Is Vital or Serum the Superior Choice? 3 Years Later

Serum and Vital are often compared, I myself made three videos almost three years ago. In this video I look again at the characteristics of both synths, looking at what changed with the updates, but more importantly, I share what has changed in my understanding of both instruments since I made this video • Serum VS Vital; synth ... and the following two
Here's my first album as Eùoè with @Oblium 's Labyrinthine Crew
labyrinthinecr...
Here's my gumroad, full of patches for Vital
gumroad.com/pl...
and if you like links, here's a lot more, my music, my social profiles... you know, that stuff
linktr.ee/Platipo

[@trevor_mounts_music]

If Vital was out when I first started paying payments on Serum...i would have just stuck with Vital. Like the UI more, like the extra filter and oscillator. Love Serum...but I find myself using Vital most of the time.

[@platipo]

I suppose if Vital had been out in 2014, few would have even bothered looking at Serum. Vital is 6 years younger, that's no small thing, also, Vital is clearly built making use of some good ideas behind Steve Duda's synth, both things are imho pretty self evident looking at the UI

[@highestpeeqs9532]

Jesus loves yall, died for us, and rose again! Jesus calls for all of us to repent! He's coming back

[@KordTaylor]

Very useful and cool video. Thank you. 👏🏻🔥

[@platipo]

@@KordTaylor thank you :)

[@vergaerd]

I've never used Serum. I quit making music around the time Serum came out and I've only recently regained interest and inspiration again after ~10 year hiatus. I had my reasons, anyway, I've been using Vital extensively and almost exclusively to create multiple sound patches almost every single day for the past 2 months. I had been sitting with idea's and inspiration for a while and the discovery of Vital triggered and enabled me to explore these ideas, partly because its free and partly because I couldn't let go of those ideas. I could even say I'm in love with making music or at least sound design again as I haven't written a song yet. Sorry, this turned more into a personal story and Vital appreciation comment. I think there's a lot to say about the differences. Platipo explained it well and there probably isn't necessarily a "best". At a glance they look similar. You can even get your Vital to look like Serum, but who cares... When you try to recreate Serum patches in Vital you start to see the differences and similarities. Serum offers more features in certain departments and vice versa But things like, e.g the one extra OSC haven't proven me its advantages yet. Some of Serums major features are truly a miss in Vital, where I can't say the same for Serum. Partly because I haven't used it, but my point is that from my perspective they seem more significant than the Vital features missing in Serum. Like the video mentions, the ability to modulate LFO shapes and the amount of filter types are pretty big advantages for Serum. Even if I have explored Vital extensively and pushed it to its limits, there's still parts I'm not entirely familiar with yet. I can say however, that Vital is not perfect. One thing I wish Vital would improve on is the visual/contextual representation of modulations. Its easy to set-up and use, but once you go back to figure out what is connected to what you just see labels like "modulation x". I find this especially annoying when returning to a patch after a couple days or weeks. It takes a little bit to figure out again, but even that has its advantage I suppose. Beside the text labeling, this was especially noticeable to me with the default skin as every modulation is the same color for half its aspects. So I tried to make a Vital skin that represents and differentiates every aspect of Vital better visually. It helped, but isn't exactly what I wanted, because of these text labels mentioned before. The skin editor itself also leaves some things to desire. If you're not careful about it, you're bound to accidentally delete lines that aren't recoverable without a re-install. And while its relatively in-depth, it's inconsistent or buggy sometimes. All in all, as far as "bang for buck" goes, Vital obviously wins. Great vid, cheers.

[@platipo]

Well, but as I mentioned, how about the mod remapping, did you get into that? how is that not a miss in Serum? Also, the ability to modulate the modulation curve directly, it is so powerful for lively/playable patches, and it really cannot be done in Serum. On the mod "deciphering" front, I hear ya, but really, it has been like this forever, if you a hard time backtracking your work or that of someone else, I completely understand, but I really can't think of any sensible way of making something this flexible and practical also easily readable... I think Vital does enough to make its interface friendly, modulating modulations might be slightly less understandable but hey... still better than only having auxiliary modulations isn't it? On the "bang for the buck" of course you're right, and I wouldn't recommend anyone to buy Serum today, nonetheless, if you have it, you might wonder which one to open from time to time...

[@vergaerd]

@@platipo Oh.. I had no idea there's no mod-remapping in Serum. That's huge. I don't see any reason for Vital not to show what is mapped to what by labeling the target instead of "modulation x". But, I'm no coder. Perhaps -and I'd humbly forgive, the dev's simply reached the limitations of their tools. I was just picking at something significant that could see improvement imo. The more you explore these Vst's, or almost anything in life, the more you start to see the flaws. I'm kinda curious to see what Serum 2 will involve as Vital's existence alone should naturally push the Serum dev's to create something even "better". I guess time will tell. :)

[@platipo]

@@vergaerd well, mod remapping isn't really such a common feature, it isn't surprising Serum doesn't have it, I don't know of any synth except vital where you can design a modulation map for every single modulation. In many synths, like in Zebra orthere is Pigments there is some sort of modulator which involves remapping or combining modulators, Vital too could be helped by such a feature, as it'd make programming some things a lot quicker and more readable, but as far as possibilities go, it would almost be redundant.

[@highestpeeqs9532]

Jesus loves yall, died for us, and rose again! Jesus calls for all of us to repent! He's coming back

[@philippebackprotips]

Thanks for those educated comments. What fantastic pieces of software for making sounds... Call me old as I mostly have been using Hybrid 3 for a lot of stuff (I know I know) and now moved to Vital which is crazy good, especially the mod mapping. Other synth having mod mapping is Avenger and Vital made me appreciate that feature which otherwise would have eluded me.

[@platipo]

Avenger does it natively for every voice in the modmatrix? I didn'5 know, now I'm genuinely curious

[@alexandersprout7992]

That intro slapped my head off!!! Blew me away. Thank you.

[@platipo]

Thank you :) You're actually the first to notice

[@JJWalters]

I agree! DAMN! Can we get a tutorial on how to do that?! :)

[@alexandersprout7992]

@@JJWaltersSLAPPED you too?! Hope it was easier to put your head back on than it was for me. Really taps into the soul. Truly amazing!

[@platipo]

@@JJWalters well... to be honest I don't remember too well myself :D but I could backtrack, if I could find the time to make videos with my time devouring dayjob... I'll try to keep that in mind for whenever some time becomes available. Thanks btw :)

[@StepanTrnka]

Hi. I just discovered your channel and found it awesome. The intro is exactly kind of sound I'm looking for and couldn't design it for months. Please, please, make a totorial on it. I beg you! 😂

[@djpaulcfunkeddub3951]

Great intro man & informative comparison, came here because I'm debating whether to get Serum because of the price

[@platipo]

As I mentioned in another video, if I was on the market for an "old workhorse synth" with some money, but not so much money, today I'd put it into Zebra Legacy. Thanks for the comment :)

[@platipo]

@@highestpeeqs9532 what would Jesus ask me to repent about this video?

[@Mr-Lamda]

I used serum a liittle time, i m sure i only explored maybe a quarter, but not much as the half of possibilitys. I liked it, but my generated sounds sound allways a little bit to strong, harsh, heavy ... I allways thought, it is great for any music but not for my favorite. The other one, vital, from time to time i make something with it, it felt allways a litttle bit cheap and simple. But last, i dived deeper in it and holy shit, i love it to explore the modulation possibilitys. I allways get sounds with psychoaccustic movement and a realy impressive stereo soundscapes. It match way better to me. I want say the same as in the video, there two synthesizer with hughe possibilities, but different focus. I also belive, most of the user only use 50% of the possibillitys (dosnt matter which one) and would be surprised if dive realy deep into

[@p.c513]

It's wonderfully clever and definitely helps me better understand the conceptual difference between the two synths. It would be too much to ask that you make a video explaining the corners of the sound that you synthesized at minute 14:30. Thank you in every way for your videos and I hope you make content with SERUM again, your knowledge is very vast.!

[@platipo]

Oh well... that one is actually very complicated, that was the patch I used in that one synth performance I used in a video, I might have a video I never published explaining precisely that, but it's probably horrible.

[@p.c513]

@@platipo Thank you very much for answering. Definitely, the sound itself already gives information that it must be a complicated patch (I had never heard anything that evolved in that way over time, it's really amazing). If you can share the video, maybe we can learn something. Thank you very much for sharing your talent

[@platipo]

@@p.c513 found it :) kzbin.info/www/bejne/b52tlIivipZ4kLssi=Wk8VQ1szFTYraKEk

[@p.c513]

@@platipo Thank you!!

[@Yilue]

I started making music last year and I've played around with vital a lot. I recently tried serum mainly because its much easier to find presets (splice). Theres tones of awesome presets that I love but serum dosnt have the same sound that I like with vital. Everything I make in vital just sounds better. Maybe I'm somehow using serum wrong but I dont see how.

[@electro16035]

Ho scoperto solo oggi questo canale , sei fantastico!!! ma purtroppo vedo che é da un paio di anni che ti sei messo a fare i video in inglese..peccato perche italiani che spiegano accuratamente come te nn c'é né soprattutto con un suono del genere,mi accontenterò dei sottotitoli 😉 e grazie ancora del lavoro svolto !

[@platipo]

Grazie a te dell'apprezzamento e dei complimenti, mi piaccia o no, fare video in inglese mi da un pubblico molto piú vasto, da quanto sono passato a farli in inglese il numero di visualizzazioni e di iscritti é schizzato alle stelle. Ultimamente faccio qualche video in Italiano per Sounders

[@enricodeba5288]

@@platipo Infatti ti ho trovato perché cercavo video in inglese su surgeXT😅

[@platipo]

E quindi da cosa avete capito che ero italiano? L'accento, i video precedenti o qualche commento?

[@Maradnus]

I'm happy I own both.

[@platipo]

Likewise ;)

[@GeorgeLocke]

Great video. Makes me want to get Serum 😅 I prefer a more modular interface for complex patches, which I guess is why i haven't gravitated towards Vital, tending to prefer Polymer --> Poly Grid

[@highestpeeqs9532]

Jesus loves yall, died for us, and rose again! Jesus calls for all of us to repent! He's coming back

[@GeorgeLocke]

@@highestpeeqs9532 i disagree with all of that.

[@allenpolley]

Have you tried Dune 3? Great synth and per osc voice editing etc. so you can have certain voices be an arp and certain voices a pad for example.

[@platipo]

I have not, heard many good things a about it, but resources and time are what they are, sure sounds very interesting and vast.

[@jeffreyhanc1711]

@@platipoconcur. It’s an amazing and unique synth, while not being complex at all to learn (certainly for a synth vet).

[@nustaniel]

I've grown quite fond of Sytrus in FL Studio. I find it difficult to go back to using either Serum or Vital. Sometimes I have to though, as not everyone uses FL and Sytrus being a stock plugin is tied to that.

[@swhoisthis]

How do you get around the fact that vital filters can only have a slope of 12 dB and 24 dB per octave? (While Serum has a 6 dB, 12 dB, 18 dB and 24 dB per octave) Is this something that bothers you when designing sound? 🙂

[@platipo]

Somehow yes, I do at times miss the immediacy of having a smooth 6db/octave filter or the compromise of an 18db/octave one, and even though I don't dislike the filters Vital offers, I agree the lack of variety there is one of the instrument's weak points, however, I'm used to work with instruments with features and limitations; between the wavetable editor, the spectral filter, or even careful use of the filter morph, you can get almost anything, Vital imho encourages you to approach synthesis with a less subtractive centric approach, more wavetable mangling, more audio rate modulation flavour... then yes, you have the filters, but they're not the point, imho for most patches, using Vital just to send a sawtooth through a filter, isn't programming it the way it is meant to.

[@partlysimpson5154]

U can make unlimited sounds with these synths still after 10 years later

[@mantrasoul]

which skin are you using in the video? Looks nice

[@platipo]

It's one of those that came with the full version once 1.5 was out, can't remember the name right now

[@jonasharp3]

Liked and subbed for bigwig

[@gabrielapodaca1102]

what serum packs do u recommend for complex ideas. maybe u can make one, id buy it thanks for great comparison vid

[@platipo]

I wouldn't recommend any; Serum is a very powerful instrument, can do very complex things, but somehow it seems to be intended for quick and straightforward programming. Anyway I do have quite a bunch of nice Serum patches sitting there... That's definitely an idea :)

[@AntiTrollable]

you can have more than 4 LFOs with serum, not sure the limit though.

[@platipo]

Just like with Vital, they're eight. I had covered these things in the older videos

[@CC-fi3pp]

Phase Plant

[@platipo]

Really :D