Create A Pluck Bass Sound In Xfer Serum

Here's a step by step tutorial on how to create a pluck bass in Serum. This one of those really versatile and staple sounds of electronic and pop music which is widely used in modern productions. The video tutorial is accompanied by a step by step guide so it's easy for you to follow along and create it yourself. If you like this tutorial click here to watch more sound design tutorials for Xfer Serum. 

Step by step guide:  

1. Open a new instance of Serum
2. Change the waveform on oscillator A to iCanhasKick; you can find it in the digital waveforms list.
3. This particular wavetable has lot of positions so set it to 30% to 40%
4. If it sounds too gritty, use a filter to make it sound smooth and then change its envelope and turn it into a pluck. Leave the filter on MG low 12. 
5. Change the LFO 1 curve to give a pluck characteristic of fast attack and switch on the envelope mode so it sounds like a filtered saw bass.
6. Map the LFO to filter cut off and turn it down a little bit to make it sound softer.
7. Add some noise (you can leave it on AC hum1). This noise gives the sound it's initial attack. Reduce the noise level to make it softer if you find it too sharp.
8. And now add the sub and set it to 'direct out' because we don’t the sub frequency being filtered out by any envelope.
9. Set the sub to 'direct out' and  in that, use a distorted sine wave ,map the same envelope on to level and turn the level down.
10. Next,  go to the FX tab to add some width in the bass. For that simply switch off the hyper and add a little bit of dimension to in to add some width.
11. Within the FX tab, apply distortion; you can leave the tube setting the way it  is but if you like, you can experiment with the different kinds of distortion. Increase the drive as per your taste. 
12. Next, you can apply some multi-band compression. You can change the compression parameters to get the kind of  sound you're looking for.
13. Next coming to the filter, change the cut off a little bit without much modulation.
14. If you want some width and fatness use chorus.
15. If you are looking for interesting ways to modulate the sound you can play around with ASYM+ or ASYM- any other module. It gives a different tone to the sound so you set it to 20% or 25% or as you like it.

If you would like to download our pop serum presets click here. Hope you found the post useful. Thanks for checking it out. Have a great day!