How To Install Serum Presets on Mac & Windows

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Serum is probably the most popular VST synth of our time. It sounds great, looks stunning, is easy to understand, plus there are plenty of Serum presets and skins available. Since not everyone knows how to install Serum presets I decided to write this tutorial for you guys.

Fortunately, it doesn’t matter if you’re using Mac or Windows, Ableton or FL Studio.

The process is always the same!

Open Serum’s Presets Folder

Start by opening Serum.

Now go to the menu in the top right corner and click “Show Serum Presets folder”.

You should see these folders (this screenshot is a bit old by now, so you should see some additional ones):

If you can NOT find Serum’s preset folder there’s a good chance you haven’t installed a legit license, so make sure to purchase one. It’s worth it 😉

Paste Your New Presets

Now paste the pack you’d like to install in the presets folder. Some preset banks may come with additional LFO shapes, noises, wavetables or skins. Just drag each of those categories in the matching folder, too. Wavetables go to “Tables”, noises go into “Noises” and so on.

Have fun

Go ahead and open Serum. You’ll find all patches in Serum’s browser. If you can’t open some of the presets you probably haven’t installed the latest update yet.

..and this is how to install Serum presets! Easy, right? 😉

How To Install Serum Presets on Mac & Windows

Home » Blog » How To Install Serum Presets on Mac & Windows

Table of Contents

Serum is probably the most popular VST synth of our time. It sounds great, looks stunning, is easy to understand, plus there are plenty of Serum presets and skins available. Since not everyone knows how to install Serum presets I decided to write this tutorial for you guys.

Fortunately, it doesn’t matter if you’re using Mac or Windows, Ableton or FL Studio.

The process is always the same!

Open Serum’s Presets Folder

Start by opening Serum.

Now go to the menu in the top right corner and click “Show Serum Presets folder”.

You should see these folders (this screenshot is a bit old by now, so you should see some additional ones):

If you can NOT find Serum’s preset folder there’s a good chance you haven’t installed a legit license, so make sure to purchase one. It’s worth it 😉

Paste Your New Presets

Now paste the pack you’d like to install in the presets folder. Some preset banks may come with additional LFO shapes, noises, wavetables or skins. Just drag each of those categories in the matching folder, too. Wavetables go to “Tables”, noises go into “Noises” and so on.

Have fun

Go ahead and open Serum. You’ll find all patches in Serum’s browser. If you can’t open some of the presets you probably haven’t installed the latest update yet.

..and this is how to install Serum presets! Easy, right? 😉

1. How to Find Serum’s Presets Folder

The first good news: you don’t have to close your DAW. Simply navigate to Serum’s Menu in the top-right, and select Show Serum Presets Folder.

Your OS’s file browser will open up at the correct system folder containing Serum’s factory presets.

2. How to Add your New Serum Presets

Here we’ve downloaded and unzipped our Melodic Techno — Serum Presets pack. Among the folders, there’s one containing ‘SERUM_PRESETS’. Folder names may vary, depending on the pack, of course.

All Serum presets have the file extension FXP – regardless of whether you’re on Mac or PC.

Now we can copy or move the entire new folder from our Downloads into the Serum Presets folder that we opened via Serum, in the ‘Presets’ folder, as shown here.

When we return to Serum, go back to the same menu and select Rescan folders on disk.

Our new presets now show up alongside Serum’s Factory bank.

It’s worth renaming the folder to something more relevant. You can do this using your OS file browser, and Rescan the folder in Serum once again for this to take effect. See our notes about how best to organise your Serum presets at the end of this article for more info.

3. Installing Serum Noises, Wavetables and LFOs

With your presets installed, sometimes the newly-created wavetables, noises and LFOs, made by the sound designer will be installed as part of the FXP patch, but sometimes not.

If your preset fails to produce noise when loaded, you may need to load the required wavetables into Serum as well. Serum can also bring up an error message when it can’t find a certain element, as shown below.

In this case, your downloaded preset pack should contain custom wavetables, noises and/or LFOs to drag into Serum’s other preset folders. Depending on the developer, the destination could be in the User folder for the Noise, Wavetable or other element, but the most likely way to get the sound working is to simply drag the included folder straight into the relevant directory in Serum. Don’t forget to Rescan folders on disk after this.

4. Using Imported Wavetables, LFO Shapes and Noises in your own Serum Patches

Once any Noises, ‘Tables’, and LFO Shapes are imported into Serum, you can also freely bring them into any patch you’re working on elsewhere.

5. Organising your Third-Party Serum Presets

You might have noticed Serum’s User folder, where it stores presets that you save yourself. We recommend not installing whole Serum preset packs here, to prevent confusion. It’s even more useful to save your presets in a folder of their own if your pack is based on a particular genre (such as a pack like Tropical House — Serum Presets, or a certain mood, like our pack Dark Cinematic — Serum Presets.

Remember that Serum can’t access folders within folders, so if you do attempt to install your third-party packs within the User folder, you can only drag the individual FXP presets in – only one layer of folders will ever be visible, and that’s the top layer with ‘Serum Presets’

Please select the folder named serum presets in the windows about to appear

The GUI is fantastic and the sound is . AMAZING ! Clarity , power , so . . . 2014

10 / 10 ( playing 2 hours with the demo so far and loving it )

Steve Duda here (the developer).
Nice to see so many good words about Serum.

If you have any questions, I’d love to answer them!

Also I wanted to mention that the plugin is 33% off until Oct 31st — Thats $129, for VST/AU/AAX on OSX/WIN 32+64 bit, and always free updates!

Hi Steve,
thanks for your offer !

Switching presets can take quite a while, is there a way, to speed this up ? Why does it take so long ?

have to get my head around the wavetables, is there something like a scale, where I can draw certain pitches ?

kindest regards,
kosi

tried to contact support 2 times (via contact form @ xfer site) with no luck (((
any one have direct mail of them or even Steve?

I just found your messages this morning spam filtered, maybe it was the links you included. In any case I’ve replied to your message here.

Hi kosi — the delay is almost entirely the wavetables loading, which involve a lot of pre-calculations for maximum sound quality on realtime playback. Just like loading a patch in Kontakt, a very similar thing is happening here (imagine keyzones being created across the keyboard, with 256 samples in each zone — it turns out to be minutes not seconds of audio, and this audio is not simply ‘loading’ but rather processing / high-quality filtering). With that said, I will be working to improve this speed, in the near future, while I am confident I can make significant optimizations, however there will always be some delay.

the ‘pitch’ is the note you play on the keyboard of course. Then the harmonics of that pitch can be drawn in the bars across the very top of the WT editor window. Similarly you can get pitches out by using certain grid sizes, e.g. a grid size of 6 will give you a ‘perfect 5th’ kind of sound!

Steve yesterday i bought your monster vsti !

I was messing with the delay effect and i have to say its very very good .

One word «WOW» I just saw the demo from PLUGINGURU.com

Impressive indeed. IMpressive price as well. I will have this. I only own 1 softsynth, this is the one to add.

Made with Serum
I sampled my Virus XL and used the Saw waveform for the Arp here. The intro sound and the pluck sound in the complete track is also Serum (there is also Dune, Spire etc. so it’s not 100% Serum)

Why not do it just to be safe.

Gotta say, I’m really enjoying this synth.

Its got tons a capabilities and I really like how you can get very experimental.

First Song («Concentrated» presets):

This is one instance of Serum with a custom patch.

Now here is another with one guitar part added:

The cool thing is that this can be done with one synth and saved as a patch which allows for some really powerful live use.

In the past I would have to use several synths to get the same results.

click where it says «- Init -» in blue at the top, there is a menu directory of presets there («internal browser»). They aren’t exposed to the host.

click where it says «- Init -» in blue at the top, there is a menu directory of presets there («internal browser»). They aren’t exposed to the host.

yeah I had this as well

they are in ‘documents’ ->’Xfer’ -> ‘Serum Presets’

Working on a film soundtrack in Logic and changing presets in Serum caused a couple of crashes.
Anyone else experiencing this?

I really like Serum. I think it has great potential and can see it developing into a dream synth. I feel it has slightly more oomph than Zebra — I’m finding it easier to get harder more abrasive sounds — and more fidelity than Massive — it sounds glassier — offering a little something different whilst complementing them. What I like most is the aggressive, hard character that this synth has.

The slow preset loading times are a bit of a drag though.

KVR Audio

Pro Audio Forum — VST, AU, AAX Plugin and Audio Software Discussion

Serum — Why cant i change the preset folder location :(?

Post by Caine123 » Tue Apr 04, 2017 7:47 pm

Post by m03 » Tue Apr 04, 2017 9:18 pm

Maybe they’re trying to avoid having to burn support hours/funds troubleshooting end-user filesystem permissions issues.

Anyway, maybe try adding a symlink to the desired destination?

6399 posts since 5 Aug, 2009

Post by Caine123 » Tue Apr 04, 2017 9:20 pm

Post by EvilDragon » Tue Apr 04, 2017 9:20 pm

6399 posts since 5 Aug, 2009

Post by Caine123 » Tue Apr 04, 2017 9:23 pm

Post by yellowmix » Tue Apr 04, 2017 9:47 pm

I do this to all my plugins, and some don’t like symlinks, and some won’t even work with junction points. I considered patching the dlls but maintenance would be a pain. But Serum is one of the most cooperative and easy preset relocation plugins.

Simply move the preset folder wherever you’d like (if you don’t know where it is, open up the menu in Serum and choose «Show Serum Presets folder». After that, create a new Serum instance, it’s going to say it can’t find the presets, and ask you to please tell it where it is. Point it to the new location, and you’re done.

6399 posts since 5 Aug, 2009

Post by Caine123 » Tue Apr 04, 2017 10:11 pm