Industrial Techno is concrete and steel. Metallic textures, low end that has been pushed until it breaks, and sounds that feel machine-made rather than played. The genre is less about melody than about weight and friction.
Reference points: Perc, Ancient Methods, SNTS. Tempo sits at 130–140 BPM. Most tracks have three or four sounds total, and every one of them is distorted somewhere in the chain.
Here is how I build that palette in Serum 2 — the distorted bass, the metallic lead, the noise and impact layers — and how to keep it all from turning into undifferentiated mud.
Start with the free pack
Download the Free Serum 2 Industrial Techno Presets — 6 leads, 6 basses and 1 drum patch, each with an audio demo, all royalty-free. Unzip into Serum 2’s user preset folder and rescan.
It is aimed at people who already have a kick they like and need everything around it. The drum patch is worth a look on its own: industrial percussion built in a synth rather than sampled behaves differently, because you can tune and modulate it.
The sound, part by part
Distorted bass
Start with one saw, unison 1, mono. The distortion does the widening later, so keep the source clean and narrow.
Add a lowpass with resonance around 30 percent, then stack distortion in the FX rack: a hard clip or a tube stage first, then a bandpass filter after it to cut everything the distortion added above 4 kHz. Order matters more than amount. Distorting a filtered signal sounds controlled; filtering a distorted signal sounds dead.
Run a slow LFO into the drive amount at 1/1 or 1/2. That tiny movement is the difference between a bass that loops and a bass that breathes. The effects guide covers the rack order in more detail.
Metallic lead
This is where FM earns its keep. Set oscillator B to a high, bright wavetable and use it to modulate oscillator A. Small FM amounts give you bell character; large amounts give you clanging metal. Sweep it and pick a spot that sounds wrong in a good way.
Then put a comb or a highly resonant bandpass after it. Comb filtering is what makes a sound read as struck metal rather than as a synth. Detune oscillator B slightly off any musical interval — a few cents sharp of a tritone works — so the result is inharmonic.
Envelope: attack 0, decay 200–400 ms, sustain 0. Percussive, not sustained.
Growls and screams
The techniques overlap with bass music more than people admit. Two LFOs on filter cutoff at different rates, one fast and one slow, plus wavetable position modulation, gets you a moving, vocal texture. Keep it in the 200 Hz to 2 kHz band so it does not compete with the kick.
If you want the full version of that technique, the growl tutorial lays out the modulation routing step by step — just use half the intensity for techno.
Noise and impacts
The noise oscillator with a resonant bandpass, swept slowly, covers risers. For impacts, take the same noise, add a very short pitch envelope on the whole patch, and put a long reverb on a send that you gate manually. Industrial impacts are mostly reverb decisions.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
130–140 BPM. The bottom of that range gives you room to make the kick heavy; the top pushes toward the harder end where the kick gets shorter and clickier.
The groove is rigid. No swing at all. The interest comes from layering percussion that is not quantised to the same grid — a metallic hit every 3 beats against a 4/4 kick creates a slow phase that resolves every few bars.
Arrangement habit that works: automate one filter across the entire track. Pick the bass lowpass, draw a slow curve from bar 1 to the end, and let that carry the long-form tension. Then the drops are just parts entering and leaving on top of it.
Tracks tend to run 6–7 minutes with long, unforgiving intros. Do not rush to the first drop.
Mixing notes for industrial techno
Mono below 150 Hz, which is higher than most genres because the distorted bass will otherwise smear stereo information into the kick.
Sidechain everything to the kick, not just the bass. Leads, noise, reverb returns — all of it. With this much distortion, the kick needs a hole carved for it in every layer.
Carve 2–4 kHz on the bass and on the leads separately. Distortion piles harmonics up exactly there, and after three distorted parts that region is unlistenable. A 3 dB dip on each is usually enough.
The loudness comes from the distortion, not the limiter. If you drive the individual parts properly, the master should barely be working. That is the whole point of the genre.
Watch the noise floor. Distortion amplifies hiss. High-pass every part at whatever frequency it stops losing character.
Common mistakes
Distorting everything the same way. Three parts through the same saturator sound like one blurred part. Use a different flavour on each — clip on the bass, waveshaper on the lead, bitcrush on the percussion.
Making it too fast. Beginners hear aggression and reach for 145 BPM. Most of the records that actually hit sit at 132–136 and get their weight from the sound design.
No dynamic range at all. If everything is at maximum from bar one, nothing lands. Leave the kick alone for 32 bars somewhere in the middle.
Forgetting the mid. Industrial tracks that only have sub and treble sound thin on club systems. Something has to occupy 300 Hz to 1 kHz.
When you outgrow the freebies
These 13 patches came from the same sessions as my Serum 2 preset bundles, which collect whole genres at a lower price than buying the packs separately.
If you would rather pick by style, every Serum 2 pack I make is listed in one place.
FAQ
Do these presets work in Serum 1?
No. They rely on the Serum 2 engine. Serum 2 is a free update for existing Serum owners, so it costs you a download rather than a purchase.
Are they royalty-free?
Yes. Use them on releases, client work and tracks you sell, with no credit required. You just cannot redistribute the preset files.
How do I make a Serum 2 bass sound genuinely metallic?
FM between two oscillators, then a comb or high-resonance bandpass filter after it. Detune the modulating oscillator slightly off any clean interval so the harmonics stop lining up.
What BPM is industrial techno?
130–140 BPM, with most releases landing between 132 and 138. Faster is a stylistic choice, not a requirement.
My distorted bass sounds harsh on headphones but weak on speakers — why?
The distortion is adding upper harmonics while the fundamental is being lost. Split the bass into two bands, leave everything under 120 Hz clean and mono, and only distort the band above it.
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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