[Wavetable] Can we recreate this Serum example?

Hi.

I’m very new to Halion and synthesis in general I used to use synth presets. Now I wanna go a bit further and I want to ask you guys: can we recreate the procedure shown in this example for Serum Importing Samples/Creating Wavetables in Serum - Course Excerpt - YouTube using the tool set we have in
Halion 6? Or Halion 6 is not good enough comparing to Serum in this area?

Thanks in advance.

I would recommend changing the title to something a bit more specific.

I took a quick look at the video and what I saw should be doable in Halion.

The Wavetable synthesis implementation in Halion is pretty complete, and is actually superior to Serum in some areas.

AFAIK these are the only things missing compared to Serum:

-Insert Effects can’t be used as a modulation destination. You have to automate them from your DAW.
-Each Wavetable zone has 2 OSC, 1 SUB and 1 NOISE (like a single instance of Serum), but they all have to go through the filter if it’s enabled. You’ll have to duplicate the Wavetable zone if you don’t want one of these elements to be filtered. (not a huge deal)
-In Serum all LFOs are fully customizable in the form of bezier curves. In Halion, you have to use one of the envelopes for this, such as the User Envelope or a Mono Envelope. The regular LFOs are limited to classic analog shapes, but you can change their shape slightly (PWM, etc).
-Serum has 8 stereo LFOs (originally 4, each note is affected separately) while Halion has only 2 per Wavetable zone, not counting the envelopes. However, Halion can have an infinite number of mono LFOs and mono envelopes per layer (these affect all notes in the layer, if you play a chord all notes receive the same modulation).
-Halion’s unison is limited to 8 voices instead of 16 (but numbers over 7 are rarely used). There’s no blend control, so they play at full volume (only the last detuned voice has a variable volume)
-No wavetable warp option. The closest equivalent is the formant shift controls.
-Less filter shapes, but some are covered by the Resonator insert effect.
-No mix knob for the filters.
-You can’t edit the waveform shape of each generated wave directly, but you can edit their harmonic/phase spectrum (potentially more useful). Some of the less used advanced wave edit functions are also missing.

I think that’s it.

Overall nearly everything you’ll see in these tutorials should be doable in Halion in some way. The biggest difference is that you’ll be using (looped) envelopes when complex LFO shapes are required.

(Note to googlers: This is just a list of what’s missing in Halion compared to Serum. Halion can do a bunch of things that Serum can’t.)

1 Like

Thank you very much for your explanation.

I’m trying to repeat one thing after that guy in the video and not succeed yet. He pushes a note on the piano and move the wave table position so I can hear the original sound of the sample, when I try to do the same in Halion I hear a very synthetic sound (I’m using the same wave file which he did). So am I missing something or it’s just impossible in Halion?

It seems like he’s using a shortened version of this sample. In the Wavetable tab, use the Range Selection Tool to select just the first ~4 seconds of the creaking door sample.

Try using these settings for a result that sounds close to the original sample. Don’t forget to press the Set Markers button: https://i.imgur.com/y805ZcP.png

Play a very low key like C-1 on the virtual keyboard.

You can get a lot of interesting results by just importing random stuff into Halion and playing around with these settings.

Wow! Thank you again! At C-1 it sounds the same to original! Brilliant! Fixed size did the trick. Now I got the idea.

Thanks a lot!