Techno lives or dies on its low end. Get the bass right and a two-note loop can carry a whole warehouse set. Get it wrong and nothing else in the track will save it.
I make preset packs for a living, and techno bass is one of the sounds people ask me about most. So here’s my honest take: what actually makes a techno bass work, which styles you should know, and which of our Serum 2 packs I’d point you to for each one.
Quick context for 2026: Serum 2 shipped in March 2025 as a free upgrade for every Serum 1 owner. You now get three oscillators, five engine types (including granular and spectral), new FX buses and a built-in sequencer. For bass design that mostly means more layering headroom inside one patch — no more stacking two Serum instances just to get a sub plus a mid layer. If you’re still on the fence about upgrading, I compared both versions in Serum 1 vs Serum 2.
If you’d rather test sounds before buying anything, grab our free Serum 2 preset pack first — it includes bass patches you can drop straight into a techno project.
What Makes a Great Serum 2 Bass Preset for Techno
Techno bass is the opposite of EDM bass. No supersaws, no wild modulation for its own sake. You want tight low end, groove and hypnotic movement. Three things matter.
1. A Clean, Controlled Sub
The fundamental usually sits around 40–60 Hz. In Serum 2 that’s typically a sine or triangle on one oscillator, kept mono below roughly 120 Hz.
A few settings I use constantly:
- Oscillator: sine, unison at 1 voice, no detune on the sub layer
- High-pass everything else in the patch around 100–150 Hz so only the sub owns that range
- Keep the sub 3–6 dB louder than the mid layer, then check it on headphones and a club-style system if you can
A clean sub is what makes the bass translate on a big PA instead of turning into mud.
2. Midrange Harmonics for Character
The sub gives you power, but the midrange is what people actually hear on laptop speakers and phones. Techno patches usually get their character from FM, subtle distortion or filter drive.
In Serum 2, try FM-ing oscillator B from A at 15–30% — that alone turns a plain sine into a growling techno bass. Add the Distortion module in Tube or Diode mode at low drive, then pull the wet mix back to 30–50%. If you want to go deeper on routing, my Serum 2 modulation guide covers the LFO and envelope tricks that make these patches move.
3. Tight Envelope Control
Most techno bass notes are short and punchy so they lock with the kick. My starting point: attack 0 ms, decay 150–300 ms, sustain around 20–40%, release under 100 ms. Shorter decay for rolling lines, longer sustain for droning hypnotic stuff.
Filter envelope matters just as much. A small amount of envelope on cutoff (20–30%) with a fast decay gives you that plucky forward motion without touching the sub.
Techno Bass Styles (and the Presets I’d Use)
Different subgenres want different bass. Here are the three styles I get asked about most.
Deep and Hypnotic Techno Bass
Clean sub, minimal distortion, slow subtle movement. This is the sound of hypnotic, minimal and melodic techno — the bass sits low and lets the groove do the talking.
For this style I’d start with our Technocraft techno presets — it’s the pack we built specifically for club techno, with subs and rumble basses that are already mixed tight. For the more melodic end, Elixir has reese basses and atmospheric patches that work well, and the North Sea melodic house and techno pack covers the softer, emotional side of the genre. I also wrote a full walkthrough on building this sound from scratch in the melodic techno Serum 2 tutorial.
Distorted Hard Techno Bass
Hard techno wants aggression: saw oscillators, heavy saturation, aggressive filtering. The trick is that the distortion lives in the midrange while the sub underneath stays clean — distort the whole signal and you lose all your low-end weight.
A quick recipe in Serum 2: saw wave, FM at 40–60% for grit, hard-clip distortion on one FX bus, then blend it against a clean sine sub on a second oscillator. The multiband options in the new FX buses make this much easier than it was in Serum 1.
Rolling Techno Bass
Rolling basslines are the engine of peak-time techno and tech house: off-beat 16th-note grooves, rhythmic filter movement, a bassline that never quite sits still.
This is where our Fishlake series earns its keep. Tech House Serum 2 Presets – Fishlake Vol.2 is the newer set, and FISHLAKE Vol.1 adds a sample pack on top of the presets. If you want a third flavour, Techsonic leans harder into the modern tech house sound. I break down the actual bassline programming — note lengths, velocity, sidechain timing — in the tech house bass tutorial.
How to Make Any Bass Preset Sit in Your Track
Even a good preset needs three adjustments before it works in a mix. This is where most demos I hear fall apart.
Tune It to Your Track
Obvious, but constantly skipped: make sure the patch is actually playing in your track’s key, and check the octave. A techno bass an octave too high loses all its weight; an octave too low turns to rumble soup. F to A around the first octave (F1–A1) is the sweet spot for most club systems.
Saturate Lightly, Not Heavily
A touch of tape saturation or soft clipping adds harmonics that let small speakers “hear” the bass even when they can’t reproduce the sub. Drive it until you just start hearing the difference, then back off a notch. If you’re distorting inside Serum 2 already, you probably don’t need much more in the DAW.
Sidechain to the Kick — Subtly
Kick and bass have to share the low end. In techno the sidechain should be felt, not heard: 2–4 dB of gain reduction with a fast release, not the pumping you’d use in EDM. I usually sidechain only the sub layer and leave the mids alone — the groove stays intact and the kick still punches through.
If your patches sound right but your project starts choking on CPU once you stack FX buses, the fixes in Serum 2 CPU optimization will help.
Where to Start: My Shortlist
If I had to pick a starting kit for techno in Serum 2, it would be:
- Technocraft — the core techno pack: subs, rumbles, stabs
- Fishlake Vol.1 or Vol.2 — rolling basslines for tech house and peak-time sets
- Elixir — reese basses and atmospheres for the melodic side
- The free pack — zero-cost way to test how our sounds sit in your mixes
Every preset is fully editable, so treat them as starting points. Swap the wavetable, retune the FM amount, reshape the envelopes — that’s how a preset becomes your sound. If you’re new to Serum’s preset system, here’s how to install Serum 2 presets the right way.
FAQ: Serum 2 Bass Presets for Techno
Are Serum 2 presets good for techno production?
Yes. Serum 2 is one of the most used synths in techno right now — wavetable plus FM covers almost every bass style in the genre, and the new granular and spectral engines add textures Serum 1 couldn’t do. Plenty of touring techno producers build their basslines on it.
Do Serum 1 presets work in Serum 2?
Yes, Serum 2 opens Serum 1 presets without conversion, and the upgrade itself was free for Serum 1 owners. All the packs mentioned here are built and tested for Serum 2.
What frequency should a techno bass sit at?
The sub fundamental usually sits between 40 and 60 Hz, which means bass notes around F1–A1. Keep everything below roughly 120 Hz mono, and high-pass the non-bass elements of your mix so the sub has that range to itself.
Can I customize the presets?
Fully. Every parameter stays editable — filters, envelopes, FM amounts, the FX buses, macros. Most producers use presets as a fast starting point and tweak from there, which is exactly how I’d recommend using them.
Final Thoughts
A techno track is basically kick, bass and conviction. Nail the low end and everything else gets easier.
Start with a solid preset, tune it, saturate it lightly, sidechain it gently — and spend the time you saved on groove and arrangement, which is where tracks are actually won.
Not sure where to begin? The free Serum 2 presets pack has 250+ sounds including bass patches — download it, drag a few into a project tonight and see what sticks.
I run Monosounds.studio and make the packs myself. Ten-plus years of producing, 97+ releases, 16,000+ downloads. Every Serum 2 preset we ship passes a CPU check on a mid-range laptop and gets used in a real track before release. If it does not survive a mix, it does not go in the pack.
More about Maxim & the studio →
