The sound palette is everything in Deep House, all smoky after-hours textures: basses heavy on sub, dusty organ keys, plucks tucked behind the beat. This is dance music you can talk over, so every element has to justify being there.
Making Serum 2 preset packs is my day job, and no genre rewards restraint like deep house does. Sixteen voices of unison? Almost nothing here wants that. What it wants is the correct filter slope, a well-voiced chord, and a bass that keeps clear of the kick.
What follows are the actual patches (bass, keys, plucks, pad), then tempo, mixing, and the mistakes I run into constantly.
Start with the free pack
Grab the Free Serum 2 Deep House Presets — 4 bass · 3 plucks · 2 keys · 2 synths · 1 chord · 1 pad, every one with an audio demo, all royalty-free.
Installing takes less than a minute: unzip into the Serum 2 user preset folder, rescan, done. Never moved presets before? My install walkthrough shows exactly where the folders live on macOS and Windows.
Who’s it for: producers who can write eight bars of chords but somehow always end up with a skinny bass and a pad that could pass for a stock string patch. Thirteen patches covers a full track and is small enough that you’ll actually study each one.
This is roughly the register the genre lives in:
The sound, part by part
Bass
Begin from a plain sine or a soft triangle wavetable, one voice, unison off. Deep house bass is nearly always mono and nearly always short: give it 200 to 400 ms of release so it’s gone before the next kick arrives.
Character gets layered on top, not baked into the oscillator. Put a second oscillator an octave higher, low-pass it around 400–600 Hz, and you get that woody body without blurring the sub. Attack close to zero, decay medium, and 20–40 ms of glide for the rubbery note-to-note slide.
People underestimate how much the filter choice matters. A 12 dB low-pass keeps the upper harmonics breathing and comes across warm; the 24 dB version is tighter. Still hazy on the filter types? The filter breakdown puts them side by side.
Organ keys and chords
The signature deep house key sound is organ, not piano. Three or four sine-ish voices stacked at octaves and fifths, attack instant, sustain flat, chorus slow. That’s most of the recipe.
Two details close the deal: run a very slow LFO into oscillator fine tune for a small pitch drift, so no two chord hits land the same, and high-pass around 200 Hz so the chord never fights the bass.
Keep the chord voicings roughly between C3 and C5. The emotion comes from sevenths and ninths; bare triads fall flat.
Plucks
A pluck is just a chord patch with the sustain yanked down. Decay around 250 ms, sustain at zero, and send the envelope to filter cutoff along with amplitude so the tone darkens as it dies.
Three to five unison voices with 15–25% detune covers it. Go further and you lose the definition that lets a pluck act like a rhythm instrument.
Pads and texture
In this genre pads are backdrop, never the star. Give them 1.5 to 3 seconds of attack, a long release, a low-pass sitting dark, and a slow LFO on the cutoff so the thing breathes.
The noise layer and the reverb are doing more work than the oscillator. Want to push the layered-ambience idea further? I laid the whole approach out in the pads and atmospheres guide.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
Deep house lives at 118–123 BPM. Drop under 118 and it starts reading as downtempo; climb past 124 and you’ve made tech house.
The energy hides in the space between elements, not inside the elements. Kick on every quarter, an open hat on the offbeat, a shaker swung around 8–12%, and a bass playing the offbeats instead of doubling the kick. That interlock IS the genre.
An arrangement habit that keeps working for me: build the entire track out of a single eight-bar loop, then start removing things. Kill the pad for eight bars, bring it back in. Subtraction pays far better here than adding new sounds.
Mixing notes for deep house
Everything under 120 Hz stays mono. A wide sub in this genre collapses on club rigs and phone speakers alike.
Sidechain the bass, pads and reverb returns to the kick, but gently. A release of 40–60 ms is all it takes. You should feel deep house pumping, not watch it on a meter.
Cut a small dip in the chords around 250–350 Hz to clear room for the bass body. That single move cures most complaints about mud.
Get loudness from saturation, not a limiter. Tape or tube drive across the bass and the drum bus buys a few perceived dB with zero pumping, and deep house masters are supposed to sit quieter than peak-time house anyway.
Common mistakes
Too much unison on the bass. Sounds huge soloed, vanishes in the mix. One mono voice, and let saturation create the illusion of width.
Bright pads. When you can pick the pad out as its own instrument, it’s either too loud or too open. Keep closing the filter until the pad only registers when you mute it.
Straight, unquantised-looking hats. Zero swing means zero groove. Even 8% transforms the feel.
Writing triads. Put the seventh in. Deep house harmony leans toward jazz, and a naked major chord sounds like a demo project.
When you outgrow the freebies
These 13 patches came out of the same design sessions as my Serum 2 preset bundles, which are full genre collections for a fraction of what the packs cost individually. Curious what else is out there before you commit to a bundle? Browse the full Serum 2 preset catalog, and trust the audio demos over the descriptions.
FAQ
Do these presets work in Serum 1?
No, they’re built on the Serum 2 engine. Serum 2 came as a free update for existing Serum owners, so anyone who bought Serum 1 already has it.
Are the presets really royalty-free?
Yes. Use them in releases, client work, beats you sell, no credit needed. The single restriction: you can’t resell the presets themselves.
Can I use them in any DAW?
Any DAW that loads Serum 2 as VST3 or AU: Ableton, FL Studio, Logic, Cubase, Studio One, the rest. Serum 2 runs natively on Apple Silicon too.
What BPM should deep house be?
Nearly everything released under the name sits between 118 and 123 BPM. Starting a new project and unsure? 120 is the safe default.
My deep house bass sounds thin on speakers but fine on headphones — why?
Nine times out of ten it’s stereo width on the sub. Drop a utility or mono plugin on the bass, collapse everything below 120 Hz to mono, and listen again. Still thin? Your fundamental might be sitting under 40 Hz, where small speakers give up, so shift 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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