Serum Tutorial - Virtual Self 'Ghost Voices' Lead Synth (Porter Robinson)

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I got the idea for this video while playing around with a recreation of the Virtual Self/Porter track 'Ghost Voices'. After finding the soundfont I'm pretty sure porter used for this sound, I had the idea to try turn it into a wavetable inside Serum and create a preset using the LFO technique I covered in my Organic Synths tutorial. Long story short I was really happy with how it turned out and confirmed my theory that Soundfonts might be great source material for Serum presets.

For those of you not familiar with Soundfonts, they stem from a type of audio format created in the 90's utilising sample-based synthesis and were used commonly for video games. Soundfonts have a very identifiable sound character and although they can generally sound quite 'cheesy', when processed they can provide interesting results. Most importantly in this context they are generally quite short in duration as well as pitch corrected, making them ideal for the creation of custom wavetables in Serum.

There's a tonne of great and usually free soundfont packs out there if you do a quick google search. Once you have a bank you like you'll have to first extract the files before you can sample them:

Ableton:    • How to import Soundfonts - Ableton Li...  
Logic:    • Getting soundfonts in Logic Pro x 2018  
Other (Soundfont VST Player): https://www.plogue.com/products/sforz...

Once you've extracted the soundfonts, you can bounce them out and turn them into a Serum wavetable using the same steps as my organic synth tutorial:

Step by Step guide:
1. Bounce a 1-2s sample of a single pitch (monophonic) Soundfont Try to avoid samples with pitch bend as Serum has a harder time dealing with them.
2. Drag and drop this sound onto a wavetable osc and select the constant framesize (pitch avg) option. An alternative is also to go into the wavetable editor and manually type the pitch of the sample you're importing. Sometimes if I didn't get the results I was hoping for I'd try different octaves (i.e c1, c2, c4)
3. Then you'll want to clean up the wavetable a bit. Delete unnecessary frames. Increase the grid size and click x-fade edges to smooth the wavetable from frame to frame.
4. Drag and drop a ramp up LFO onto the WT position. Set to Env & Anchor modes. Lower the Hz to somewhere around 1-2 Hz. Experiment with different Hz settings until you find the sound is playing back at a similar speed to the original sample or at a speed that sounds good to you.
5. If all has worked nicely and you're happy with the result, save the wavetable for future use. If not, go back to step 2 and play around with inputting different octaves in the wavetable editor before importing. Sometimes this technique really is just trial and error and you might have to move on to trying different sounds instead.
6. From here it comes down to you as a sound designer to see what you can come up with. Play around with layering the new wavetable with the original sound, try different amounts of union, stack the sound with another oscillator with the same or different wavetable, try different filters and fx and play around with the amplitude envelope to shape the sound.

Hope you guys enjoy!