Hard Techno lives and dies by its sound palette — industrial aggression: distorted basses that sit next to the kick, siren-like leads and rave stabs. Everything is loud, everything is distorted, and the low end belongs to the kick alone.
I design Serum 2 packs for a living, and hard techno is the genre where restraint applies to the frequency plan rather than to the sounds. You can push a patch as far as you like, as long as you take the bottom out of it afterwards.
Below I cover the bass, the leads, the stabs and the risers, then tempo, mixing and the mistakes that make hard techno sound harsh instead of heavy.
Start with the free pack
Download the Free Serum 2 Hard Techno Presets — 6 bass · 4 leads · 3 synths · 1 drum · 1 other, each with an audio demo, all royalty-free.
Install takes under a minute: unzip into Serum 2’s user preset folder and rescan. Fifteen patches, all built assuming they will be driven hard and high-passed afterwards.
Who it suits: producers with a distorted kick already working who need everything else to survive next to it. Hard techno mixes are unforgiving, and starting from patches designed for the context saves a lot of frustration.
The sound, part by part
Bass
In hard techno the kick usually is the bass. What people call the bass is a mid-range layer sitting just above it, from around 150 Hz up.
Build it from a saw or a hard wavetable, mono, unison of 2, then run it through heavy distortion and a high-pass at 120–150 Hz. The high-pass after the distortion is the important part — distorting first and filtering second keeps the aggression without the mud.
Amp envelope: zero attack, decay 150–250 ms, sustain low. It should be gated by the kick’s pattern rather than droning underneath it.
Siren leads
The siren is a saw or square with a lot of pitch movement. Route an LFO to oscillator pitch with a range of several semitones, or automate pitch by hand across four bars.
Add a resonant band-pass around 1–3 kHz and drive it. Then high-pass at 300 Hz — aggression in this genre lives above 300, and everything below that is stolen headroom.
A synced delay and a short reverb make it feel like a room rather than a plugin.
Rave stabs
Rave stabs are short, dissonant and repeated. Hard wavetable, decay around 120 ms, sustain zero, resonant filter parked mid-range, distortion after. Play them on offbeat sixteenths with a delay and let the pattern run for sixteen bars unchanged.
Detuning two voices by a semitone rather than by cents gets you the classic hoover-adjacent dissonance.
Risers and noise
Filtered noise through a slowly opening band-pass, with pitch rising over eight bars, covers most transitions. Serum 2’s built-in modules handle the whole chain — the effects guide covers which ones are worth reaching for.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
Hard techno sits at 140–155 BPM. The faster end has become normal over the last few years, and 150 is no longer unusual.
Energy sits in the kick and in relentlessness. There is very little arrangement in the traditional sense — a kick, a mid bass, hats, a stab, a lead, and long stretches where nothing changes.
One arrangement habit that works: write in sixteen-bar blocks and change exactly one thing per block. Add the hats. Remove the stab. Open the lead filter. The restraint is what makes the moments that do change land hard.
Mixing notes for hard techno
Mono below 150 Hz, and give that entire range to the kick. Nothing else should have meaningful energy down there.
High-pass everything except the kick at 200–300 Hz. This one rule is the difference between a hard techno mix that hits and one that turns to sludge.
Sidechain the mid bass and leads to the kick with a fast 20–40 ms release so the kick transient always gets through cleanly.
Loudness comes from clipping, not limiting. Soft clip the kick, clip the drum bus, and let the master limiter do almost nothing. Watch out for resonant peaks around 2–4 kHz — that is where distortion turns painful rather than aggressive, and a narrow dynamic EQ cut there buys you a lot. Which filter model you distort through changes the result a lot; the filter breakdown compares them.
Common mistakes
Bass below the kick. There is no room. Everything under 150 Hz is the kick’s, and adding a sub layer makes the track quieter, not heavier.
Distortion after the filter. Distort first, filter second. The other order produces harshness rather than weight.
Changing every eight bars. Hard techno is hypnotic. Sixteen or thirty-two bars between changes is normal.
Mastering for loudness on the master bus. If the drums are not already clipped and controlled, a limiter will just squash the kick and kill the impact.
When you outgrow the freebies
These 15 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 a bundle is more than you need, every Serum 2 preset pack on the site is listed individually with demos. Heavy distortion chains also cost CPU quickly, so the CPU notes are worth a read before a big session.
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 Serum 1 buyers already have access.
Are the presets really royalty-free?
Yes. Releases, client work, beats for sale — no credit required. Reselling the presets themselves is the only restriction.
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 is hard techno?
140 to 155 BPM covers most current releases. Older hard techno sat closer to 140; the recent wave often runs 148–155.
My hard techno mix sounds harsh and tiring rather than heavy — how do I fix it?
Sweep a narrow EQ cut between 2 kHz and 5 kHz on the distorted elements and find the resonance that hurts. Distortion adds harmonics evenly, but one or two peaks usually dominate. Cutting those by 3–4 dB lets you push the whole mix harder before it becomes fatiguing.
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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