KSHMR & Tiesto Secrets Synth Lead in Serum

Vespers shows how to create a KSHMR & Tiesto Secrets Synth Lead in Serum.

FREE DOWNLOAD: Grab the patch from this tutorial here: https://goo.gl/kIezVm
Grab my custom Serum Wavetable patches: https://goo.gl/81Sd6h

In this tutorial video we look at the track “Secrets” by KSHMR & Tiesto. It was recently posted on Splice so it was possible to look at the project file and individual tracks. Chris Smith from the Ableton Live Facebook group had asked me how the main supersaw lead sound was created so I took on the challenge!

This was a fun one to work on as the lead sound was heavily layered and quite complex. Tiesto and KSHMR made the lead out of four parts:

1) A searing main lead with a huge sidechained reverb
2) A dry saw wave lead taking up the bottom end
3) A dry saw wave open lead that has a lot of noise in it
4) A wide, detuned supersaw lead, filling out the stereo field and adding some stabs to accent the main synth sound

My goal with this sound design tutorial was to flex the full power of XFer’s Serum synth to create a similar sound using only a single plugin instance and no additional audio effects. The patch I made used all of Serums oscillators: both wavetable oscillators, the sub oscillator and the noise oscillator. We also used the unison engine, both filters, the Hyper & Dimension Expander effect, Distortion, Reverb, Delay and Multi-Band Compressor. I’m a huge fan of assigning modulation to allow you to explore the patch more fully, so we used all four macros, two envelopes, an LFO in a sidechain shape and the mod wheel.