Harmor vs serum vs alternative

#1

Both very powerful…loads of capabilities…I know this maybe apples and oranges but i ask…which do you prefer…

Fyi I have harmor now and ermahgawd…FM modulate whilst automating timestretch with filters…uber hax resampling…oly fuk

#2

Sounds like fun. My computer would hate me though. Ableton crashes a lot LOL. >.> I need to build a new PC for music purposes at some point.

#3

Take a saw wave and put it through filter one in lowpass mode. Then take the harmonizer and put it after filter one. Turn the harmonizer on. You now have every organ you’ve ever heard in one of my tracks.

So in all seriousness, a better way to frame this discussion might be additive versus wavetable synthesis for your resampled brostep style bass sounds. In that case, I don’t have much of a preference because I don’t make those kinds of sounds. I stick with tonal stuff, like if I can’t make a pretty thick chord out of it I don’t like it. I got better at doing that with harmor first, and some of the best sounds I’ve ever made that still blow me away have come out of harmor. BUT, I’m starting to get wavetables now too, using them to add movement rather than… IDK what I thought they did. I’m reliably doing cool patches in Hive 2 with wavetables now, and I’m trying to branch out to other synths because it’s a new sound for me.

#4

That synth looks amazing after I’ve seen a couple of youtube videos. Also - Phaseplant, wow.

I’m using serum for some time now and it sounds great, but I think it’s pretty basic feature-wise

#5

I wouldn’t call Serum basic feature-wise. Massive, Serum… I believe their selling point is how much you can flip wavatables, the general ground-basis synthesis, that’s their strength. On top of that they’re very lightweight and you can achieve amazing results fast because their UI is excellent. For example, in Serum you got amazing warp modes, like Mirror one, bend ones. Great tools for sound shifting. That’s what I care the most when it comes to synthesis. I can do other stuff outside out it because I’m in a DAW so who stops me from applying some extra later on?

#6

As many Seamless vids as I watched on Harmor that is one that never made sense to me.

I like Serum a lot. Like if you want a contemporary sounding sound design tool that’s what Id get. You can also rent to buy for 10$ a month.

#7

ye it isn’t actually, but you can’t manage routing details and it’s in my opinion nothing new. You can get great sounds out of it though. I’m on rent to own, but if i discovered kilohearts ultimate bundle earlier I would take it instead, having that shit in maschine would be lovely :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: they also have 10$ subscription and reward 100$ each 12 months I think

#8

I tried PhasePlant and I like the idea of it, but I didn’t love the overall sound and the add-on business model and in the end decided that the Bitwig Grid is perfect for me for more complicated routing and osc interactions. My favs basically are Serum/Icarus/Infinite for WT, mostly Icarus for WT-based resynthesis, and BW Grid for more complicated osc stuff. Only limited experience with Harmor but I liked it when playing around with it a few times, same for Sytrus btw, still a great FM synth with useful parameter envelopes and other stuff since the dawn of DAWs, or close to it…

#9

Was able to make a reese bass with harrmor… playing around with the unison harmonics and the detune…got a nice filthy mid range squelch by switch between A and B tab modding that sound with a sytrus bassline being filter swept via vocodex…+ love philter bandpass×3 and got a le mid range wubz…now for the idm spectral noises and destruction of othe sounds like drums…

#10

I find it odd that i still don’t own Serum, and now i have Arturia Pigments and the wavetable synth in Ableton live I’m not sure $189 for serum would be a wise buy although I’m sure somebody will tell me different.

#11

nah, I have pigments and especially with the granular engine, I don’t see myself doing serum for any reason. I’m thinking about buying live and I would just do standard, I already have so many nice VSTs that it doesn’t make sense for me to do suite just for the stock plugins.

#12

I haven’t dove into Harmor quite as hard, but serum is an insane powerhouse. Wavetable (Live native) is pretty decent for being a serum-lite, but it obviously came into being long after serum was already on the market.

#13

I bought standard at first, but with me having the eurorack and the release of CV-tools i had to grab suite.

#14

I got into WT on the cheap with Synthmaster One and Sektor. Esp SM1 hase some crazy options for things like wave folding to get some crazy sounds. Genesis is coming out in a few days and looks pretty neat too. Kinda wish I had grabbed Pigments when it was cheap…just didn’t have the scratch at the time. I steer clear of the bigger, more expensive synths though… everyone has them and they cost so much…but that is just me.

#15

my first introduction to wave table synthesis was the E350 Morphing terrarium on the eurorack about 8 years ago.

#16

In harmor Apparently if you play with the algorithm for unison…and image interpolation of a sound…in conjuction with playing around with harmonic clipping, protection, blur, mix, prism(with taste otherwise it will sound like ass)…will yield interesting sounds when automating said parameters including the image scrubbing and the formant thingy…

Haven’t really played with the envelopes to get sequences…also for some parameters it just graphs the frequency spectrum and you can adjust it accordingly…

It’s great because of the data bending capability like in audacity.