If you got into future bass in the late 2010s, you know OSHI. That mix of hip-hop bounce, warped vocal textures and emotional chords influenced a whole wave of producers, and people still write me asking how to get close to that sound.
I first wrote this guide in 2023 and refreshed it in 2026. The biggest change since then: Serum 2 landed in March 2025 as a free upgrade for Serum 1 owners, with three oscillators, five engines (including granular and spectral), new FX buses and a built-in sequencer. A few tricks that used to need external tools now happen inside the synth. If you want a full walkthrough of building a future bass drop from an init patch, I keep a separate future bass Serum 2 tutorial. This post is about the OSHI flavor specifically.
Serum 2 Presets for the OSHI Sound
OSHI’s synth work sounds like Serum whether or not it always was Serum. The tell is the effect chain: heavy multiband compression, chorus, and pitch envelopes that make leads talk almost like vocals.
Rather than reverse-engineering every patch, start from presets built for this style and tweak. These are the packs from our catalog I’d point you to first:
- Serum 2 Future Bass Presets — 40 wide, drop-ready chords and leads, the closest match to this style
- Harmonic Horizons — softer, more atmospheric future bass tones
- Nextgen Vol.3 — modern hybrid sounds with a hip-hop lean, which fits OSHI’s background
- Serum 2 Skrillex inspired presets — for when the drop needs more teeth
Three tweaks that push any chord preset toward OSHI territory:
- Pitch envelope on the attack. Assign an envelope to coarse pitch, +12 semitones, decay around 60–100 ms, zero sustain. That short downward scoop is half the vocal-like character.
- OTT in moderation. 20–30% depth on the chord bus, not 100%. Full-depth OTT flattens the groove.
- Unison that isn’t a supersaw. 5–7 voices, detune 0.15–0.25. Wide but still pitched, not a wash.
New to preset banks? Here’s how to install Serum 2 presets — takes about two minutes.
Drums and Groove
Future bass lives or dies on the half-time bounce. Most OSHI-style tracks sit at 140–160 BPM with the snare on beat 3, which leaves huge gaps for the chords to breathe.
What I listen for in his drums: layered snares (a tight acoustic crack plus a clap plus a short white-noise tail), percussion with swing around 55–60%, and fills built from pitched toms and risers instead of generic crash spam. The hi-hats often borrow straight from trap — rolls, triplets, velocity dips.
Two packs from our side that cover this ground:
- Drums Utopia Vol.1 — includes future bass loops at drop-ready tempos, plus stems so you can swap the snare
- Evoque Drums & Melody Loops — more organic, softer drum tones for verses and intros
One practical tip: don’t quantize the percussion top layer. Nudge shakers and foley hits a few ticks late. That slight drag against a tight kick and snare is where the head-nod comes from.
Sound Design: Layering, Foley and Pitch Bends
OSHI blends synthetic and organic sounds more aggressively than most future bass producers. Here’s how I approach it in 2026:
- Three-layer chords. A mono sine or triangle sub, a mid layer carrying the actual chord voicing, and a top texture layer. In Serum 2 you can do all three in one instance now that there are three oscillators — put the texture on oscillator C and blend it low.
- Foley from your phone. Record kitchen sounds, keys, paper, whatever. Then drag the recording into Serum 2’s granular engine and scan through it slowly with an LFO. This used to take a separate granular plugin; now it’s one drag-and-drop. I wrote up the workflow in the Serum 2 granular tutorial.
- Talking leads. Mono mode, portamento around 80–120 ms, then automate a bend into the note instead of starting on pitch. Combine with the pitch envelope trick from above and a formant-ish bandpass sweep.
- Vocal chops. Chop a phrase, pitch pieces to the chord scale, and glue them with the same reverb as the chords. If you want the full method, see Serum 2 vocal chops.
- Movement everywhere. Slow LFOs on wavetable position, filter cutoff drifting 5–10%, subtle auto-pan on the texture layer. Static patches are the fastest way to sound like a stock preset. The modulation guide covers the routing.
Mixing and Mastering Chain
OSHI’s records translate well on phone speakers, and that’s not an accident. The low-mid area is where most amateur future bass falls apart.
A chain that gets you close, with actual numbers to start from:
- EQ: cut 2–4 dB somewhere in 200–400 Hz on the chord bus. That’s where stacked saws pile up mud.
- Mono below 120 Hz. Wide bass sounds big in headphones and disappears everywhere else.
- Parallel OTT on the master bus at 10–15% mix, not inserted at full depth.
- Gentle saturation (tape or tube) before the limiter to soften transients.
- Limiter: ceiling at −1 dBTP, aim around −8 to −9 LUFS integrated for a dense future bass drop. Louder than that and the pump starts eating the groove.
Then A/B against an actual OSHI track at matched loudness and stare at the low and low-mid balance. Reference checking beats any preset chain.
FAQ: OSHI-Style Future Bass
What synth does OSHI use?
Serum shows up constantly in this scene, and even where it isn’t Serum, the processing (OTT, chorus, pitch envelopes) sounds like it. In 2026 the practical answer is Serum 2 — it’s the same workflow with three oscillators and granular/spectral engines added, and the upgrade was free for Serum 1 owners.
Do my old Serum 1 presets still work in Serum 2?
Yes. Serum 2 loads Serum 1 presets directly, so every pack linked in this post works fine. You just get extra engines and FX slots on top.
What BPM is future bass?
Most of it sits between 140 and 160 BPM with a half-time feel, so it grooves like 70–80. OSHI often leans to the slower, more hip-hop end of that range.
Where do I get free presets to practice with?
Grab our Serum 2 free presets — 250+ sounds across basses, leads, chords and keys. Plenty in there fits future bass, and it costs nothing to test the tricks from this post.
That’s the whole recipe: presets as a starting point, half-time drums with real swing, foley layers, and a restrained master chain. Start with the free pack above, apply the pitch envelope trick, and you’ll hear the OSHI flavor show up in your own drops fast.
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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