of not, it would make them angry, because “science” says there are only two kinds of buildings: Pizza Hut and Not Pizza Hut.
They would even have a subculture of people who “hutvestigate” photos of buildings, measuring the roof angles to decide which buildings are secretly Pizza Hut. And they would do this even for cartoon images of buildings just to make sure the Woke Mind Virus isn’t infiltrating children’s media.
(And now it’s time for my lunch break and I kind of want pizza…)