Serum 2 Overview for Harder Styles

The effects section is amazing. You can add as many effects as you want. If you want four filters, you can just do that. You couldn't do that before and it changes everything. Then you can save that and load up your favorite presets each time.

You can change the volumes in the mixer for every part of the sound, but once you add effects you can also control the volume in there, and it goes down the chain with that amount of volume. If I have distortion, it helps a lot to add a lot of volume in front of it, because it gets distorted more.

The mixer changes the game too. I take the raw sound of oscillator A and add it to bus 1, then go into the effects and add some chorus on bus 1. Oscillator A can go to the filter at the same time, the filter goes to bus 2 with distortion on it, and bus 1 can go into bus 2 as well. You can split up the sound into millions of fragments, which makes it unbeatable.

The LFOs got chaos options, and they added a beautiful animation. I do this a lot with hardstyle. Switch the rate from BPM to Hz, turn the rate up and add it to the coarse pitch in the matrix. Then you can control it from there. You can have a Rossler too.

With this many options, I first think about what I want to make. Say a reese. I dial in the final sound first on the main bus and don't worry about any buses yet. A distortion on sine shaper, then the splitter with a very high crossover, the lows going into a compressor and some chorus on the highs. Then another distortion to make it clip with a hard clipper.

Then I go back into the mixer and think about what I want the raw sound to go through. Bus 1 is a very wet one, so I remove the lows with an equalizer and it goes on top. Letting every knob go to everything doesn't really work. You need to think in stages.