Deep House lives and dies by its sound palette — smoky late-night textures: sub-heavy basses, dusty organ keys and plucks that sit behind the beat. It is dance music you can hold a conversation over, which means every part has to earn its place.
I build Serum 2 preset packs for a living, and deep house is the genre where restraint pays best. Almost nothing here needs sixteen voices of unison. It needs the right filter slope, a good chord voicing and a bass that stays out of the way of the kick.
Below I go through the actual patches — bass, keys, plucks, pad — then tempo, mixing and the mistakes I see most often.
Start with the free pack
Download the Free Serum 2 Deep House Presets — 4 bass · 3 plucks · 2 keys · 2 synths · 1 chord · 1 pad, each with an audio demo, all royalty-free.
Install takes under a minute: unzip into Serum 2’s user preset folder and rescan. If you have never moved presets around before, my install walkthrough covers the folder locations on both macOS and Windows.
Who it suits: anyone who can write eight bars of chords but keeps ending up with a thin bass and a pad that sounds like a stock string patch. Thirteen patches is enough for a whole track and small enough to actually learn.
Here is roughly the register the genre sits in:
The sound, part by part
Bass
Start with a single sine or a soft triangle wavetable, one voice, no unison. Deep house bass is almost always mono and almost always short — 200 to 400 ms of release so it stops before the next kick lands.
Add the character on top rather than in the oscillator. A second oscillator an octave up, low-passed around 400–600 Hz, gives the woody body without smearing the sub. Attack near zero, medium decay, and 20–40 ms of glide for the rubbery slide between notes.
Filter choice matters more than people expect. A 12 dB low-pass leaves the upper harmonics alive and reads as warm; a 24 dB version sounds tighter. If the filter types are fuzzy for you, the filter breakdown compares them side by side.
Organ keys and chords
The classic deep house key sound is an organ, not a piano. Stack three or four sine-ish voices at octave and fifth intervals, instant attack, flat sustain, slow chorus. That is most of it.
Two details sell it: a small pitch drift from a very slow LFO into oscillator fine tune, so no two chord hits are identical, and a high-pass around 200 Hz so the chord never competes with the bass.
Voice the chords roughly between C3 and C5. Sevenths and ninths do the emotional work here; plain triads sound flat.
Plucks
A pluck is a chord patch with the sustain pulled down. Set decay to about 250 ms, sustain to zero, and route the envelope to filter cutoff as well as amplitude so the tone closes as it fades.
Unison of 3 to 5 voices with detune around 15–25% is plenty. Past that you lose the definition that makes a pluck feel like a rhythm instrument.
Pads and texture
Pads here are background, not foreground. Attack of 1.5 to 3 seconds, long release, low-pass parked dark, and a slow LFO moving the cutoff so it breathes.
Noise and reverb do more than the oscillator does. If you want to go further with layered ambience, I wrote up the approach in the pads and atmospheres guide.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
Deep house sits at 118–123 BPM. Below 118 it starts to feel like downtempo; above 124 it turns into tech house.
The energy is in the space between the elements, not in the elements themselves. Kick on the four, an offbeat open hat, a shaker with swing around 8–12%, and a bass that plays on the offbeats rather than doubling the kick. That interlock is the genre.
One arrangement habit that works: build the whole track from one eight-bar loop, then remove things. Mute the pad for eight bars, bring it back. Deep house rewards subtraction far more than new sounds.
Mixing notes for deep house
Keep everything below 120 Hz in mono. Wide sub in this genre falls apart on club systems and on phones alike.
Sidechain the bass, the pads and the reverb returns to the kick — but gently. A 40–60 ms release is enough. Deep house pumping should be felt, not seen on a meter.
Carve a small dip around 250–350 Hz on the chords to make room for the bass body. That one move fixes most “muddy” complaints.
Loudness comes from saturation, not from a limiter. Tape or tube drive on the bass and the drum bus buys a few perceived dB with no pumping artefacts, and deep house masters are meant to sit quieter than peak-time house anyway.
Common mistakes
Too much unison on the bass. It sounds impressive soloed and disappears in the mix. One voice, mono, and let the saturation add the width perception.
Bright pads. If the pad is audible as a distinct instrument, it is too loud or too open. Close the filter until you only notice it when it is gone.
Straight, unquantised-looking hats. No swing means no groove. Even 8% changes the feel completely.
Writing triads. Add the seventh. Deep house harmony leans jazzy, and a bare major chord sounds like a demo.
When you outgrow the freebies
These 13 patches come from the same design sessions as my Serum 2 preset bundles — complete genre collections at a fraction of the single-pack price. If you want to see what else exists before committing to a bundle, browse the full Serum 2 preset catalog and start with the audio demos rather than the descriptions.
FAQ
Do these presets work in Serum 1?
No — they use the Serum 2 engine. Serum 2 is a free update for existing Serum owners, so if you bought Serum 1 you already have access.
Are the presets really royalty-free?
Yes. Releases, client work, beats for sale — no credit required. The only thing you cannot do is resell the presets themselves.
Can I use them in any DAW?
Any DAW that hosts Serum 2 as VST3 or AU: Ableton, FL Studio, Logic, Cubase, Studio One and the rest. Serum 2 runs natively on Apple Silicon.
What BPM should deep house be?
118 to 123 BPM covers almost everything released under the name. 120 is the safe default if you are starting a new project and not sure.
My deep house bass sounds thin on speakers but fine on headphones — why?
Almost always stereo width on the sub. Put a utility or mono plugin on the bass and collapse everything under 120 Hz to mono, then check again. If it is still thin, your fundamental may be below 40 Hz where small speakers cannot reproduce it — move the bassline up an octave.
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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