To start off, you should know the general features – the menu bar and preset selector are along the top. Don’t worry – we’ll cover what you need to know. Very well-designed, but a tad confusing and complex. When you load up Serum for the first time, you’ll be confronted with this interface. So in this tutorial, I want to give you a brief rundown of Serum’s layout first, mostly so you don’t stress out – everything is quite simple once you understand this. I find one of the most off-putting things about learning something new is just how complex something looks. Get Xfer Serum on Splice Rent-to-Own (Not sponsored, just a genuinely good deal.) The Interface Xfer was the first company to team up with Splice for their rent-to-own scheme, allowing musicians and producers to get plugins without having to pay for them in full upfront.įor $9.99 USD a month you get full access to Serum, and once you’ve paid off the full price, the payments stop and you own it for life. There is also a demo available, but use time is limited to 15 minutes, so that’ll quickly get frustrating after using it for a bit. The full-featured version of Serum is available on the Xfer Records website for $189 USD. The first way is to get either the paid or demo version direct from Xfer themselves. However, if you’re yet to download Serum, you can get through two main avenues. Try Serum for free, and then Rent-to-Own the plugin for $9.Before we get into the tutorial, if you’ve already bought or got a trial of Serum you can skip this section. Note that when opened within a DAW, the MIDI regions may be preceded by a slot of silence depending on their location in the final track.ĭo you have any questions on Serum or the sound design techniques explored in the video? What other production challenges would you like to see us try out on our YouTube channel next? Let us know in the comments below. Get all of the presets and MIDI files from the video, in addition to the overall Ableton project file here. In the video above, we go over how we constructed each preset and the role the resulting instrument plays in the overall track. To put its capabilities to the test, we challenged ourselves to try making a full track using nothing but Serum. Xfer Records’ Serum is widely regarded as one of the most versatile software synths ever created.

Xfer serum rent to own