A pluck is the easiest sound to build in Serum 2 and the hardest to build well. The easy part is the envelope. The hard part is making it sound like an instrument instead of a doorbell.
This is the three-step version I use for house, melodic techno, and pop. Every step comes with a screenshot of the plugin, so you can check your settings against mine.
Step 1: The Amp Envelope Is the Pluck
Init the preset and set OSC A to the saw on frame 2 of Basic Shapes. Then go straight to ENV 1.
Set ATK to 1 ms, DEC to about 450 ms, SUS to minus infinity, REL to 300 ms. Sustain at zero is the whole trick. The note swells in instantly, falls away over half a second, and holding the key does nothing. That is a pluck.
Play a few notes. Even without a filter it already has the right shape. The decay time is the knob to play with here. 250 ms is tight and percussive. 800 ms is soft and lets chords ring.
Step 2: A Filter That Closes With Each Note
The saw is too bright to leave alone. Enable FILTER 1, keep MG Low 24, and pull CUTOFF down to about 28 percent with RES around 20. On its own that sounds dull. That is fine, because the next part opens it.
Click the ENV 2 tab. Give it a 1 ms attack, 280 ms decay, zero sustain and 200 ms release. Then drag the ENV 2 tab onto the CUTOFF knob and set the depth ring to around 48 percent.
Now the filter opens at the start of every note and closes faster than the amp envelope. The bright part is only the first 100 ms or so. That fast brightness-to-dark movement is what makes a pluck sound plucked rather than gated.
Drag VELO onto CUTOFF too, at about 14 percent. Soft notes stay darker, hard notes open up. This one routing makes a programmed melody feel played.
If the relationship between the two envelopes is unclear, keep ENV 2’s decay shorter than ENV 1’s. The filter should close before the note fades out. Reverse that and the sound gets brighter as it dies, which is a pad trick, not a pluck trick.
Step 3: Delay and Reverb
A dry pluck is a dry pluck. Two effects finish it.
Delay with L at 375 ms and R at 500 ms, feedback around 35 percent and mix around 22. At 120 BPM those are a dotted eighth and a quarter, and the uneven sides give the classic bouncing pluck echo. Set the delay filter around 1.8 kHz so the repeats are darker than the note.
Reverb on Plate, size 45, mix under 20 percent. Small and short. A big hall under a pluck fills the gaps the delay is supposed to leave.
That is the patch. Play it against a kick and you will hear it sit right away, mostly because there is no sustain fighting the drums.
The Settings
| Section | Setting | Value |
|---|---|---|
| OSC A | Table / frame | Basic Shapes / 2 (saw) |
| ENV 1 | A / D / S / R | 1 ms / 450 ms / 0 / 300 ms |
| FILTER 1 | Type / cutoff / res | MG Low 24 / 28% / 20% |
| ENV 2 to Cutoff | A / D / S / R / depth | 1 ms / 280 ms / 0 / 200 ms / 48% |
| Velo to Cutoff | Depth | 14% |
| FX | Chain | Delay 375/500 ms 35% fb, Plate reverb 18% |
Variations Worth Trying
Mallet pluck. Swap the saw for a sine, push ENV 2 depth to 70 percent and shorten its decay to 120 ms. The short bright burst reads as a strike.
Guitar-ish pluck. Use a square instead of a saw, and add the Sync warp mode on OSC A at a small amount, with ENV 2 also modulating the warp knob. The pitch of the sync harmonics falls with the note, which is a lot of what a picked string does. I go further with this in the Serum 2 guitar sounds guide.
Wide pluck. Add 3 unison voices to OSC A with low detune and turn the Hyper/Dimension effect on after the delay. Keep the sub area clean with an EQ high-pass at 150 Hz.
Plucks are the most common preset type in the free Serum 2 preset pack, and all of them use the two-envelope routing above. If you want genre-specific ones, the Serum 2 presets catalog is sorted by style, with bundles for people who want the whole shelf.
FAQ
What makes a pluck sound in Serum 2?
Zero sustain on the amp envelope, plus a second envelope that opens the filter for the first hundred milliseconds of each note. Everything else is decoration.
Which filter is best for plucks in Serum 2?
MG Low 24 for a warm, rounded pluck. Try L12 or the Ladder Acid types if you want a thinner, more electronic tone. Keep resonance under 30 percent so the low end stays solid.
How long should the decay be on a pluck?
Between 250 and 600 ms on the amp envelope for most tempos. Shorter than 200 ms starts to sound like a click. Longer than 800 ms is closer to a key sound than a pluck.
Why does my pluck sound like a doorbell?
A sine or triangle wave with no filter movement and a long reverb. Use a saw or square, add the ENV 2 to cutoff routing, and shrink the reverb.
Do plucks need unison?
No. A single-voice pluck is cleaner and sits better in a busy arrangement. Add three voices only if the pluck is the main hook and needs to fill the stereo field.
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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