My very first future bass chord came out sounding like a cheap organ. Thin, flat, not a hint of movement. The notes were right; everything else was wrong.
What I learned since: notes are maybe 20% of this sound. The other 80% lives in unison, detune, multiband compression, and modulation. Future bass Serum 2 patches happen to be the perfect classroom for all four, because Serum 2 packs every tool you need into a single plugin.
I’ve been building future bass presets at Monosounds since 2022, and what follows is my exact recipe, with real values you can copy directly. Pull up an init patch and work along with me.
Start With the Right Saw
Put Osc A on the Wavetable engine with a basic saw. One saw on its own sounds like a bee. Seven saws drifting slightly out of tune with each other sound like future bass.
Where I start Osc A:
- Unison: 7
- Detune: 0.15
- Width: 90%
- Blend: around 75%, so the center voice stays in charge
- Level: 100%
Resist the urge to slam unison up to 16. It devours CPU and blurs the pitch until the chord loses all definition. Chords get 7 from me, dropping to 5 when the patch has to live in a crowded mix. For the deep version of every unison and detune decision, there’s a full Serum 2 supersaw guide I wrote covering it all.
Osc B becomes the octave layer. Same saw, shifted up an octave (Oct +1), level pulled down to roughly 60%, detune nudged a bit higher to around 0.18. This is the layer that makes the chord sound expensive. Soloed, it’s harsh; blended, it’s the sparkle riding on top.
Osc C provides the body. A plain sine an octave below (Oct -1), unison 1, zero detune, level near 50%. Leave it out and the chord floats. Put it in and the low mids fill up, and suddenly the drop has actual weight.
One envelope move before going further: set Env 1’s release to roughly 400 ms. A future bass chord wants a short tail; without one, every chord change sounds like a needle being lifted off a record.
Voicings: 7ths and 9ths Do the Heavy Lifting
Feed a plain major triad into that patch and it still sounds like a demo. Extended chords are the fuel of future bass. Stack on the 7th and the 9th and the same patch abruptly sounds like a record.
My rule of thumb: four or five notes per chord, spread over about two octaves, and the 9th never goes at the bottom. These are the voicings I grab constantly:
| Chord | Notes to play | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Am9 | A2, C3, E3, G3, B3 | Moody drops, the genre default |
| Fmaj7 | F2, A2, C3, E3 | Softer verse sections |
| Cmaj9 | C3, E3, G3, B3, D4 | Bright, hopeful hooks |
| Gadd9 | G2, B2, D3, A3 | Pre-drop lift |
| Dm9 | D3, F3, A3, C4, E4 | Tension before F or C |
Play Am9, Fmaj7, Cmaj9, Gadd9 at 150 BPM over half-time drums. Half the genre is that one progression.
Hold the lowest chord note at C2 or above, and give everything beneath it to a dedicated sub bass. When someone tells me their chords are muddy, EQ is almost never the real issue. The voicing is: too many notes crammed below C3, all wrestling with the sub.
OTT-Style Compression Inside Serum 2
That crushed, hyper-bright tone on every Flume-style drop is multiband compression lifting the quiet frequencies while squashing the loud ones, all at once. The usual answer is the OTT plugin. You never have to leave Serum 2, though.
Open the FX tab, load the Compressor, and flip on Multiband mode. Then:
- Lower the threshold until sustained chords show steady gain reduction, roughly 6 to 10 dB
- Fast attack, release around 100 ms
- Raise makeup gain until it matches the bypassed level
- Set Mix to about 60%
Pay attention to that Mix knob. Push it to 100% and you get the fully flattened OTT sound, which comes across harsh on headphones. Back at 60% the aggression stays while some dynamics survive. Right there is 80% of the future bass Serum 2 sound, from one compressor.
Serum 2 also replaced Serum 1’s single FX chain with multiple buses. Take advantage: the compressor stays on the chord bus while reverb gets a bus of its own, so the compressor never chews on the tail. Every chord patch in our Harmonic Horizons pack runs this exact split, so crack one open if you want to inspect the routing.
The Filter Wobble
By bar three, a static chord has lost its audience. The classic answer is a slow filter sweep opening and closing over the bar, letting the chords breathe.
Turn on the filter, send all three oscillators through it, and choose one of the analog-style 24 dB low pass models. Serum 2 added 11 analog-style filter types, and for this job they sound noticeably rounder than the old digital ones. Park the cutoff near 800 Hz.
Then drag LFO 1 directly onto the cutoff knob. Sine shape, BPM sync, rate 1/2. Dial the modulation amount so the sweep tops out around 8 kHz before settling back to 800 Hz. At 150 BPM that gives one complete open-close per two beats: slow enough to feel like breathing instead of dubstep.
Drag-and-drop modulation is the quickest part of the Serum 2 workflow, and it stretches far past one LFO on one knob. New to the mod matrix? My Serum 2 modulation guide takes you through it from zero.
Fake the Sidechain With a Volume LFO
Future bass chords pump. That per-beat ducking normally comes from sidechain compression, but you can build it straight into the patch and dodge the routing headache completely.
Grab LFO 2 and draw a ramp: a fast dip at the start of the shape, then a climb back to full across the cycle. Rate at 1/4 gives you a pump on every beat. Drag it onto the master volume deep enough that the duck is unmistakable, somewhere around 60 to 80%.
Make sure the LFO mode follows the host clock rather than retriggering per note. Skip that and long chords will pump in time while off-grid notes fight the beat. Every future bass Serum 2 track you love runs some flavor of this pump, whether it’s baked into the patch or routed from the kick.
Prefer studying finished patches over building from an init? Our free pack of 271 Serum 2 presets contains chords, plucks, and pads made with these very techniques. Find it at Serum 2 free presets download, royalty-free, no strings.
Polish: Reverb, Space, and a Top Layer
Three finishing touches that go on nearly every chord patch I make.
First: reverb on a dedicated FX bus. Serum 2 arrived with three new reverb types; grab a big hall, set the mix near 25%, and keep it after the compressor bus split so the tail stays dynamic.
Second: automate the wavetable position, or blend in a second table when the second drop hits. Small shifts in timbre are what keep an eight-bar loop from dying.
Third: put something human on top. A pitched vocal chop tracking the chord roots is the quickest route from synth-only drop to finished-sounding drop. Serum 2’s Sample and Granular engines do this inside the same patch, and the full workflow is in my Serum 2 vocal chops tutorial.
And if reverse-engineering pro patches is more your speed, our future bass Serum 2 presets pack was built for exactly this style: chords, supersaws, subs, and plucks all following the recipe above.
Future Bass Serum 2 FAQ
What BPM should future bass be?
The genre mostly lives between 140 and 160 BPM, with 150 being the sweet spot. Drums typically run half-time, so it feels like 75. A lot of the bounce comes from that tension between slow drums and fast chord stabs.
Do I still need the OTT plugin if Serum 2 has a multiband compressor?
Not for the patch itself. The built-in multiband compressor delivers the sound and spares you a plugin instance per track. That said, I sometimes still drop OTT on the full chord group in the DAW, since compressing the layered stack glues things differently than compressing one synth. Test both, keep whichever one you can’t hear a difference on, and bank the CPU.
Why do my chords sound muddy?
Nine times out of ten it’s the voicing, not the mixing. Shift the chord up until its lowest note is C2 or higher, cut everything under about 100 Hz on the chord bus, and hand the bottom to the sub. Need a refresher on where things live in the spectrum? Our EQ blueprint with frequency charts has you covered.
My CPU spikes with unison 7 on three oscillators. What do I do?
Take Osc A down to unison 5 first; the loss is smaller than you’d expect. Next, cap polyphony at 6 voices, because five-note chords rarely want more. Freeze the track as soon as the part is written. Xfer also keeps official CPU guidelines on their support site, and they’re worth ten minutes of your time.
Copy the Recipe, Then Break It
Saw at unison 7, an octave layer, a sine body, 9th chords, multiband at 60% mix, filter wobble at 1/2, volume pump at 1/4. That’s the entire sound. From there on it’s all taste.
Want the shortcut? Grab our free 271 Serum 2 presets and dissect the chord patches to see how they’re wired. No email wall, no strings. Copy what works, then make it yours.
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 all my Serum 2 preset packs — sorted by genre and by sound, with a demo on every one.
