How to use Serum to make Impacts and Whooshes for Sound Design
Serum is widely known among the sound design and game audio community as a powerful software synthesizer. But maybe less known is the fact that it can also be used as an effect insert.
When using Serum as an effect insert, you can route audio from your DAW through Serum and use its filters, effects and modulation capabilities to process the sound. While this is powerful in its own right, one of the things I like to use it for is as an envelope generator to sculpt sounds.
Using it in this way allows you to generate transients or impacts from source material that may not have a strong transient component. Or you could use it to generate whooshes, something that we have to do in sound design frequently. SerumFX enables this quickly and easily - especially after you’ve created and saved some envelope presets that you like. I used this technique recently to generate whooshes while designing spell casting sounds for enemy mobs in Wolcen: Lord of Mayhem’s Endgame update.
Before we start, if you already own Serum, check to see if you’ve downloaded SerumFX. I didn’t know about it for a while because it has its own separate downloader and installer. So make sure to grab it from the Xfer website if you haven’t already.
In order to send audio through SerumFX you need to enable it via the Noise Oscillator and select: Audio In. Then what I typically like to do is to use either an Envelope or an LFO to control the level of the Noise Oscillator - which will enable us to shape the envelope of whatever signal we’re passing through Serum.
Setting up a Whoosh Envelope in SerumFX
For example, if we were setting up a whoosh envelope, we’d probably want a slow attack, a short sustain time and a medium to long decay time. But obviously you can set your envelope to achieve whatever results that you’re looking for.
A simple seteup for generating whooshes in SerumFX. Here I have used FFO 1 to shape the envelope which controls the level of the Audio Input.
As well as generating more basic envelope shapes such as impacts and whooshes, you can also use it to generate wild tremolo or rhythmic style effects that would be laborious or difficult to create with other plugins. Because Serum has four Envelopes, four LFO’s as well as its Chaos Oscillators, you can modulate far more parameters than you would be able to on a conventional tremolo effect plugin, for example.
Taking Envelope Generation Further with Serum Effects
Once you’ve dialed in the envelope shape that you want, you can take it even further. If I’ve set up an impact-shaped envelope, another thing I like to do is to engage the Sub oscillator and map the same envelope from the Audio In to the Sub oscillator. This will help add some low end content to our impacts. Or, if I’m making whooshes I might engage the reverb effect and map some of its parameters to the whoosh envelope that I’m using. Of course you’re free to use any and all of Serum’s effects to shape your sound further. The filters in particular can really help further refine your sound.
An example of a transient envelope in SerumFX. This time the amplitude envelope is also mapped to the sub oscillator to add some low end content to our sound.
I hope this was informative. While there are definitely more advanced (and pricey) envelope generators out there for sound design, the fact that many people own Serum already can make it a great option if you don’t have access to anything else. I hope it’s given you some ideas to try at least. Try using SerumFX as an envelope generator or maybe even just using its onboard effects to process sounds. Have fun!
The Author
This article was written by Oliver Smith. A long-time remote working freelance sound designer dedicated to making gameplay enhancing sound for games.