House lives and dies by its sound palette — classic four-on-the-floor warmth: swung chords, rubbery basslines and hands-in-the-air leads. It is the parent genre for most of what fills a dance floor, and the rules are simple enough to learn in an afternoon.
I make Serum 2 preset packs for a living. House is the genre I come back to when a patch needs to sound good rather than clever — the sounds are simple, so the writing has to carry the record.
Below I go through the bass, the chords, the leads and the plucks in Serum 2, then tempo, mixing and the four things I see beginners get wrong most often.
Start with the free pack
Download the Free Serum 2 House Presets — 4 bass · 4 plucks · 3 leads · 2 chords · 1 keys · 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. The folder lives inside Serum 2’s Presets directory, under User.
Who it suits: anyone starting out. Fifteen patches covers a whole arrangement, and every one is built to be edited rather than used as-is. If Serum 2 itself is still unfamiliar, read the beginner walkthrough first — it explains the oscillator page and the mod matrix in plain terms.
For reference, this is the general territory:
The sound, part by part
Bass
House bass is round and rubbery. Start with a sine or a soft saw, mono, no unison. Amp envelope: zero attack, decay around 300 ms, sustain low but not at zero — you want a little tail so the note connects to the next one.
Add glide of 20–40 ms and the bassline starts to feel played rather than programmed. A low-pass at 300–500 Hz with the filter envelope opening it 20% on each note gives the rubbery bounce.
For the deeper, longer sub variant, use the same patch with a longer decay and no filter movement. A short pitch envelope on the first 30 ms makes the note read as pitched rather than as a thud.
Chords and keys
House chords are usually a piano, an organ or a filtered saw stack. In Serum 2 the saw stack is the easiest: two oscillators, one detuned 10–12 cents against the other, unison of 3, low-pass around 3 kHz.
Play seventh and ninth voicings in the C3–C5 range and swing them slightly late. That lateness is most of what makes a chord sound like house rather than like pop.
Leads
The hands-in-the-air lead is a supersaw with the top end tamed. Unison of 5 to 7, detune 25–35%, a low-pass sitting around 6 kHz so it does not get shrill, and a short reverb behind it.
Width comes from unison spread and stereo delay, not from a stereo widener. There is more on getting supersaws to sound big without turning to mush in the supersaw guide.
Plucks
Take the chord patch, drop sustain to zero, set decay to about 250 ms, and route the envelope to filter cutoff as well as amplitude. Sixteenth-note plucks under a chord progression are the cheapest way to add motion to a house track.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
House sits at 120–126 BPM. 124 is the modern default; 120 feels classic and slightly deeper.
The energy is in the interplay between the kick, the offbeat open hat and the bass. The kick is on every beat, the hat on every offbeat, and the bass should avoid landing exactly with the kick more often than it lands on it.
One arrangement habit that works: build the drop first, then delete elements backwards to make the intro and the breakdown. It guarantees that every section is made of the same material, which is what makes a track feel coherent instead of stitched together.
Mixing notes for house
Mono below 120 Hz. Sub width sounds impressive in headphones and collapses on a club system.
Sidechain the bass, pads and chords to the kick. In house the pump is meant to be audible — a 60–100 ms release is fine here, unlike in tech house.
Cut 200–400 Hz on the chords to make room for the bass, and cut 2–4 kHz on the pads so the lead and the vocal have that range to themselves.
Loudness comes from a saturated drum bus and a well-behaved bass, not from the limiter. If the bass is even in level from note to note, the whole master gets 2 dB louder for free.
Common mistakes
Everything quantised dead straight. House swings. Push the hats and chords 5–15 ms late and the track stops sounding rigid.
Bass and kick in the same octave. Pick a lane: kick owns 50–70 Hz, bass owns 80–150 Hz, or the reverse. Not both.
Too much reverb on the chords. A long tail smears the groove. Use a short plate and a delay instead.
Adding a new sound whenever a section feels flat. Usually the fix is filtering, muting or a different chord — not a fourteenth layer.
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 you would rather pick a single pack, every Serum 2 pack I make is listed with demos, and the modulation guide is worth reading first so you can rework whatever you buy.
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 it.
Are the presets really royalty-free?
Yes. Releases, client work, beats for sale — no credit required. The only restriction is that you cannot resell the presets.
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. It runs natively on Apple Silicon.
What key should a house track be in?
Minor keys dominate, most often A minor, F minor and G minor. Key matters far less than voicing — a well-voiced seventh chord works in any key.
My house track sounds thin compared to references — what am I missing?
Usually mid-range, not bass. Solo a reference and a mix at 300 Hz to 2 kHz and you will normally find your version is nearly empty there. Add a layer that lives in that band — an organ, a pluck, a guitar-style stab — before touching the master chain.
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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