The first future bass chord I ever made sounded like a cheap organ. Flat, thin, zero movement. I had the right notes and the wrong everything else.
Turns out the notes are maybe 20% of the sound. The rest is unison, detune, multiband compression, and modulation. And future bass Serum 2 patches are the perfect place to learn all four, because Serum 2 has every tool you need inside one plugin.
I’ve been building future bass presets at Monosounds since 2022. Here’s the exact recipe I use, with real values you can copy. Open an init patch and follow along.
Start With the Right Saw
Set Osc A to the Wavetable engine with a basic saw. One saw sounds like a bee. Seven saws slightly out of tune with each other sound like future bass.
My starting point for Osc A:
- Unison: 7
- Detune: 0.15
- Width: 90%
- Blend: around 75%, so the center voice stays in charge
- Level: 100%
Don’t jump straight to unison 16. It eats CPU and smears the pitch so hard the chord loses definition. I use 7 on chords, and drop to 5 when the patch sits in a busy mix. If you want the deep version of every unison and detune decision, I wrote a full Serum 2 supersaw guide that covers it.
Now build the octave layer on Osc B. Same saw, but shift it up an octave (Oct +1), drop the level to about 60%, and push detune a little higher, around 0.18. This layer is what makes the chord sound expensive. Solo it and it sounds harsh; blended in, it’s the sparkle on top.
Osc C is your body. Plain sine, one octave down (Oct -1), unison 1, no detune, level around 50%. Without it the chord floats. With it the low mids fill in and the drop actually feels heavy.
One envelope tweak before we move on: give Env 1 a release of about 400 ms. Future bass chords need a short tail, or every chord change sounds like someone lifting the needle.
Voicings: 7ths and 9ths Do the Heavy Lifting
Play a plain major triad through that patch and it still sounds like a demo. Future bass runs on extended chords. Add the 7th and the 9th and the same patch suddenly sounds like a record.
My rule: four or five notes per chord, spread across roughly two octaves, and never put the 9th at the bottom. Here are the voicings I reach for 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 |
Try Am9, Fmaj7, Cmaj9, Gadd9 at 150 BPM with half-time drums. That progression alone is half the genre.
Keep the lowest chord note at C2 or above and let a separate sub bass handle everything below. When people tell me their chords sound muddy, it’s almost never an EQ problem. It’s a voicing problem: too many notes stacked below C3, fighting the sub.
OTT-Style Compression Inside Serum 2
That crushed, hyper-bright tone you hear on every Flume-style drop is multiband compression pushing quiet frequencies up and loud ones down at the same time. Most producers reach for the OTT plugin. You don’t have to leave Serum 2.
Head to the FX tab, add the Compressor, and switch on Multiband mode. Then:
- Pull the threshold down until you see steady gain reduction on sustained chords, roughly 6 to 10 dB
- Fast attack, release around 100 ms
- Bring makeup gain up to match the bypassed level
- Set Mix to about 60%
That Mix control matters. At 100% you get the full flattened OTT sound, which reads as harsh on headphones. At 60% you keep the aggression and some of the dynamics. That’s 80% of the future bass Serum 2 sound right there, and it’s one compressor.
Serum 2 also gives you multiple FX buses instead of the single chain Serum 1 had. Use that: keep the compressor on the chord bus and put reverb on its own bus, so the compressor doesn’t chew up the tail. Every chord patch in our Harmonic Horizons pack uses this exact split, so pull one apart if you want to see the routing.
The Filter Wobble
Static chords bore people by bar three. The classic move is a slow filter sweep that opens and closes across the bar, so the chords breathe.
Enable the filter, route all three oscillators into it, and pick one of the analog-style 24 dB low pass models. Serum 2 added 11 analog-style filter types, and they sound noticeably rounder than the old digital ones for this job. Set the cutoff around 800 Hz.
Now drag LFO 1 straight onto the cutoff knob. Sine shape, BPM sync, rate 1/2. Set the modulation amount so the sweep peaks around 8 kHz and falls back to 800 Hz. At 150 BPM that’s one full open-close every two beats, which is slow enough to feel like breathing rather than dubstep.
Drag-and-drop modulation is the fastest part of Serum 2’s workflow, and it goes far beyond one LFO on one knob. If you’re new to the mod matrix, my Serum 2 modulation guide walks through it from zero.
Fake the Sidechain With a Volume LFO
Future bass chords pump. That ducking on every beat is usually sidechain compression, but you can bake it into the patch and skip the routing headache entirely.
Take LFO 2 and draw a ramp: the shape dips fast at the start, then rises back to full over the cycle. Set the rate to 1/4 so it pumps on every beat. Then drag it onto the master volume with enough depth that the duck is obvious, around 60 to 80%.
Set the LFO mode so it runs off the host clock instead of retriggering with every note. Otherwise long chords pump in time but off-grid notes fight the beat. Every future bass Serum 2 track you love does some version of this pump, whether it’s baked in or routed from the kick.
If you’d rather study finished patches than build from scratch, our free pack of 250+ Serum 2 presets includes chords, plucks, and pads built with these same techniques. It’s at Serum 2 free presets download, royalty-free, no strings.
Polish: Reverb, Space, and a Top Layer
Three finishing moves I use on almost every chord patch.
First, reverb on its own FX bus. Serum 2 shipped with three new reverb types; pick a big hall, set mix around 25%, and keep it after the compressor bus split so the tail stays dynamic.
Second, automate the wavetable position or blend a second table for the second drop. Small timbre changes keep an eight-bar loop alive.
Third, layer something human on top. A pitched vocal chop riding the chord roots is the fastest way to make a synth-only drop feel finished. Serum 2’s Sample and Granular engines handle this inside the same patch, and I cover the whole workflow in the Serum 2 vocal chops tutorial.
And if you’d rather start from pro patches and reverse-engineer them, our future bass Serum 2 presets pack is built exactly for this style: chords, supersaws, subs, and plucks that follow the recipe above.
Future Bass Serum 2 FAQ
What BPM should future bass be?
Most of the genre sits between 140 and 160 BPM, with 150 as the sweet spot. Drums are usually half-time, so it feels like 75. That contrast between slow drums and fast chord stabs is a big part of the bounce.
Do I still need the OTT plugin if Serum 2 has a multiband compressor?
For the patch itself, no. The built-in multiband compressor gets you the sound, and it saves a plugin instance per track. I do still sometimes put OTT on the full chord group in the DAW, because compressing the layered stack glues it differently than compressing one synth. Try both, keep the one you can’t hear the difference on, and save the CPU.
Why do my chords sound muddy?
Nine times out of ten: voicing, not mixing. Move the chord up so its lowest note is C2 or higher, cut everything below about 100 Hz on the chord bus, and let the sub own the bottom. If you need a refresher on where things sit in the spectrum, our EQ blueprint with frequency charts covers it.
My CPU spikes with unison 7 on three oscillators. What do I do?
Drop Osc A to unison 5 first; you lose less than you think. Then limit polyphony to 6 voices, since five-note chords rarely need more. Freeze the track once the part is written. Xfer also publishes official CPU guidelines on their support site that are worth ten minutes of your time.
Copy the Recipe, Then Break It
Saw with unison 7, octave layer, sine body, 9th chords, multiband at 60% mix, filter wobble at 1/2, volume pump at 1/4. That’s the whole sound. Everything past that is taste.
If you want a shortcut, grab our free 250+ Serum 2 presets and tear the chord patches apart to see how they’re built. 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.
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