Like most of you, when I'm rebuilding a sampled kick in Serum 2, I end up drawing the pitch contour into an LFO by eye and ear, nudging points until it sits right against the sample. It works, but it's slow and never quite exact. I'm thinking of scripting it instead. Feed in the kick WAV, extract the pitch contour, reduce it to a handful of LFO breakpoints, and write them straight into a Serum 2 preset along with the LFO time, mod depth and root note. The preset side is more feasible than I expected. Serum 2's .SerumPreset is a Zstd-compressed CBOR document inside an "XferJson" wrapper, and it's been reverse-engineered: - serum-preset-packager by Kenneth Wussmann unpacks presets to JSON and repacks them: https://github.com/KennethWussmann/serum-preset-packager - PySerum is a Python DSL built on top of it for generating presets, including mod routings: https://github.com/ThatMajd/PySerum - serum2-preset-loader converts presets into state blobs for DawDreamer, so you can render them to audio without opening Serum. That's handy for automatically comparing the result against the original sample: https://pypi.org/project/serum2-preset-loader/ The plan would be template-based. Build the kick patch once with the routing, unpack it to JSON, and have the script write the analysed LFO points, mod depth, LFO rate and tuning into it. The format is unofficial, so a Serum update could break it. Before I put time into it, would anyone here actually use this? One more thought: Owen, I believe you know the Serum 2 developers personally? If people here think the idea has legs, would you be up for running it past them? Even a quick view on whether something like "extract pitch envelope from sample" could ever be native, or whether they'd be open to the preset or LFO shape format being documented, would save a lot of reverse-engineering guesswork.

Hey! Owen asked me to share a technique I came up with yesterday while synthesizing kicks in Serum. It was easier to show than explain, so I recorded a video. Pardon me for being a bit hungover. We had a crayfish party last night, a late-summer tradition that involves a lot of crayfish, akvavit, and vodka 🦞 The technique itself is all about matching the cycles of your kick exactly to a reference. Hope this helps you guys!

I’m currently sat at #5 on beatport charts for my genre, up there with some huge names in the scene, thanks to the techniques I learned here 👌 big up OTG!

Hello guys. I need your opinion on how to distribute your time and efforts during the process of creating a track from scratch. I found myself in a methodological trap trying to mix during production and writing. I always do everything in parallel, however I'm in a doubt because it has some cons that I really feel. So I think if you try to mix or engineer the sound BEFORE you have completed the musical ideas you risk to spend much more time and even get very tired of the track you are working on. And I've got tired of a couple of latest tracks trying to make them sound as perfect as possible.

Heyyy, anyone know why there is a difference in the slope between span and q2 and which is correct? - span looks like it’s sloped down to the highs and q2 does not! Maybe it’s a setting in span but I can’t find it 😂 Ty