Creating Unique Leads in Serum: A Step-by-Step Guide

Godamn Eli Brown. Look at that. Oh, Eli. Eli. Damn.

What a track. What a So, Eli Brown's pissing off all the techno underground heads by proving once again that you

don't need complex [ __ ] going on. All you need is a good sound, catchy melody, good bass going, and you will kill it.

Okay, so in today's video, I'm going to teach you guys how to make this lead. I'm going to show you guys what I

considered it to be the pro technique touch to it that makes this saw sound more than just a saw because just like

many of you guys, I heard the song and I was like, it's just a [ __ ] saw until I tried to remake it myself for Paradox

Volume 6. Not out yet, you know, and I take my sweet time, you know, with remakes because you guys are worth it,

right? You guys are worth it. You guys support. I try my best for you guys. And in today's video, I'm going to break

down what I think is going to look very simple in nature and anybody's going to be able to do it, but really just makes

this lead sound unique and different to everything else out there. Okay, so let's get started by doing the scariest

thing we can do as producers, and that is initializing the sound. Okay, and I also did a little bit of a

practice run to make sure we're not all over the place. So, we're going to start off with the soft.

First thing I want to do is I want to add VBR to the sound. Okay? And this is something simple that you can do to a

soft straight away that will make it sound better than the stock one. And that is going to be to drag an LFO to

the fine. We're going to increase the amount click. And this makes it so that the LFO knob turner is moving the fine

for us. Now, it's sounding a little too FL Studioish. So, we're going to lower down

the rate to around 116. We're still not ababbing. So, let's lower it down even more.

Now, we're talking. We're going to lower down that rate just a tad bit. Now, this is a cool technique whenever you want to

add grit to a sound, whenever you want to make the sound kind of cry. You know, guitarist, they do some fancy stuff

where they'll pull the string like this and then just pull up on it. But for us in the synth world, things like this is

what we're going to do in order to have a similar effect and show people what's up. Okay, from there, okay, we're going

to go into oscillator C. And this is what I would consider the magic touch. And it took me a while to figure this

out, believe it or not. And maybe you, some of you guys in the chat, might have figured it out straight away, but I was

just trying my best to go like, what is that processing he's doing to the sound? I I can't figure it out. It's that grit.

It turns out it's FM from a sine wave. FM stands for FM, frequency modulation. However, it's not going to be frequency

modulation like the one we see up here. It's going to be a a form that's going to keep the integrity of the harmonics

of the sound. That just means that we're going to alter the sound, but it's still going to stay in key as long as we don't

go too crazy with it. Okay? And we're going to go FM from C because we're in oscillator C. We have our sign here. And

then we're going to add a bit of Now whenever you do frequency modulation of this sort there's something known as

FM ratio and that is going to be the relationship of octaves between the sound that you are modulating. So this

is going to be the modulated sound and then we're going to have the sound doing the modulating doing the thumping. So if

I lower this down by minus one we're increasing or decreasing the ratio. and we add this very sick um tone to it

that again just still sounds like a saw. Still sounds familiar but has this unique touch to it. Now the next thing I

want to do is add three voices here of sauce and then we're going to re-trig it. We're going to lower down the

detunement because by default the Serum has all this stuff up. But the reason that I want to stack three voices is

one, I'm increasing unison in there making meaning that the saw is going to sound fat.

Okay, you definitely don't want to go too overboard with it at times because without this rand phase down or aka

reach it can sound FL Studioish. So let's keep this at one or sorry at three.

Stack the sauce and then we can now move the phase to decide where we start. This just changes the tone very slightly, but

once you start making baselines and getting into phase relationships in the low end, then this is where this becomes

very, very useful. Okay. Now, the reason we set up the three voice saw here is because now I

can go into the unison settings by clicking here. And now I have a couple of options. The first one is I'm going

to stack. So, one or some of these new voices of the sauce because we're making three saws, two homies to be with us

here in the battlefield. We're making it so that one of them or two of them gets stacked up in O.

The three sounds glorious. So, we're going to stay with that. And now, let's bring the FM.

Okay. from this LFO it's added to the sine wave because anything we do to the sine wave will alter the way it

influences the saw. So remember all this sine wave is doing is it's frequency um it's fming frequency modulating it

sounds kind of nasty but frequency modulating this sound which adds that grit and because it's down an octave bel

below this one it's adding some lower harmonics versus if I go higher up it's going to influence more and add

more upper ones so that's kind of the way you want to think about the relationship between the octaves or the

FM ratio Okay, from there it's time to apply a filter. Filters are built into synths to

provide character and to allow us to shape the sound. We remove the high so that we can bring them back and

reshape them in to create a pluck by lowering down the envelope 3 sustain and the decay will come down. And now we're

going to route that to our cut. Now, there's two big important things as you do this that many people fail at

when they're designing their own sounds. They really don't care about that stuff. But I think attention to detail matters

in sound design. Number one, where the cut off is going to be at.

Number two, how much are you opening up by? If the cutff is pulled more back, by

default, we're removing more high frequencies, more mid. So, when we open the envelope up, it's

going to be more drastic, more dramatic. However, let's say you don't want to lose the sound completely and have it

sound pluckucky like this. You still want to maintain some presence, some dominance, and the cut off should come

up. So, when creating sounds, you want to use a combination of both. I'm going to

be lowering the cut off more because I think I like it a lot more when it's lowered down.

Okay. Now, the next thing that really makes this lead shine is going to be the voicing that he's added. It's at the

bottom right of Serum 2. You're going to find your voicing section. All right. In it, we can turn this sound mono, which

means only one note can be played. From there, what that allows us to do is activate this always as well, which is

going to make it so that there's portimento between the notes. And all that means is that if there is no

portimento and I'm hitting a G, uh, and I'm going up to an A sharp ah, then as I go from G to A sharp, it's an instant

thing. uh uh uh but if I add portimeamental that time right you're adding time the time you set will

determine how long it takes for me to go from uh to h okay so uh right so you get this really cool almost like I guess

afrojackish uh I I would say you know pitch effect that occurs which can really make the

sound just sound a little less robotic and a little bit more wavy or Okay, so higher amounts can sound a

little FL Studioish, but lower amounts mid sounds Ableton as [ __ ] Really don't.

From there, it's time to add effects. So, we can add a bit of distortion to add make the sound a little bit more

expensive. That just means it's going to provide harmonics and it's also going to

compress the sound if we decide to add a bit of a of a plucky vibe to it, which I think we should in envelope one. Let's

just lower down the sustain a bit and our DK. This technique allows us to push this

drive further without sounding like FL Studio or Logic-ish because distortion is an effect that is

going to be based on amplitude as well. That just means volume. If the volume's always loud on the sound, then

distortion is already getting into a smash sound. But if there's dynamics to the sound, distortion is applied heavier

at the beginning of the sound versus when you start going down into the sustain where the sustain is at lower,

distortion is being applied less. So, that's a really cool technique to use if you ever want to push stuff hard.

Okay, from there, let's EQ. Okay, here we can remove some of the mids or if you're the type that just says, "Fuck

it. I like the way it is." Then you can also leave that. But I'm also going to add a bit of highend

with serum. careful because these values you can move it a tad bit and you're already it looks like you're decreasing

by 0.5 dB but you're actually decreasing by two. So that's something to be careful with

from the let's just add the standard reverb and delay that is provided to us. I'm not a huge

fan of the ones from Serum but hey let it be. Just add your favorite reverb and delay.

If you wanted to, you can grab emblem 3 and put it here. So you have this sort of effect that reduces

the delay when the leads and that ducks the reverb for us because the mix will control the volume of the

effect itself. Now, from here, usually this is where I would kind of go, hell yeah, you know, I

got the sound somewhat close enough to put my seal of approval, but as at the same time, I always want to kind of add

more to the sounds for you guys because you guys support my work and I, you know, and again, that means a lot to me.

So, I always try my best to kind of give you guys variations to the sound and allow the sound to climax or sound

bigger. So, let me show you how I would do that. So when I have this sound already in my head, the sound is

covering the mids, right? It's down the center. It's uh very gritty, right? So if I wanted to layer up on it, there's

only a couple of options we have. The first one is going to be to either layer up in terms of octave range. So I can

add another saw layer on which doesn't sound so good. The other thing is since the stereo field is

rather empty, right, besides the reverb and the delay, then I can choose to add a wide layer to this by activating my

unison. I instantly get wide as we already know and also detune the sound to allow for more w.

So I can do that and I can choose to keep it with a saw. But sometimes you can go with square.

And at times if you have a really solid sound down the center like a saw or square, you can start using the freaky

wave tables from Serum like the spectral or the digital in order to provide just more interest. Usually these tend to be

either really thin sounding but interesting, very spectral sounding, very metallic, very very like I wouldn't

use them too much for main leads unless I'm aiming for something like I'm making minimal tech sounds like Josh Baker or

if I'm trying to make a new like spectrally sounding lead, which again just sounds metallic and rather cold.

But we can add This layer, for example, and then I can also choose to auto pan

it around if I wanted to. That's just being fancy for the sake of being fancy. And that's one way to add interest to

the sound. And of course, climaxing the sound. We can grab an macro, move the D, and as we do that, you can add it to

reverb, delay, and so forth in order to create a crescendo for which, you know, I believe these are the things that

separate standard producers from what I would call pro producers or producers that impress other producers.

So, we watch, check it out. This is super cool because we can create this really cool

You know I'm waiting. I want to. All right. So, some really cool stuff there. If you guys enjoyed the sound,

make sure to leave a comment. Uh, hit the subscribe if you enjoy the content. But as always guys, you guys can find

this preset over at my Patreon. I'll make sure to leave a link if you guys are interested. But other than that, you

guys should be able to make it from scratch, you understand the theory of it. And in order to cement that theory,

it's all about practicing and making sounds like this. And I again, if you want some homework, what I would say is

make this sound, but then experiment with different waves, different shapes for the FM. Maybe experiment with

different voicing. Don't do certain things. is just like kind of mess around and you'll discover new variations to it

that will make you sound different but at the same time have a proven to work sound um you know so the way I would

kind of say this is usually when I'm making sounds I I like to have some form of inspiration of a track or a sound in

a track that has worked really well because that already tells me this sound is successful this sound has done

something in this track that people like. So basing my sounds on something like that as you know can sometimes be a

little hard but once you figure it out you can start to experiment for different variations and I think that's

where the magic happens right you buy presets they're good starting points they're good remix and you can use it

outright the problem with that sometimes is that people will instantly think of the other the artist as you're making

love to them so if you don't want that person to think of the other person find a way to flip it into your own thing

which can be as simple as changing the waves changing the octave range changing little things in order to make it your

own.