Fifty, give or take. That’s my straight answer, coming from a guy who literally makes money selling you presets. A core set of about 50 sounds you actually know will get you through nearly any track in your genre. Meanwhile the average producer owns thousands and couldn’t describe a single one from memory.
Let me argue for the small, familiar library, and hand you a one-month process for digging yours out of the pile you already own.
Hoarding feels like progress. It isn’t
Grabbing a new pack delivers the same little dopamine hit as finishing a track, for about one percent of the work. That’s exactly the trap. Collecting sounds is shopping. Using sounds is producing. They feel almost identical and have nothing in common.
Scrolling is the giveaway. When you preview forty presets before writing a note, you aren’t hunting for a sound; you’re dodging the harder question of what the track actually needs. I’ve burned whole evenings this way. The session where I forced myself into a single folder wrapped up quicker and, frankly, came out better.
Why known beats new
A preset you know and a preset you merely own are two different tools. With the known one, you can say what register it lives in, how it responds to velocity, what each macro does, how it sits under sidechain. You grab it the way a guitarist grabs a chord shape. No audition step exists.
That familiarity is the whole reason a small set wins:
- Speed. Writing with sounds you know keeps you writing. Every trip to the browser is a mode switch, and mode switches are session killers.
- Consistency. Build your tracks from one palette and they sound like one artist. A “recognizable sound” is mostly a repeated one.
- Depth. Fifty sounds means you eventually learn what each needs in a mix. Five thousand means every track resets you to zero.
Check the classic records in any genre: most were cut on a small handful of instruments, used again and again. The constraint wasn’t in the way. The constraint was the style.
The folder audit: find your real palette in a month
You don’t choose a working set by browsing for it; you uncover it by logging what you already grab.
- Make a folder named Working Set inside your Presets/User directory. Serum 2 surfaces user folders straight in the browser, so it sits one click away.
- The rule: any preset that makes it into a real track (an actual kept part, not just an audition) gets saved to that folder. Versions you tweaked count double; save them tweaks and all.
- Change nothing else for a month. Don’t delete, don’t reorganize the hoard. Just this single end-of-session habit.
- A month later, take a look. For most people it’s 20–40 sounds. That isn’t a small library — that’s your real instrument, finally visible.
Now invert the default: open every session inside the Working Set folder, and step outside it only when the track calls for something you genuinely lack. Browsing driven by an actual need is the one kind that pays off.
Notice nothing got deleted. The hoard becomes an archive; dipping into it now and then is fine. It just stops being the front door. I cover more shelf-level tactics in my preset organization guide.
What about new packs?
Buy when you need, not when it’s on sale. Among my customers who actually put out music, the healthy pattern looks like this: they pick up a pack when moving into a genre or when a track reveals a hole (no dark pluck, no real rumble), then audition it once, promote the keepers into the working set, and archive everything else guilt-free. It’s why the full list of Serum 2 packs is organized by genre: find the one that plugs your gap, ignore the rest.
Getting ten keepers out of a 50-preset pack is honestly a good ratio. The other forty weren’t waste; they were the search cost of locating the ten.
Still assembling your working set? Start with free stuff: our free Serum 2 presets exist for exactly this: practice the audit habit on sounds that cost you nothing. For a broader map of quality freebies, see my free presets guide.
And when the same gap keeps showing up across multiple genres, the Serum 2 preset bundles fill it for the least money: one purchase, several genre folders, cheaper than the packs bought individually. They still go through the same audit, though; no exemptions for bundles.
FAQ
Is 50 presets really enough for finished tracks?
Easily, for one or two genres. A typical track runs on maybe 5–10 synth sounds. Fifty options you know well is depth, not limitation.
Should I delete the presets I never use?
No reason to. Archiving beats deleting — pull the hoard out of your default browse path and it costs nothing sitting there. Deleting mostly manufactures reverse FOMO.
How do I stop buying packs I don’t use?
Single rule: name the gap before paying. “I need a dark techno pluck” is a purchase. “This pack is 70% off” is clutter with a receipt attached.
Does a small library make my music sound samey?
It makes it consistent, and listeners hear consistency as identity. Plus you’ll push known sounds around with more confidence, which produces more genuine variety than preset-swapping ever does.
So there it is: fifty sounds, one folder, one month of honest logging. Cheapest workflow upgrade you’ll ever get — it’s free, and it’s built out of presets already sitting on your drive.
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 →