He put £15000 of Synths into SERUM and Pigments

video upload by Starsky Carr

"I sampled the Frap out of a Magnolia, an Analogue Solutions Maximus, a Pittsburgh Taiga, a Pittsburgh Voltage Lab 2, a Sequential Prophet VS, a Korg DW8000 and a Novation Peak — then chopped them into single cycle waves and turned them into 151 wavetables for Serum and Pigments.

£15,000 is roughly what those seven instruments would cost you, give or take. The pack is £15.

What's different here is what got sampled: full sweeps through the Magnolia's wavefolder, the Voltage Lab 2's complex oscillators, PWM across its whole range, the DW8000's 16 digital waves, the Prophet VS set. Not generic waveshapes — the actual character of specific, expensive, awkward instruments.

It started with a comment. Someone watched my Magnolia demo and asked how to get that tone out of their Peak. The short answer is you can't, because the oscillators don't start with the same harmonics. The long answer is this video.

Along the way I've used it as an excuse to go through the different ways a synth actually makes a tone — subtractive, FM, wavefolding and wavetable — and why the Magnolia can do three of them and the Peak can do the fourth. If you've ever wondered what people mean by East Coast and West Coast synthesis, start at 1:18."

0:00 Matching a Magnolia patch on a Summit
1:18 Back to basics: the classic analog waveshapes
3:36 Subtractive synthesis, and why it's called East Coast
5:09 FM: harmonics that aren't related to the fundamental
7:22 Wavefolding, and where the gnarly tones come from
8:38 Three synthesis types in one synth — the Magnolia
9:09 Wavetable synthesis, and the one thing the Peak can do
10:08 The comment that started all this
13:33 Into Serum: the Magnolia wavetables
16:00 Emulating Polymove in the Serum mod matrix
17:30 The rest of the pack: 151 tables, 19,088 waves
19:18 Working in Arturia Pigments
20:54 Thanks for watching