Tech house is a sound-palette genre — everything tight and groove-first: punchy stab basses, clipped vocal-ish synths, hooks that behave like percussion. Nothing rings out, nothing gets lush. Every single part is playing rhythm, the bass included.
Designing Serum 2 packs is my day job, and no genre exposes a patch faster than tech house: it either sits in the pocket or it doesn’t. Most of the sound design comes down to envelope times, and specifically how a sound ends rather than how it begins.
Here’s my breakdown of the bass, the stab, the hook and the percussion, followed by tempo, mixing, and the habits that leave tracks sounding like loops rather than records.
Start with the free pack
Grab the Free Serum 2 Tech House Presets: 10 synths · 3 others · 3 drums · 2 plucks, audio demos for each, all royalty-free.
Installing takes maybe a minute: unzip into Serum 2’s user preset folder, rescan, done.
Who’s it for? Producers whose drums already work but whose basslines keep coming out as house instead of tech house. Eighteen patches covers a full track and stays small enough that you can actually learn each one.
This is where the genre lives — dry, upfront, basically no reverb tail:
The sound, part by part
Bass
A tech house bass stabs; it never drones. Single oscillator, plain saw or square, mono, no unison. Amp envelope: attack at zero, decay somewhere in the 150–250 ms range, sustain at zero.
The personality lives in the filter envelope. Send a second envelope to low-pass cutoff, decay around 100 ms, plenty of depth, so the sound opens and closes within a sixteenth note. Push resonance to 20–30% and you get the bark.
Now hit it with drive. Light tube or hard clip in Serum 2’s distortion, then a high-pass at 60–80 Hz, and the bass reads loud without chewing up sub headroom. For the layering side and how I actually choose a bass, see the tech house bass guide.
Stabs and organ chords
The classic stab here is either a filtered organ or a detuned saw chord with sustain zeroed. Three or four unison voices, detune near 20%, decay about 200 ms.
Then place it offbeat. Hitting the “and” of each beat with slight velocity changes will do more for your groove than any processing chain ever could.
Vocal-style hooks
Those talky, formant-flavoured hooks are really just a filter moving quickly. Take a band-pass, sit it around 800 Hz, and drive the cutoff with a sixteenth-synced LFO or a short envelope. Want it closer to an actual vowel? A comb filter gets you there.
Keep the patch thin and bright. It lives above 500 Hz and belongs in front of the whole mix.
Percussive one-shots
Tuned percussion is something Serum 2 does surprisingly well. Sine wave, pitch envelope falling two octaves in 30 ms: that’s a tom. Noise into a resonant band-pass with 60 ms of decay: shaker, or a rim. Make three or four of these and your percussion layer belongs to you alone.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
Tech house runs 124–128 BPM, with 126 as the centre of gravity.
The offbeats carry the energy. Kick on all four, bass hitting offbeat sixteenths, shaker swung to 55–58%, plus one percussion part that shifts every two bars. When it’s right, muting any single element should break the loop.
An arrangement habit worth stealing: write 32 bars where nothing new arrives, then hunt down the two bars that drag and fix those rather than reaching for a new layer. DJs playing tech house need long stable runs, and a track that flips every eight bars is a pain to mix.
Mixing notes for tech house
Below 120 Hz, everything goes mono. No exceptions. Kick and bass share one job down there and can’t be left to phase against each other.
Sidechain every channel to the kick except the hook. Keep the release fast, 30–50 ms: tight pocket, no audible pumping.
Either carve 200–400 Hz out of the bass and give the kick’s body that space, or flip it around. Pick a side and stick with it. Two elements wrestling over that band is the number one tech house mix problem I hear.
Loudness here comes from clipping the drum bus, not the limiter. Let a soft clipper shave 2–3 dB off the kick peaks and the whole mix rides higher. For more on drive, saturation and friends, the effects rack guide walks through the built-in modules.
Common mistakes
Long bass notes. Sustained bass kills the groove. Pull the decay in until it feels slightly too short, then stop.
Reverb on everything. This is a dry genre. Short rooms under 0.8 seconds, mostly on the percussion, and that’s it.
No swing. Straight sixteenths read as a drum machine demo. Add swing until it feels a touch wrong, then pull back one notch.
Too many elements. A complete tech house track is six to eight parts. Fourteen parts means you’re holding two tracks.
When you outgrow the freebies
These 18 patches came out of the same design sessions as my Serum 2 preset bundles: whole genres collected for a fraction of what the single packs cost. Want to compare first? All my Serum 2 packs carry audio demos on their product pages, and this roundup of bass presets flags the ones that pull the most weight in club genres.
FAQ
Do these presets work in Serum 1?
No. They’re built on the Serum 2 engine. But Serum 2 is a free update for existing Serum owners, so if you have Serum 1, you already have it.
Are the presets really royalty-free?
Yes. Releases, client projects, beats you sell, no credit needed. The only thing off-limits is reselling the presets themselves.
Can I use them in any DAW?
Any DAW that runs Serum 2 as VST3 or AU: Ableton, FL Studio, Logic, Cubase, Studio One, the lot. Serum 2 also runs native on Apple Silicon.
What BPM is tech house?
124 to 128 BPM. Club releases mostly settle at 126, and DJs pitch it a few percent either direction without anyone noticing.
My tech house bass disappears when the kick hits — how do I fix it?
Nine times out of ten that’s phase, not level. Make sure kick and bass are both mono under 120 Hz, then flip the bass polarity and listen; louder means leave it flipped. Still thin? Nudge the bass notes a few milliseconds later so the kick transient owns the first 20 ms.
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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