7/9/2020 Serum Wavetable Design (1/2): Create your own Wavetable - Typhonic Samples

By Tieme
In Serum, Sound Design, Tutorials

Wavetables are the base of your sound and all the filters, LFOs and modulations will shape your
sound. However, it’s very important to start with the right/best wavetable so that you can create the
sound that you are looking for more easily. There are multiple ways to create your own wavetable for
Serum. This article will give you insight in 4 different techniques available and how to use them. Part 2
shows you how to polish and finish your wavetables. Since every wavetable that you make with these
methods will probably need to be customized a bit to get perfect.

What are wavetables?

Just like almost any synth, Serum has oscillators. These oscillators use wavetables to define the sound that
they make, which means they are the base of your sound. You probably are familiar with a sine or triangle
oscillator, see image. What you see in this image is 1 single frame of 2 wavetables (osc A and osc B). A
wavetable in Serum contains a maximum of 256 frames. So basically, 1 oscillator can produce 256 different
sounds.

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7/9/2020 Serum Wavetable Design (1/2): Create your own Wavetable - Typhonic Samples

Serum Oscillators. OSC A: Sine Shape, OSC B: Triangle Shape.

Method 1: Import a sound/sample as a wavetable.

This is probably the most used method to create wavetables in Serum. There are multiple ways to use a
sound or sample. You can drag & drop it on one of the oscillators. But before dropping your sample on the
oscillator screen, hold your mouse button and choose one of the options. The top three options I use the most,
because you can choose what Serum does with the pitch. The bottom 4 (FFT) are the best for vocals and
drums. Especially when you want to hear what the vocal says when scrolling through the wavetable position.

There’s a lot to say about all these options and which audio to use them for but just play around with these
different import options and see what kind of results you get. To help you out, here are my basic rules to
understand what each option does.

Serum Import Options with Drag & Drop Audio Samples

Normal (Dynamic Pitch Zero Snap) – Best for simple/basic samples with slight pitch shifting (I don’t use
this one often).

Normal (Dynamic Pitch Follow) – This option is best for the more complex samples with pitch shifting.

Constant Framesize (Pitch avg) – Best for samples with a constant pitch, since Serum will grab the average
pitch of the sample.

FFT 256, 512, 1024 and 2048 – Choose one of these for drum hits and vocals. The longer the duration of the
sample is, the higher the FFT for best results.

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7/9/2020 Serum Wavetable Design (1/2): Create your own Wavetable - Typhonic Samples

Note: These are my general rules on how I use these options. You can use any option for any sample. Don’t
feel limited to these rules; just check what the results are by experimenting. Try any sound or sample you
like; from your own voice to your favorite bass. It’s all possible!

But wait! There’s more!

Besides dragging and dropping your sample directly on the oscillator, you can also drag your sample into
the wavetable editor. I use this feature when I know the pitch of the sample, for example a synth hit at C1.

Simply open the wavetable editor and click on formula. There you can enter the note of the sample, in this
example C1. Hit enter and now drag and drop your sample.

Serum Wavetable Editor: Enter Note in Formula

Method 2: Import images.

Since Serum 1.4 it is possible to use images as wavetables. You have to use PNG images and can easily drag
& drop them on the oscillator like audio samples. There will be some unusable frames at the beginning and
end, so just delete those. To learn more about importing images in Serum, read our article: How to Import
Images as Wavetables in Serum.

Method 3: Draw your own wavetable.

I like this method a lot to create simple wavetables, because sometimes you don’t need a complex wavetable.
However, this method is not limited to simple/basic wavetables.

Go to the wavetable editor. On your left you will see a bunch of tools to create different styles of lines. The
default grid value is 8 (the amount of squares you have to draw in). On the lower right corner you can adjust
the value – the higher this value, the more squares you have to draw in.

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7/9/2020 Serum Wavetable Design (1/2): Create your own Wavetable - Typhonic Samples

When u decrease the grid value to 0, there’s no grid that gives you 100% artistic freedom. Grab the line
tool and paint whatever you want! There are 12 drawing tools to use, for the sake of the length of this tutorial
I will not explain them, but I will probably make an article about that later.

When you’ve created your first frame, hit the + icon at the bottom of the wavetable editor and it copies your
frame. Now you can make adjustments and go to the next. When you have 2 or more frames you can
complete your wavetable by choosing for Morph -> Crossfade or Spectral. These options will fill in all the
empty frames in between the ones you created, making a full 256 frames wavetable. Note: these frames
will not show in the editor, but they will be in your oscillator! More about finishing your wavetable in the
next episode.

Serum Wavetable Editor: Draw Your Own Wavetable

Method 4: Using Warp Mode

The Warp mode is in the OSC tab of Serum. Here you can choose a bunch of different modes to alter you
wavetable. These modes can bend your current frame, mirror it and much more. This is pretty basic and you
probably already know this. However what I don’t see often in tutorials and articles is that Serum has an
option to create wavetables with your selected warp mode.

When you’ve selected a wavetable position/frame and a warp mode, you can go to Menu -> Render OSC
A Warp (or B of course, depending on the oscillator you’re working in). This will render the complete warp
mode, 0 to 100%, to a new complete wavetable. It will use the current wavetable position, replacing all
the other frames.

You can now turn it off or use another warp mode to further customize your wavetable.

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