The sound palette decides everything in House: classic four-on-the-floor warmth, swung chords, rubbery basslines, hands-in-the-air leads. This is the parent genre of most things that fill a dance floor, and the rules are simple enough that an afternoon covers them.
Making Serum 2 preset packs is my job. When a patch needs to sound good rather than clever, house is the genre I return to. The sounds are simple, which means the writing has to carry the record.
Below: bass, chords, leads and plucks in Serum 2, then tempo, mixing, and the four things beginners get wrong most often.
Start with the free pack
Grab the Free Serum 2 House Presets — 4 bass · 4 plucks · 3 leads · 2 chords · 1 keys · 1 pad, every patch with an audio demo, all royalty-free.
Installing takes less than a minute: unzip into Serum 2’s user preset folder and rescan. You’ll find that folder inside Serum 2’s Presets directory, under User.
Who’s it for: anyone just getting going. Fifteen patches is enough for a full arrangement, and each one was built to be edited, not used as-is. Still finding your way around Serum 2 itself? Read the beginner walkthrough first; it explains the oscillator page and the mod matrix in plain language.
For reference, here’s the general territory:
The sound, part by part
Bass
House bass should be round and rubbery. Begin with a sine or a soft saw, mono, unison off. Amp envelope: attack at zero, decay near 300 ms, sustain low but not zero. You want a small tail so each note reaches the next one.
Now add 20–40 ms of glide and the bassline starts feeling played instead of programmed. A low-pass at 300–500 Hz, with the filter envelope opening it 20% per note, delivers the rubbery bounce.
For the deeper, longer sub variant, reuse the same patch with a longer decay and the filter movement removed. Put a short pitch envelope on the first 30 ms and the note reads as pitched rather than as a thud.
Chords and keys
House chords tend to be a piano, an organ, or a filtered saw stack. The saw stack is the easy one in Serum 2: two oscillators, one sitting 10–12 cents off the other, unison of 3, low-pass parked around 3 kHz.
Voice sevenths and ninths in the C3–C5 range and swing them a touch late. That lateness accounts for most of the difference between a house chord and a pop chord.
Leads
The hands-in-the-air lead is a supersaw with its top end under control. Unison 5 to 7, detune 25–35%, a low-pass around 6 kHz to stop it turning shrill, and a short reverb sitting behind it.
Width should come from unison spread and stereo delay, never from a stereo widener. For getting supersaws huge without mush, there’s more in the supersaw guide.
Plucks
Start from the chord patch: sustain down to zero, decay around 250 ms, and the envelope routed to filter cutoff on top of amplitude. Running sixteenth-note plucks under a chord progression is the cheapest motion a house track can buy.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
House lives at 120–126 BPM. The modern default is 124; 120 reads classic and a little deeper.
The energy comes from how the kick, the offbeat open hat and the bass play off each other. Kick on every beat, hat on every offbeat, and the bass landing exactly with the kick less often than it lands off it.
An arrangement habit that works: build the drop first, then delete elements backwards until you have the intro and the breakdown. Every section ends up made from the same material, and that’s exactly why some tracks feel coherent while others feel stitched together.
Mixing notes for house
Mono below 120 Hz. Sub width impresses in headphones and falls apart on a club rig.
Sidechain the bass, pads and chords against the kick. House is a genre where the pump is supposed to be heard, so a 60–100 ms release is fine here, unlike in tech house.
Pull 200–400 Hz out of the chords to clear space for the bass, and pull 2–4 kHz out of the pads so the lead and the vocal keep that range for themselves.
Loudness lives in a saturated drum bus and a well-behaved bass, not in the limiter. Get the bass even in level from note to note and the whole master picks up 2 dB for free.
Common mistakes
Everything quantised dead straight. House swings. Nudge the hats and chords 5–15 ms late and the rigidity disappears.
Bass and kick in the same octave. Choose lanes: kick takes 50–70 Hz and bass takes 80–150 Hz, or flip it. Never both in one lane.
Too much reverb on the chords. Long tails smear the groove. Reach for a short plate plus a delay instead.
Adding a new sound whenever a section feels flat. The real fix is usually filtering, muting or a different chord, not a fourteenth layer.
When you outgrow the freebies
These 15 patches came from the same design sessions as my Serum 2 preset bundles — full genre collections for a fraction of what single packs cost. Prefer picking one pack at a time? Every Serum 2 pack I make is listed with demos, and it’s worth reading the modulation guide first so you can rework whatever you end up buying.
FAQ
Do these presets work in Serum 1?
No, they run on the Serum 2 engine. Serum 2 came as a free update for existing Serum owners, so buying Serum 1 means you already have it.
Are the presets really royalty-free?
Yes. Releases, client work, beats you sell, all without credit. The single restriction: no reselling 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 and the rest. It’s native on Apple Silicon.
What key should a house track be in?
Minor keys rule the genre, with A minor, F minor and G minor showing up most. But key matters far less than voicing; a well-voiced seventh chord works anywhere.
My house track sounds thin compared to references — what am I missing?
Mid-range, usually, not bass. Compare a reference against your mix between 300 Hz and 2 kHz and you’ll typically find your version nearly empty there. Before touching the master chain, add a layer that lives in that band: an organ, a pluck, a guitar-style stab.
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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