Sound design breakdowns, production techniques and honest studio advice from the team behind 97+ packs — written for producers who finish tracks.
Melodic House rises or falls on its sound palette — emotional progressions: glassy plucks, wide pads, leads that unfold a story across eight bars. The bass keeps a low profile, the drums stay plain, and the harmony carries everything. Designing…
Bass House rises or falls on its sound palette: growling low-end power: basses that talk, metallic stabs, drops with the impact of a truck. Structurally it’s house; the bassline, though, runs on dubstep sound design. Designing Serum 2 packs is…
Tech house is a sound-palette genre — everything tight and groove-first: punchy stab basses, clipped vocal-ish synths, hooks that behave like percussion. Nothing rings out, nothing gets lush. Every single part is playing rhythm, the bass included. Designing Serum 2…
The sound palette decides everything in House: classic four-on-the-floor warmth, swung chords, rubbery basslines, hands-in-the-air leads. This is the parent genre of most things that fill a dance floor, and the rules are simple enough that an afternoon covers them.…
The sound palette is everything in Deep House, all smoky after-hours textures: basses heavy on sub, dusty organ keys, plucks tucked behind the beat. This is dance music you can talk over, so every element has to justify being there.…
Every free Serum 2 preset pack I make, grouped by genre and by sound: 35 packs, 790 presets, with demos on each pack page and notes on which Serum version each format needs.
Serum 2, Phase Plant, and Pigments all sound great. I've built patches in all three - here's which one to actually buy, based on your genre and how you learn.
Vital is free and covers most of a classic wavetable workflow. So when does Serum 2 actually earn its price? A preset maker's honest breakdown.
The exact chain I use for wobbly tape keys in Serum 2: pitch drift LFOs, a vinyl noise layer, an analog low-pass, gentle overdrive, and granular texture beds. Real settings, no sample chopping.
The exact Serum 2 settings behind phonk's core sounds: the metallic pitch-bent cowbell, the distorted cowbass, dark detuned leads, and that lo-fi tape drift. Plus house phonk vs drift phonk, explained with numbers.
The full Afterlife-style recipe: a drifting analog pluck, one huge dark pad, velocity-shaped arps and automated reverb tails - with the exact Serum 2 settings I use in our packs.
Two tech house bass recipes for Serum 2: the rolling offbeat workhorse and the vocal formant stab. Real settings, real BPM numbers, no vague advice.
The full future bass chord recipe in Serum 2: unison and detune values, OTT-style multiband compression, filter wobble, and the baked-in sidechain pump - with every setting spelled out.
Five practical ways to build vocal chops inside Serum 2 - sample oscillator, multisample mapping, granular textures, spectral ghost vocals, and a fake vocal from scratch when you have no sample at all.
The exact growl recipe we use at Monosounds: vowel wavetables, FM warp, formant movement, distortion into phaser, and the resampling loop that makes Serum 2 patches talk.
How I build 808s in Serum 2 from an init patch: sine core, pitch envelope click, Overdrive saturation, glide for slides, and the exact trap vs drill envelope settings.
A pad that doesn't move is just a long chord. Here's the exact Serum 2 recipe I use: three detuned layers, slow LFOs, a granular texture layer, and one full patch walkthrough.
Most supersaws sound thin because detune, blend and width are all cranked at once. Here is the exact Serum 2 recipe I use in our packs, with future rave and eurodance variants.
The folder taxonomy, favorites setup, and 20-minute cleanup routine I use to keep 1,400 Serum 2 presets findable — from someone who sorts presets for a living.
Right-click menus, modifier keys, drag-and-drop tricks, and the arp's chord mode. Every Serum 2 shortcut I could verify and actually use, from someone who builds presets for a living.