How to Make Euphoric Leads in Serum 2

When you tweak small things in a dry mode, you can't really hear them in context. So I set up the mixing and routing first and play a melody with the whole chain in place. From main I split it up into bus 1 and bus 2. Bus 1 is a 100% wet delay on normal mode at 1/4 and 1/2 dotted, with a bit of band pass and a distortion on tape saturation to make it warmer. Bus 2 is the dry sound, made wet with reverb. Now you can mix between dry and wet, and it creates a very cool full sound.

The reverb goes on hall mode with the lows down a bit. High rate, low depth on the modulation is perfect to create a very chaotic, overwhelming reverb. The decay needs to be around six seconds. To make it breathe I open the pre-delay to around 100 milliseconds, so the lead has a bit of room to play before the reverb takes over.

To finalize the setup I add the compressor on multiband. Multiband gives you upward and downward compression, but I don't like the downward compression because it sounds very squashed and contained. So I take that out and carefully dial in the upward compression with Below. It adds that modern bright edge you need to really make these leads pop.

Put the compressor after the delay and all these effects. Because it upwards compresses, it pumps those sounds up once the lead is not playing.

Click on the wavetable and there's a phase randomization section. With one oscillator you don't really hear it. But open one more on the same octave, change the randomization from 100 to zero, and it tightens up and gets way more consistent. That happens because of phase cancellations.

This is the most important part. You can tweak the sound so much just by changing the unison, so more voices and how they're detuned. Detune it too much and it gets reesey. Get it right and it adds that movement, that phasing sound you need in these leads. Play with the blend, detune and randomization and you can make a lot of variations.

For the pitch wobble I put LFO 2 on free mode, so it's always playing, at around 7 to 8 hertz. Instead of the pitch of one oscillator, I put it on Main Tuning in the matrix, because I might add more oscillators later. Make sure it's on bipolar, otherwise it's off key.

Then I shape LFO 3 and put it on envelope, so it only plays once, and assign it to the aux source. Now the wobble doesn't do anything in the beginning but opens up at the end. On hertz you can control how fast the effect hits. That depends on the pace of your melody.

The next stage is white noise and distortion together. I add the noise on color white with no stereo, so it doesn't muddy up the left and right channel. Then on bus 2, where the dry sound is, I stack three distortions, because we can now do that in Serum 2. Tube, Diode 2 and Hardclip.

The tube rounds out the sound and adds those mid harmonics, the smooth sound we want for euphoric hardstyle. Diode 2 creates a squeeze. The hard clipper enhances the highs and makes it more in your face. Don't add too much of any of them. If the noise and distortion start to sizzle, put a filter in front of the distortions on MG Low 6 to round out the highs.