Serum 2 landed back in March 2025, and the preset situation still hasn’t sorted itself out. Type “free Serum 2 presets” into a search box and what comes back is mostly old Serum 1 banks wearing a fresh thumbnail, or some five-patch “teaser” whose real job is selling you a $40 pack.
We got tired of that and built our own answer. Monosounds has been shipping Serum preset packs since 2022, and this one is the genuine article: 250+ presets built from the ground up in Serum 2, sorted into ten categories. Royalty-free, nothing stripped out, no countdown timer anywhere.
Below is the full walkthrough: what each category holds, which genres they suit, how the patches got built, what the license really permits, and how to install everything and then bend it until it sounds like you.
What’s Inside the Free Serum 2 Presets Pack
Everything arrives as one .SerumPack file containing ten category subfolders, which keeps your browser tidy rather than dumping 250 lines on you at once. Get it from the free Serum 2 presets download page – check out at zero and the file is yours.
| Category | What you get | Works well in |
|---|---|---|
| Bass | Growls, reeses, sub layers | Tech house, DnB, dubstep |
| 808s | Tuned, distorted and clean subs | Trap, hip hop, phonk |
| Leads | Wide saws, mono hooks | Trance, melodic techno |
| Keys | E-pianos, synth keys | RnB, lo-fi, pop |
| Piano | Sampled and hybrid pianos | Ballads, lo-fi hip hop |
| Plucks | Short, bright, snappy hits | Future bass, pop, EDM |
| Atmospheres | Granular pads and drones | Ambient, cinematic, intros |
| Chords | Stabs and stacked voicings | House, UK garage |
| Guitar | Plucked, processed strings | Pop, reggaeton, ambient |
| Arps | Sequenced motion patches | Melodic house, synthwave |
Bass and 808s
Bass takes up the largest slice of the pack. Inside you’ll find reese basses on unison 5 with detune sitting near 0.15, driven through Serum 2’s new Overdrive distortion mode. There are growls powered by wavetable position modulation, plus clean sub layers ready to slide under anything.
Run the reeses in DnB at 174 BPM, and point the growls at dubstep or tech house. If low end is where you live, we also do a standalone free Serum 2 bass presets pack, and I dissected my favorite patches in this bass presets roundup.
The 808s are built on the Multisample engine, which means they hold their weight across the entire keyboard instead of going thin above C2. Only after those? The free 808 presets come as their own download too.
Leads, Plucks and Chords
The leads run the range from big trance saws at unison 7 down to mono hooks with glide near 80 ms. Macro 1 is mapped to brightness on most of them, so a single knob carries a lead from verse into drop.
Plucks are tight and snappy by design: fast filter envelopes, decay around 400 ms, sustain parked at zero. They slot into future bass, pop and EDM toplines without stepping on the vocal.
Each chord patch bakes a stacked voicing into a single preset, so one key press delivers a complete stab. Going by the emails we receive, house and garage producers get the most mileage out of these.
Keys, Piano and Guitar
All three of these folders lean on Serum 2’s Multisample engine, which can load SFZ instruments. The pianos are genuinely sampled instruments finished inside Serum: a light chorus, one of the three new reverb types, and occasionally a quiet granular layer running underneath for texture.
Keys are aimed at RnB, lo-fi and pop. The guitars are plucked, processed string patches suited to reggaeton, pop and ambient beds. Serum 1 could do none of this, which is precisely why these folders are a centerpiece of the pack rather than filler.
Atmospheres and Arps
The atmospheres live on the Granular engine, typically 40 to 120 grains sweeping across a source sample. They move on their own — hold a single note and you’ve got a cinematic intro, or the bed for an entire ambient piece.
The arps come pre-programmed through Serum 2’s built-in arpeggiator and sequencer, per-step velocity and note lengths included. It all locks to host tempo, so one of these in a 122 BPM melodic house project means motion within two seconds.
How We Made These Patches
Serum 2 rewired how we build sounds, and three rules ran through every single patch here.
Macros are always mapped. On every preset, Macro 1 is the main character control: wavetable position, grain density, whatever that sound is really about. Macros 2 to 4 cover brightness, space and movement. The idea is that you can reshape any patch without once opening the mod matrix.
CPU stays sane. Not one patch here runs unison 16. We stop at 7 and get our width from the Bode frequency shifter or a short delay instead. Granular patches stay below 128 grains despite Serum 2 allowing 256. Xfer’s own CPU guidelines back this up: nothing costs more than voices and unison.
FX buses do the heavy lifting. Where Serum 1 gave you a single FX chain, Serum 2 gives you multiple buses. Our bass patches route the dry sub and the wet top layer down separate paths, which is why they survive mono and don’t smear when a limiter leans on them.
The License: Royalty-Free, No Asterisks
Every sound in this pack of free Serum 2 presets is royalty-free. Commercial releases, client work, sync briefs, streams, beat sales — all fine. Nobody needs a credit, and nobody ever gets a royalty check.
One restriction, the obvious one: repackaging the preset files themselves to sell or give away as a preset pack is off limits. The music you make with them belongs to you, 100%.
How to Install the Pack
Serum 2 finally made this painless. Open Serum 2, head to the Menu tab, click Import Preset Pack, and select the .SerumPack file. Serum places everything where it belongs, and all ten folders appear in your preset browser.
Rather do it by hand? Unzip the download and drop the folders directly into your Serum 2 presets directory. Subfolders carry over, so the category structure stays intact.
The screenshot-by-screenshot version is in how to install Serum 2 presets. Can’t locate the directory on your machine? This guide to the Serum 2 preset folder location lists the paths for both Windows and Mac.
How to Make a Preset Yours
Presets are starting points, not finished records. This is the order I tweak things in, because certain moves change way more than others.
- Swap the wavetable first. Leave the envelopes, filter and FX alone and change only the table. Ninety percent of the character shifts while every bit of movement survives.
- Adjust unison and detune. Take unison from 7 down to 3 and dial detune in by ear. Thick presets tighten up, and your CPU meter gets a break.
- Change the filter type. Serum 2 added 11 analog-style filter models, and an identical cutoff sweep sounds noticeably different through each. Two clicks and it’s a new patch.
- Drag in your own audio. Any .wav dropped onto an oscillator gets converted into a wavetable by Serum 2. Once a preset runs on your own sample, it’s not really a preset anymore.
- Resample it. Resample to Oscillator prints the entire FX chain into a fresh table; strip the FX afterwards and process the new sound from scratch. Plenty of our growls began life this way.
Still hazy on terms like wavetable position or mod matrix? Our Serum 2 for beginners guide tours the interface from the very top.
FAQ
Are free Serum 2 presets really royalty-free?
Ours are. Whatever track you make is yours, commercial or otherwise, with zero credits and zero fees. The single thing off the table is reselling or redistributing the preset files themselves. That said, read the license on other packs – “free” and “royalty-free” are not the same word.
Do these presets work in Serum 1?
No. They rely on engines Serum 1 simply doesn’t have, so compatibility is one-directional: Serum 1 presets open fine in Serum 2, never the other way. The upside: Serum 2 is a free upgrade for Serum 1 owners, so staying on version 1 makes no sense anyway.
Why do some presets use more CPU than others?
Granular and Spectral patches just cost more than plain wavetable ones do. When a patch spikes, drop the polyphony, switch oversampling to 2x, or freeze the track once it’s printed. Seeing graphics glitches instead of audio ones? UseOpenGL=0 in Serum.cfg clears up most GPU-related trouble.
What if 250 presets aren’t enough?
Then free packs no longer fit you, which is a good problem. Our Serum 2 preset bundles gather the commercial packs we’ve released since Serum 2 came out, organized by genre so you don’t scroll forever.
Grab the Pack
There’s no catch and no upsell wall. If this pack buys you back one night of sound design, it’s done its job.
Download the 250+ free Serum 2 presets, open whichever category you’d usually skip, and pull three patches apart to see how they’re wired. Cheapest sound design lesson you’ll ever take.
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 full Serum 2 preset catalogue — sorted by genre and by sound, with a demo on every one.
