Tech House lives and dies by its sound palette — tight, groove-first sounds: punchy stab basses, clipped vocal-style synths and percussive hooks. Nothing is long, nothing is lush. Every element is a rhythm part, including the bass.
I design Serum 2 packs for a living, and tech house is the genre where a patch either locks into the groove or it does not. Sound design here is mostly about envelope times and how a sound stops, not how it starts.
Below I break down the bass, the stab, the hook and the percussion, then tempo, mixing and the mistakes that keep tracks sounding like loops instead of records.
Start with the free pack
Download the Free Serum 2 Tech House Presets — 10 synths · 3 others · 3 drums · 2 plucks, each with an audio demo, all royalty-free.
Install takes under a minute: unzip into Serum 2’s user preset folder and rescan.
Who it suits: producers who have the drums working but keep writing basslines that sound like house instead of tech house. Eighteen patches is a full track’s worth and small enough to learn properly.
This is the register the genre sits in — dry, forward, no reverb tail to speak of:
The sound, part by part
Bass
Tech house bass is a stab, not a drone. One oscillator on a basic saw or square, mono, unison off. Amp envelope with zero attack, decay around 150–250 ms, sustain at zero.
The character comes from the filter envelope. Route a second envelope to low-pass cutoff with a decay of roughly 100 ms and a healthy amount of depth, so the sound opens and shuts inside a sixteenth note. Add resonance around 20–30% for the bark.
Then drive it. Serum 2’s distortion on a light tube or hard clip setting, followed by a high-pass at 60–80 Hz, gives you a bass that reads loud without eating sub headroom. I go deeper into layering and pick-a-bass decisions in the tech house bass guide.
Stabs and organ chords
The classic tech house stab is a filtered organ or a detuned saw chord with the sustain at zero. Three or four voices of unison, detune around 20%, decay near 200 ms.
Play it offbeat. A stab on the “and” of every beat with a slight velocity variation does more for the groove than any amount of extra processing.
Vocal-style hooks
Those talking, formant-ish hooks come from moving a filter fast. Set up a band-pass, park it around 800 Hz, and modulate cutoff with an LFO synced to sixteenths or a short envelope. A comb filter gets you closer to the vowel sound.
Keep the patch narrow and bright. This part lives from 500 Hz up, and it needs to sit in front of everything.
Percussive one-shots
Serum 2 makes good tuned percussion. A sine with a pitch envelope dropping two octaves in 30 ms is a tom. Noise through a resonant band-pass with a 60 ms decay is a shaker or a rim. Build three or four of these and you have a percussion layer nobody else has.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
Tech house sits at 124–128 BPM. 126 is the centre of gravity.
Energy lives in the offbeats. Kick on the four, bass on the offbeat sixteenths, shaker with 55–58% swing, and one percussion element that changes every two bars. The parts should interlock so tightly that muting any one of them makes the loop feel broken.
One arrangement habit that works: write a 32-bar section where nothing new enters, then find the two bars that are boring and fix those instead of adding a new layer. Tech house DJs need long stable stretches, and a track that changes every eight bars is hard to mix.
Mixing notes for tech house
Mono below 120 Hz, no exceptions. The bass and kick are doing the same job and they cannot be allowed to phase against each other.
Sidechain everything to the kick except the hook. A fast 30–50 ms release keeps the pocket tight without the sound audibly pumping.
Carve 200–400 Hz out of the bass and put the kick’s body there, or do the opposite — pick one and commit. Two elements fighting for that band is the single most common tech house mix problem.
Loudness comes from clipping the drum bus, not from the limiter. A soft clipper taking 2–3 dB off the kick peaks lets the whole mix sit higher. If you want more on drive, saturation and the rest, the effects rack guide covers the built-in modules.
Common mistakes
Long bass notes. If the bass sustains, the groove dies. Shorten the decay until it feels almost too short, then leave it there.
Reverb on everything. Tech house is a dry genre. Use short room reverbs under 0.8 seconds, and mostly on percussion.
No swing. Straight sixteenths sound like a drum machine demo. Push the swing until it feels slightly wrong, then back it off a notch.
Too many elements. Six to eight parts is a full tech house track. If you have fourteen, you have two tracks.
When you outgrow the freebies
These 18 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 want to compare before buying, all my Serum 2 packs have audio demos on the product pages, and this roundup of bass presets points at the ones that work hardest in club genres.
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 already own Serum 1 you have it.
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 is native on Apple Silicon.
What BPM is tech house?
124 to 128 BPM. Most club-ready releases land at 126, and DJs will pitch a few percent either way without it sounding wrong.
My tech house bass disappears when the kick hits — how do I fix it?
That is usually phase, not level. Check that both the kick and bass are mono under 120 Hz, then flip the polarity on the bass and listen — if it gets louder, leave it flipped. If it is still weak, shift the bass notes a few milliseconds later so the kick transient has the first 20 ms to itself.
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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