Originally this was our 2022 deep house preset roundup, and week after week people keep finding it. So it got a proper 2026 refresh: Serum has become Serum 2 (owners of Serum 1 got the upgrade free), every pack below now ships updated versions, and I’ve added the real settings I reach for when building deep house patches from an init preset.
One housekeeping note first: all the packs linked on this page now come with Serum 2 versions. Completely new to the synth? My Serum 2 beginner guide walks through the layout changes, and this short post explains where preset files belong so the browser actually finds them. Just want something to play right now? The free Serum 2 presets pack has 250+ patches, and a good handful of them are deep house chords and basses.
What deep house actually sounds like
Deep house was born in Chicago in the mid-1980s. Larry Heard, Marshall Jefferson and their peers took house music’s raw jack, pulled the tempo back, smoothed the edges, and lifted chord language from jazz and soul. Nothing else on the dancefloor at the time sounded that warm or that moody.
Forty years on, the recipe hasn’t moved: a 4/4 kick at 120-124 BPM, a rolling sub bass, extended seventh and ninth chords, and room to breathe. Deep house needs air. Fill every bar and you’ve made something else.
The early-2010s revival pushed the sound back into the mainstream. For modern reference points, put these three on:
- Disclosure: the pop-friendly end, tight garage-influenced grooves
- Jamie xx: sparse, emotional, huge use of space
- Nicolas Jaar: the experimental edge, slower tempos, organic textures
Worth knowing too: the “Selected” / “Spinnin’ Deep” sound running today’s playlists lands somewhere between classic deep house and slap house: brighter basses, harder sidechain, vocal chops. Most packs below serve both flavors.
The presets: producer picks
What follows are our own deep house packs, all brought up to Serum 2. Making these is literally my job, so of course I’m biased — the demos aren’t, though, so let your ears make the call.
Modern Deep House Serum 2 Presets Vol.1
This one is where I’d begin. Warm chord stacks, subby basses and airy pads pointed at the classic side of the genre. Macros come pre-mapped on every patch, so the mod wheel and Macro 1 do something musical the moment you load it.
Serum 2 Deep House Presets Vol.2
Volume 2 chases the modern playlist sound: Selected, Spinnin’ Deep territory. The basses hit harder, the plucks run brighter, and the patches arrive ready for aggressive sidechain. Vol.1 is late-night; Vol.2 is festival daytime.
Slap & Deep House MegaPack Vol.1
When your deep house keeps sliding toward slap house basslines, the Slap & Deep House MegaPack handles both worlds: presets alongside bass loops and drums, enough to rough out a complete groove in a single sitting.
Serum 2 Melodic House Presets
Heading toward the deeper, more emotional territory where deep house bleeds into melodic house and techno? North Sea is the one. There’s also a free organic drums folder in the box, and it slots into deep house grooves better than you’d expect.
Serum 2 Piano Presets Vol.2
Strictly speaking this isn’t a deep house pack, but these piano and keys patches get the house-piano stab exactly right, and I know no faster route to that classic mood than a slightly detuned electric piano floating over a deep groove.
How to build a deep house patch in Serum 2
Presets get you moving; knowing the build gets you further. Here’s my from-init recipe for the two essential sounds, actual numbers included.
The chord stack
- Oscillator A: pick a soft wavetable (Basic Shapes does fine), warp mode off, unison 4-6, detune 0.10-0.15.
- There’s a third oscillator in Serum 2 now, so I drop a sine or triangle an octave down on Osc C, kept quiet, to fatten the chord’s underside.
- Filter: MG Low 12 or 24 with cutoff sitting around 400-800 Hz, then hand the opening to an LFO or the mod wheel. Resonance stays low.
- Amp envelope: 5-15 ms attack, 300-600 ms release. A deep house chord is short and plucky, never a sustained wash.
- FX: OTT-style multiband compression around 20-30% mix, generous reverb on a bus, chorus in small doses. With Serum 2’s new FX buses you can route just the wet reverb through a high-pass, which keeps the bottom end tidy.
Want more motion in your patches? My Serum 2 modulation guide gets into LFO shapes and macro mapping properly.
The rolling bass
- A single oscillator, sine or a dark analog wavetable. Skip the unison entirely; deep house bass lives in mono.
- Pitch: stay between E1 and A1. Go higher and the “deep” evaporates.
- Amp envelope: attack at 0, decay 200-400 ms, sustain near 50%, so each note does a little pump of its own.
- A touch of gentle saturation (Distortion, Tube, low drive) lets small speakers hear it at all.
- Sidechain against the kick; no compressor needed if you’d rather use a simple volume LFO synced to 1/4 dipping 3-4 dB.
Honestly, the groove outweighs the sound design here. Bass notes on the offbeats (the “and” of every beat) under a four-on-the-floor kick: that sentence is the entire genre.
Quick arrangement and mix tips
- Hold 120-124 BPM. Any slower and it reads as chill-out; any faster and it reads as tech house.
- Reach for sevenths and ninths. A bare minor triad says EDM; Am9 says deep house.
- High-pass everything under 30 Hz, and never let bass and kick share an octave. The kick-bass relationship gets a full treatment in my tech house bass tutorial, and everything there applies here.
- Arrange long and sparse: sections of 8-16 bars, introducing one element at a time. Patience is what this genre pays for.
- Give the top end to the hats and one bright sound. Three things fighting above 8 kHz means two of them get muted.
FAQ: deep house Serum 2 presets
Do Serum 1 deep house presets work in Serum 2?
They do. Serum 2 loads every Serum 1 patch and the sound is identical. Going backwards doesn’t work, though: a patch saved in Serum 2 won’t open in Serum 1. Every pack on this page ships native Serum 2 versions regardless.
What BPM is deep house?
Usually 120-124 BPM. The old Chicago records hovered around 118-122, while modern playlist deep house tends to sit at 122-124. Past 125 you’re wandering into tech house.
What chords does deep house use?
Minor sevenths, ninths and elevenths for the most part, frequently on loan from jazz. A good starter loop: Am7 – Dm9 – Em7 – Am7, spread across two octaves with the root handed to the bass.
Are there free deep house presets for Serum 2?
There are. Our free Serum 2 presets guide rounds up everything worth grabbing, and our own free pack carries deep house chords, basses and pads among its 250+ patches.
That’s the refresh. Undecided about the paid packs? Begin with the free Serum 2 presets — built with the same design approach, priced at nothing, and one session will tell you whether these sounds belong in your tracks.
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 →Looking for the packs themselves? Here is the Serum 2 pack index — sorted by genre and by sound, with a demo on every one.
