The same email lands in my inbox every week: how do you build that phonk Serum 2 cowbell that’s all over everything right now? The sender has usually burned through stock presets, a few YouTube videos, maybe a sample pack or two. And the result still sounds like someone hitting a pot with a spoon rather than a Memphis nightmare.
So here’s the part that should cheer you up. All the core phonk sounds – cowbell, cowbass, those dark leads, the tape wobble – are phonk Serum 2 patches you can put together in roughly ten minutes apiece. No hardware, no digging for rare vinyl. Six or seven settings per patch, and I’m handing you the exact numbers.
We at Monosounds have been building phonk presets since 2022, and these recipes are pulled straight from patches we actually sell. Time to build.
What Gives Phonk Its Sound
Phonk came up from 90s Memphis rap tapes: minor-key melodies with a mean streak, crunchy 808s, and samples copied through so many cassette generations the audio started to blur. Today’s phonk keeps that DNA and rebuilds it with synths.
Most of the work comes down to four ingredients. A metallic cowbell carrying the hook. Underneath it, a distorted 808 or cowbass. A detuned lead adding tension. And lo-fi grime smeared across the whole thing.
Serum 2 covers all four. Honestly, the three-oscillator layout plus the multiple FX buses make this job easier than it ever was in Serum 1 – you can park the clean sub on one bus and crush everything else on another. New to the synth itself? Xfer’s Serum 2 page has the basics, and the upgrade costs Serum 1 owners nothing.
The Phonk Cowbell Recipe
The classic phonk cowbell descends from the TR-808 cowbell: two square waves sitting roughly a fifth apart, gated hard, with a metallic knock right at the front. This is how I build mine.
- Osc A: Wavetable engine, Basic Shapes table, frame on the square. Octave 0, unison 1. Skip the detune – a cowbell should be bone dry.
- Osc B: the same square, coarse pitch +7 semitones, fine -15 cents. Bring the level to about 80% of Osc A. That slightly sour interval carries the entire character.
- Amp envelope: attack 0 ms, decay 400 ms, sustain 0. A cowbell has no sustain. If yours holds a note, you’ve made a synth, not a cowbell.
- Env 2 to pitch: drag Env 2 onto coarse pitch for both oscillators. Amount +12 semitones, decay 25 ms. That quick pitch drop is where the metallic knock comes from.
- Filter: bandpass near 800 Hz with resonance around 15%. This strips out the cheap-synth body and keeps the clang.
- FX: Distortion set to Overdrive mode at 30-40%, EQ after it with 3 dB up at 2.5 kHz, then a short dark reverb at 10% mix.
Then comes the signature move – the pitch-bent melody. Voicing to mono, portamento near 70 ms, glide always on. Write a minor-scale hook where the notes smear into each other. At 130 BPM, eighth-note phrases with a slide or two per bar land right immediately.
A Serum 2 bonus while we’re here: once the FX chain is where you want it, hit Resample to Oscillator. The distortion gets baked into a fresh wavetable, the FX can come off, and the saved CPU goes to the rest of the track.
The Distorted Cowbass
Drift phonk rarely runs on a clean 808. The low end is usually a cowbass – the cowbell patch itself, dropped an octave or two and distorted until it snarls.
Take the cowbell patch from above as your starting point. Pull both oscillators down two octaves. Crank the Overdrive distortion to 60-70%. Trade the bandpass for a lowpass sitting around 1 kHz – the crunch survives, the fizz doesn’t. Stretch the amp decay to 700-900 ms so the notes bleed into one another.
Now layer it. Put a plain sine sub on Osc C an octave lower, zero distortion, so a club system still gets clean low end. Send that sub to its own FX bus with nothing on it. This kind of separation is precisely why Serum 2 has multiple FX buses.
Still thin or muddy down low? The cure is almost always the sub layer, not another distortion stage. I walk through the whole thing in my Serum 2 808 bass guide, and if you’d sooner start from something that already works, there’s a roundup of finished patches in our best Serum 2 bass presets.
Dark Detuned Leads
A phonk lead sits somewhere between a synth and an air-raid siren. Simple recipe, but the numbers matter.
Osc A gets a saw wavetable, unison 5, detune 0.15. Don’t reach for 16 voices – that’s trance supersaw territory, and it burns CPU for no benefit here. Osc B: the same saw an octave down, unison 3, detune 0.10, level at 60%. Then a lowpass 24 dB filter at 3 kHz, with Env 3 sweeping it open slowly across 2 bars.
For keys, stay in natural minor or Phrygian. That flat second in Phrygian might as well be called the phonk scale. Chorus at 20% mix into a plate reverb, and then – here’s the phonk part – a bitcrusher or a gentle Overdrive placed after the reverb, so even the tail comes out degraded.
Some producers take these leads further into growl territory with FM and aggressive wavetable movement for harder tracks. That’s its own discipline; my Serum 2 growls tutorial has you covered if that’s the direction you want.
Prefer reverse-engineering over building from init? Our free 250+ Serum 2 presets come with dark leads, 808s and plucks you can gut and re-skin for phonk. Royalty-free, nothing attached.
Lo-Fi Character: Noise and Pitch Drift
A phonk track that sounds clean is a contradiction in terms. The genre demands tape rot, and Serum 2 lets you fake it inside the patch rather than on the mix bus.
Two moves do it. Move one is the noise oscillator: load a vinyl or tape hiss noise sample, sit its level near -25 dB, and switch keytracking off so every note hisses at the same pitch. Solo’d, it should be barely there; muted, its absence should be obvious.
Move two is pitch drift. Grab a slow LFO – sine, 0.2 Hz, bipolar – and drop it on the master fine tune at a depth of roughly 12 cents. Now the whole patch wobbles like a cassette left in a hot car. Above 20 cents it gets seasick; below 5, nobody hears it.
Finish with a subtle bitcrush on the lead bus (12-bit or so, sample rate untouched) and that’s the layer done. The same toolkit serves chillhop and ambient just as well – the lo-fi Serum 2 tutorial goes deeper on it.
House Phonk vs Drift Phonk
The cowbell is about the only thing these two branches share, and confusing their conventions is the quickest route to a track that feels wrong. In practice the split looks like this.
| Element | House Phonk | Drift Phonk |
|---|---|---|
| BPM | 125-130 | 130-150 |
| Kick | Four-on-the-floor | Trap-style pattern |
| Low end | Rolling sub, sidechained | Distorted cowbass upfront |
| Cowbell | Brighter, melodic hook | Darker, often pitched down |
| Mood | Bouncy, club-ready | Aggressive, cinematic |
| Mix | Cleaner, more headroom | Crushed and saturated |
House phonk takes its groove cues from Brazilian and club music: straight kick, swung cowbell hook, tidier mixing. If that’s where you live, our House Phonk sample pack with Serum presets was made for exactly that lane – loops, one-shots and patches at those tempos.
Drift phonk is the mean sibling: faster, uglier, cowbass right up front, saturation on everything. For that sound we built GAMMA, our Atomic Heart-inspired phonk pack – Soviet-retrofuturist textures that slot straight under drift phonk drums.
Every phonk Serum 2 patch in this tutorial works for both branches. What changes is mostly the tempo, the drum pattern, and how far you push the distortion.
Phonk Serum 2 FAQ
Can I make phonk in Serum 1, or do I need Serum 2?
Serum 1 handles the cowbell, cowbass and leads fine – the genre predates Serum 2’s March 2025 release by years. What Serum 2 brings is the noise oscillator options, the multiple FX buses and the built-in sequencer, and since the upgrade is free for Serum 1 owners, there’s really no argument for staying behind.
What BPM should my phonk track be?
House phonk lives at 125-130 BPM. Drift phonk typically runs 130-150, and the aggressive stuff sometimes goes past that. Can’t decide? Start at 130 – both styles work there.
Why does my phonk cowbell sound thin?
Three usual culprits. The bandpass is too narrow or set too high – go back to 800 Hz with moderate resonance. You left out the Env 2 pitch knock, which is where the metallic attack lives. Or the part sits too high – the hook belongs around C4 to C5, not above it.
Are these phonk Serum 2 patches heavy on CPU?
Not particularly. Cowbell and cowbass run one or two unison voices with light FX. The heaviest patch is the lead at unison 5 plus 3, and if your machine complains, Resample to Oscillator bakes its FX down. Leave oversampling at 2x while you’re writing and you won’t have problems.
Start With the Cowbell
Do the cowbell first. It’s the quickest build on this page, and the moment it slides through a minor-key hook over any half-decent drum loop, you’re already listening to phonk. Cowbass, lead and drift layer are just refinements stacked on top.
Want the shortcut? Grab our free 250+ Serum 2 presets and keep the bass and lead folders open next to this article. Pull the patches apart, lift the envelope shapes, dress them up as your own phonk. That’s exactly what they exist for.
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.
More about Maxim & the studio →Looking for the packs themselves? Here is the full Serum 2 preset catalogue — sorted by genre and by sound, with a demo on every one.
