Techno lives and dies by its sound palette — warehouse pressure: rumbling kick-and-bass fusion, hypnotic stabs and acid-tinged leads. There is almost no melody and almost no chord movement. The interest comes from timbre and from what changes over sixteen bars.
I design Serum 2 packs for a living, and techno is the genre where a preset either has weight or it does not. Most of the work is in filtering, saturation and how the low end interacts with the kick.
Below I go through the rumble bass, the stabs, the acid lead and the noise textures, then tempo, mixing and the mistakes that make techno sound thin at volume.
Start with the free pack
Download the Free Serum 2 Techno Presets — 10 synths · 5 bass, each with an audio demo, all royalty-free.
Install takes under a minute: unzip into Serum 2’s user preset folder and rescan. Fifteen patches, weighted towards synths because in techno the stabs and textures are the arrangement.
Who it suits: producers with a kick they like who need everything around it to feel as physical as the kick does.
This is the general weight I mean:
The sound, part by part
Rumble bass
The rumble is not really a bassline. It is a sustained low tone that sits under the kick and gets gated by it. Use a sine or triangle, mono, one voice, long sustain, playing the same root note for eight bars.
Then sidechain it to the kick with a slow release — 150–250 ms — and add a short reverb before the sidechain. That reverb is what turns a clean sub into a rumble.
Keep the note low, usually the same root as the kick’s fundamental or an octave above. If they clash you will hear it immediately as a wobble.
Stabs
Techno stabs are short, resonant and often dissonant. Take a saw or a hard wavetable, set decay around 150 ms with sustain at zero, and open a resonant band-pass at 800 Hz to 2 kHz.
Then drive it — Serum 2’s distortion on a hard clip, followed by a high-pass at 200 Hz. The stab should have no low end at all; the kick and rumble own that territory.
Play it on an offbeat sixteenth with a synced delay and let it repeat for sixteen bars. Repetition is the point.
Acid leads
Acid is a square or saw through a resonant low-pass with the filter envelope doing most of the movement. Set resonance high, around 60–70%, decay short, and route the envelope to cutoff with a lot of depth. Add glide of 30–60 ms so notes slide.
Then automate the cutoff by hand across the section. Which filter model you pick changes the character a lot here — the filter breakdown compares the resonant types side by side.
Noise and textures
Filtered noise through a slowly opening band-pass is a whole layer in techno. Add a long reverb and automate the filter across thirty-two bars. It functions as a riser, a pad and an atmosphere at once.
Serum 2’s built-in FX will do most of this without leaving the plugin; the effects guide covers what each module is actually good at.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
Techno sits at 128–134 BPM for most club releases, with the harder end pushing past that.
Energy lives in the kick and in density, not in melody. Straight sixteenth hats, a clap or rim on the offbeat, and a percussion loop that changes every sixteen bars.
One arrangement habit that works: build a 64-bar loop and then automate a single high-pass filter across the whole thing. Techno arrangements are mostly filtering and muting, and a track that works as a loop will work as a track.
Mixing notes for techno
Mono below 150 Hz. The kick and rumble together carry most of the energy and any stereo content down there will collapse on a big system.
Sidechain everything with low content to the kick — the rumble hard, the stabs lightly, the noise not at all.
Carve 100–200 Hz on every element except the kick and rumble. Techno mixes sound big because that band is protected, not because anything is loud.
Loudness comes from saturation and clipping on the drum bus. Techno masters are pushed hard, but the push happens on the drums, not on the master limiter.
Common mistakes
Writing a melody. If you find yourself with a chord progression, you are probably making melodic techno instead — which is fine, but it is a different mix approach.
A kick that is too short. Techno kicks are long. If yours decays in 100 ms there is nothing for the rumble to interact with.
Too many elements. Kick, rumble, hats, one stab and one texture is a finished techno track. Adding more usually makes it smaller.
Changing too often. Sixteen bars is the minimum before something changes. Eight-bar changes feel restless in this genre.
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. If you prefer to pick individually, all the Serum 2 packs I have built are listed with demos.
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 restriction.
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 techno?
128 to 134 BPM covers most club techno. Peak-time sets often sit at 132–140, and hard techno goes well beyond that.
My kick and rumble are fighting — how do I fix it?
Tune the rumble to the kick’s fundamental first; use a spectrum analyser on the kick tail to find it. Then sidechain the rumble hard so it only speaks between kicks. If it still wobbles, the two are close but not identical in pitch — move the rumble by a semitone and listen again.
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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