Progressive House lives and dies by its sound palette — long-arc builds: shimmering arps, layered plucks and basses that evolve for thirty-two bars. The genre is defined by patience. A sound that would be boring in eight bars becomes hypnotic in thirty-two.
I design Serum 2 packs for a living, and progressive house is the one where I spend most of the time on modulation rather than on the oscillator. The raw tone is often simple. What makes it work is that nothing stays still.
Below I go through the arp, the plucks, the bass and the pads, then tempo, arrangement, mixing and the four mistakes that flatten a progressive track.
Start with the free pack
Download the Free Serum 2 Progressive House Presets — 8 drums · 3 chords · 3 pads · 2 others · 2 leads · 2 bass · 1 synth · 1 pluck, each with an audio demo, all royalty-free.
Install takes under a minute: unzip into Serum 2’s user preset folder and rescan. Twenty-two patches including drum sounds, so you can build a rough arrangement without leaving the plugin.
Who it suits: producers who already understand structure and want sounds that hold up under long automation. Every patch has at least one macro mapped to something worth moving slowly.
The sound, part by part
Arps
The shimmering progressive arp is usually a short pluck run through Serum 2’s arpeggiator at sixteenths, with a dotted-eighth delay behind it. Keep the patch itself narrow — the delay creates the width.
Decay around 200 ms, sustain at zero, unison of 2 or 3 with detune under 10%. Then modulate the filter cutoff with an LFO set to one cycle per eight or sixteen bars.
An arp only becomes interesting when its accent pattern changes. Vary velocity across the sequence, or change one note of the pattern every four bars.
Layered plucks
This is the Prydz-adjacent sound. Take a pluck, duplicate the track, detune the copy by 8–12 cents, and pan the two copies hard left and right. Then add a third layer an octave up, quieter, filtered above 2 kHz.
The layers should share the same envelope times so they read as one instrument. Different decay times sound like three plucks; identical decay times sound like one wide pluck.
Bass
Progressive bass is a rolling offbeat, not a stab. Sine or soft saw, mono, decay around 250 ms, low sustain, and a slow filter opening across the section.
The evolution comes from automation, not from the patch. Open the low-pass by a small amount every eight bars through the build and the bass grows without you adding anything.
Pads and supersaws
Progressive pads are wide and bright. Unison of 7, detune 25–35%, slow attack, and a high-pass at 200 Hz to keep them out of the bass. This is the supersaw territory covered in the supersaw guide — the same voicing and detune rules apply.
Route filter cutoff, unison detune and reverb send to macros, then automate all three across the build. Almost every big progressive breakdown is those three moves and nothing else. If the mod matrix is still unfamiliar, the modulation guide explains the drag-and-drop routing.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
Progressive house sits at 122–126 BPM, most often 124.
The energy curve is the genre. A 32-bar intro, a 32-bar build, a drop that holds for 32 or 64 bars, then a breakdown that strips back to the pad and arp. Sections are twice as long as in most house subgenres, and that is deliberate.
One arrangement habit that works: draw the filter automation for a section before you write anything into it. If the curve is right, the parts almost place themselves — and you avoid the trap of adding layers to create energy that automation should be creating.
Mixing notes for progressive house
Mono below 120 Hz, and be strict about it. Progressive mixes are wide everywhere else, so the low end has to be the anchor.
Sidechain the pads, plucks and reverbs to the kick with a medium 60–90 ms release. The pump is part of the sound here, but it should feel like breathing rather than a gate.
Carve 300–500 Hz on the pads. With seven unison voices spread across a chord, that band is dense enough to swallow the whole mix.
High-pass every reverb return at 300 Hz. Long tails plus low mids equals fog, and this genre uses a lot of long tails.
Loudness comes from the drum bus and controlled bass, not from squashing the master. Heavy unison also costs CPU quickly — the CPU notes cover which settings actually matter.
Common mistakes
Eight-bar thinking. Sections that change every eight bars read as house, not progressive. Double every length and see what happens.
Static supersaws. Seven voices of unison with no movement is a wall, not a sound. Automate the cutoff.
Too many layers in the drop. Progressive drops are often thinner than the build. That contrast is the payoff.
Bass with too much character. If the bass has personality, it fights the arp. Keep it plain and let it roll.
When you outgrow the freebies
These 22 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 one pack at a time, the full Serum 2 preset library has audio demos on every product page.
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. You just cannot resell the presets themselves.
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.
How long should a progressive house track be?
Seven to nine minutes for a club mix, four to five for a radio edit. The long version is the point — the arc needs room to develop.
My build has automation everywhere but still feels flat — what am I missing?
Usually the drums. If the hats, ride and percussion do not change density across the build, no amount of filter automation will create tension. Add a layer of percussion every eight bars and remove the low end progressively, so the drop is the first time the sub returns.
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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