Melodic House lives and dies by its sound palette — emotional progressions: glassy plucks, wide pads and leads that tell a story over eight bars. The bass stays out of the way, the drums stay simple, and the harmony does the work.
I build Serum 2 preset packs for a living. Melodic house is the genre where a patch has to survive being held for a long time, which changes how you design it — everything needs slow movement built in, or it goes stale by bar four.
Below I cover the plucks, the pads, the bass and the lead, then tempo, mixing and the mistakes that keep melodic house tracks sounding pretty but flat.
Start with the free pack
Download the Free Serum 2 Melodic House Presets — 6 keys · 5 bass · 4 plucks, each with an audio demo, all royalty-free.
Install takes under a minute: unzip into Serum 2’s user preset folder and rescan. The macros are mapped to the parameters worth automating over long sections, which is most of what this genre needs.
Who it suits: producers who can write a chord progression and want the sounds to match the intent. Fifteen patches, weighted towards keys and plucks because that is where melodic house lives.
This is the emotional register I mean:
The sound, part by part
Glassy plucks
The signature melodic house pluck is bell-like, not saw-based. Use a clean or FM-flavoured wavetable, unison of 2 or 3, detune under 10%, decay around 400 ms with sustain at zero.
Route the amp envelope to filter cutoff as well, so the tone darkens as it fades. Then add a synced ping-pong delay at a dotted eighth and a plate reverb around 2 seconds. The delay is doing more for the emotion than the oscillator is.
Modulate the wavetable position slowly — an LFO at one cycle per four bars, small depth. That is the difference between a pluck that survives thirty-two bars and one that does not.
Pads
Attack of 1.5 to 3 seconds, release of 3 to 5, unison of 5 to 7 with detune around 20%, and a low-pass parked somewhere between 2 and 5 kHz.
Then give it two slow modulations: filter cutoff moving over eight bars, and a small amount of pitch drift. Static pads sound synthetic within seconds. There is more on layering noise and reverb into pads in the pads and atmospheres guide.
Bass
Melodic house bass is deliberately plain. A sine or soft triangle, mono, one voice, medium decay and a low sustain. Its job is to hold the root while the chords move above it.
Resist the urge to add character. If the bass has personality it competes with the chords, and the chords are the song.
Leads
The lead is usually a pluck with a longer sustain and more reverb, or a soft saw with unison 5 and the top rolled off at 7 kHz. Play it sparse — four or five notes per eight bars. The gaps are what make it feel like a melody rather than a riff.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
Melodic house sits at 120–124 BPM. 122 is the middle of the road and safe.
Energy builds through addition and filtering, not through drops. The kick and a shaker carry the whole first minute, the bass enters, then the chords, then the lead. The peak is usually the moment everything is playing at once with the filters fully open.
One arrangement habit that works: automate one filter across sixteen or thirty-two bars instead of eight. The genre rewards patience, and long automation is what separates it from regular house. The same principle applies in melodic techno, which is the darker sibling of this sound.
Mixing notes for melodic house
Mono below 120 Hz. Everything above can be as wide as you like — width is part of the genre’s appeal up there.
Sidechain the pads and reverb returns to the kick with a slow 80–120 ms release. You want a breathing motion, not a pump.
Carve 250–400 Hz on the pads. That band fills up fast when you have chords, a pad and a bass all sounding at once, and it is the usual cause of a mix feeling foggy.
High-pass your reverb and delay returns at around 300 Hz. Reverb on the low mids is the second most common cause of fog.
Loudness is not the point here. These tracks are meant to have dynamics; a mix that sits a couple of dB quieter than a peak-time record is correct.
Common mistakes
Static patches. If nothing moves, eight bars feels like thirty. Put a slow LFO on something in every patch.
Too much bass character. A distorted, detuned bass fights the harmony. Keep it clean.
Chord progressions that resolve too soon. Melodic house lives on suspension. Delay the resolution by four or eight bars.
Reverb as a substitute for arrangement. Drowning a thin track in reverb makes it a thin track with reverb. Add a counter-melody instead.
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. Or work through the rest of my Serum 2 presets pack by pack; the demos on each product page tell you more than the descriptions do.
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 it.
Are the presets really royalty-free?
Yes. Releases, client work, beats for sale — no credit required. Reselling the presets themselves is the only thing off the table.
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 is native on Apple Silicon.
What is the difference between melodic house and progressive house?
Progressive house is built around long builds and big drops. Melodic house is flatter in energy and leans on harmony and texture instead. There is a lot of overlap, and plenty of records sit in both.
My chords and pad sound muddy together — how do I fix it?
Give them different frequency homes. High-pass the pad at 300 Hz and let the chords own 200–500 Hz, or the reverse. Then check they are not playing the same inversion — moving the pad up an octave usually clears it instantly.
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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