Synthesizers IV: A look at Soft-Synths (Omnisphere, Serum, & Zebra)
- Joe Chris
- Feb 6
- 4 min read
Picking up where we left off, today we are going to look at a few common soft synths and find where the basic controls are for each. There are literally hundreds, maybe even thousands, of soft synths available online. The hardest part of using any of them is finding where the basic controls are. Once you know where they are and what you do, the skills transfer over quite easily. This same skill is what allows a composer to have a giant wall of modular synths yet know how to use each and every dial and patch point to create something awesome.
Once you get past the GUI, the biggest difference between each soft-synth is usually it’s internal architecture (how things are routed) and the basic sound’s it is producing and manipulating (think of it like the synth’s sonic fingerprint). Outside of that, every synth can be used the same way as any other synth (for the most part), but like DAWs some synths are designed to be better in some situations than others (which we will get to). Oftentimes, the synths your DAW comes with are also super powerful yet overlooked. I highly encourage spending some time learning these ideas on the tools included in say Digital Performer, Logic, or Cubase before dropping a couple hundred on another synth.
In media scoring, perhaps the three most common “premium” synths you will come across are Omnisphere, Zebra, and Serum. Many times, even just one of these is the main synth for a composer 90% of the time. Hans Zimmer for example made extensive use out of Zebra in his Dark knight score, so much so that they even released a pack of his patches from the movie (which are great to purchase an analyze if you ever want to really get in the weeds of sound design!)
Omnisphere is the first one we will look at. If you don’t own omnisphere, that’s ok. Try to follow along with whatever synth you do own.
Omnisphere
Omnisphere by Spectrasonics is a wavetable synthesizer. What this means is Omnisphere stores a single cycle of each soundwave (waveform) in it’s database that is manipulated and triggered by the user to create sounds. Think of this sort of like playing back a sample, except instead of working with “C5 on acoustic piano recorded in teldex” it is playing back a very small “sample” of an oscillator (most typically). You are able to do some extremely complex types of things like interpolation between multiple waveforms via waveform synthesis but for now just know that this approach can give you a wide variety of sounds, though it is not the best tool for creating every sound - such as “acoustic-like” instruments. Omnisphere does give you the ability to add your own samples, as well as create up to 4 layers of sounds per patch and has a very powerful granular engine too. We will likely spend more time looking in depth in Omnisphere, as well as the other synths mentioned below, in the future. For now let’s find the basic controls.
It can be quite overwhelming when you first open a new soft synth, however as you will soon see they all have the same basic controls. In the following images, I’ve highlighted the oscillators in red, filters in white, envelopes in green, and amps in purple.
In omnisphere, the oscillator is right in the center. This is where we can select whatever waveform or sample we want to process. Next to the word oscillator you might see a magnifying glass with a plus sign (+). Anytime you see this in omnisphere, this signifies there is an additional more indepth menu for that item. For now, experiment with changing the waveform and we can look at the FM, RM, WS, etc stuff later on.
Next in white is the filter section. It is disabled by default, so lets hit that power symbol and turn it on.
Followed by manipulation the envelope in green. Adjust the attack and release to make them much longer.
Finally, adjust the overall amp of this voice via the slider in purple.
Congrats, you just successfully used a soft synth! Now if you notice across the top, there is ABCD and “main” panels. ABC&D are your 4 layers, and main is a global control between them. We will look at omnisphere deeper in the future but I encourage you to explore all the menus you can find now that you know what to look for.
Serum
Serum is another very popular synth. This one is used heavily in the electronic music production world. You can likely find thousands of tutorials online for this.
To turn oscillators/filters on and off in Serum, click the square box to the left of the name.
Zebra
Zebra is unique in this lineup as it is more “modular” based in it’s workflow compared to the previous two we looked at. If you notice in the center, there is a grid. This is where you can program the architecture of your synth to your heart's content. We will keep it basic here though.
Zebra is a great synth for seeing how things work, as you can directly see the signal flow from the top of the screen downwards. As you add elements to the center grid, their controls appear and are able to be manipulated. So unlike omnisphere and serum, you will find the layout of Zebra vary from patch to patch, but they are essentially always going to always appear/disappear in this manner - adapting to whatever is included in your patch.
Homework
Whatever synth you are using, try to find and manipulate the controls for the oscillator, envelope, filters, and amplifier. These are the basic building blocks of synthesis and almost everything else we look at in the future will stem from this. Please make 5 patches by manipulating just these controls.
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