A tech house track is only ever as good as its bassline, and building a proper tech house bass in Serum 2 turns out to be mostly a tuning exercise. The patch itself stays simple almost every time. One oscillator, a filter, a short envelope. Where attempts die is in how those three are tuned, and in grooves that leave the kick no room to breathe.
I’ve been making tech house bass in Serum 2 for our packs since the plugin dropped in March 2025, and the core recipe is barely different from Serum 1 days. The speed is what changed. New analog filter models, real per-oscillator filter routing, and separate FX buses mean the mids can get saturated while the sub never hears any of it.
What follows are the two patches I build most: the classic rolling bassline, and the vocal-ish stab holding up half the FISHER and Solardo style records around. Actual settings, actual numbers, zero “tweak to taste” cop-outs.
What Makes a Tech House Bass Work
Pull apart any Hot Creations or Repopulate Mars record and the bass is doing three things. A clean mono sub anchors the low end. A midrange layer keeps the sound alive on phone speakers. And the notes land between the kicks, never on them.
That third point outweighs any synth setting. The downbeat belongs to the kick. The offbeat belongs to your bass. Let them both grab the same 50-100 Hz zone at the same instant, and no sound design in the world rescues the mix.
Which means the patch must be tight: instant attack, short decay, controlled low end. Everything else in this article flows out of those three words.
Recipe 1: The Rolling Tech House Bass in Serum 2
The workhorse sound. One oscillator, one sub, one filter, two envelopes. Five minutes of my time, and at 126 BPM it lands every single time.
Oscillator Plus Sub
Put Osc A on the Wavetable engine with Basic Shapes loaded, wavetable position parked on the saw frame. Unison stays at 1, since bass wants mono, and detuned voices turn the low mids into soup. Octave at 0, notes written around F1 to A1, which keeps the fundamental between roughly 44 and 55 Hz.
Then switch on the Sub oscillator: sine, same octave as Osc A. Flip on Direct Out so the sub bypasses the filter and the entire FX section. That single switch is the secret to a low end that never wobbles: the sub stays untouched while everything above it takes the processing.
Filter Choice
The 11 new analog-style filter models are the main reason my basses left their old Serum 1 patches behind. For rolling bass, one of the ladder-style low-passes is my pick. Cutoff near 300 Hz, resonance at 12-15%, enough to put a little click on each note’s attack, not enough to start whistling.
Send only Osc A into the filter. The dual filter section assigns oscillators per filter, so the sub never enters. I ran every filter model through bass duty in Serum 2 filters explained if you’d rather hear the differences before choosing.
The Amp Envelope Is the Patch
Env 1 (amp): attack 0 ms, hold 0, decay 150 ms, sustain floored, release 50 ms. Each note now dies completely before the next kick arrives. When a bass sounds like mud, shorten the decay before touching anything else; nine times out of ten, that was the whole problem.
Next, drag Env 2 onto filter cutoff. Roughly +2.5 octaves of amount, 100 ms decay, zero sustain. Every note opens bright and shuts dark, and that open-close motion is the thing people actually hear as “rolling”.
| Parameter | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Osc A | Basic Shapes saw, unison 1 | Mono core, no low-mid smear |
| Sub osc | Sine, Direct Out on | Clean sub, skips filter and FX |
| Filter | Ladder LP, 300 Hz, res 12% | Analog weight plus note click |
| Env 1 (amp) | Decay 150 ms, sus 0, rel 50 ms | Note dies before the next kick |
| Env 2 to cutoff | +2.5 oct, decay 100 ms | The rolling open-close motion |
| Note range | F1 to A1 | Fundamental sits at 44-55 Hz |
This is the rolling sound the recipe above is chasing.
Write the Groove on the Offbeats
Project at 126 BPM, kick on every quarter note. The bass notes go on the offbeat 8ths, the “and” of each beat. Hold note lengths around a 16th and leave the tail to the amp envelope.
Then start breaking the pattern, because eight bars of a static offbeat loop is enough for anyone. Drop one note a fifth at the end of bar two. Slip in a 16th-note double just ahead of beat three. Offbeat velocities near 100, ghosts near 70, and velocity mapped to cutoff at around 15% so the quiet notes go darker as well as softer.
The built-in sequencer genuinely earns its place here. With note, length and velocity per step, you can audition grooves without leaving the plugin, then rebuild the keeper in your DAW’s piano roll.
One warning sign: if your lines keep getting longer and darker and drifting off the offbeats, you’ve wandered into a different genre. That recipe lives in my melodic techno in Serum 2 guide.
Saturation and the Sidechain Pocket
This is where the multiple FX buses justify themselves. Serum 1 forced everything through one FX chain, sub and all, distortion included. Now Osc A goes to bus 1, and the sub, already on Direct Out, never meets the drive.
On bus 1: Distortion in the new Overdrive mode, drive 30-40%, mix at 60%. After it, the EQ with a high-pass around 100 Hz as insurance, then a light compressor. What you’re after is midrange density a phone can reproduce, not fuzz.
Sidechain-wise, restraint wins. Short offbeat notes mostly duck themselves by design. I still put in a soft 20-30% duck keyed off the kick, release near 100 ms, purely to tidy the transitions. Tech house ducking should be felt and never heard; audible pumping means back it off.
Recipe 2: The Vocal Stab Bass
The other sound that’s everywhere: a bass that almost speaks. Mid-forward stabs with a vowel sweep built in. Sounds elaborate. It’s one filter decision.
Begin from the rolling patch and change three things. Osc A moves to unison 3 with detune 0.10, because this sound lives in the mids, where a touch of width earns its keep. Trade the ladder filter for one of the Formant types. Then point Env 2 at the formant morph instead of plain cutoff, around 40% amount with a 120 ms decay, so each note snaps through a quick “ow” or “uh” on its way shut.
Two closing touches. A subtle LFO synced to 1/8, nudging the vowel position just barely, keeps long phrases from sounding copy-pasted. And Env 3 routed to coarse pitch — +12 semitones, 40 ms decay — gives the stab its percussive spit up front. Underneath, the sine sub sits exactly where it was: Direct Out, untouched.
Or Start From Presets and Reverse-Engineer
Init patches teach you the most, but Friday deadlines sometimes want eight basslines now. Ready-made options are rounded up in my post on the best Serum 2 presets for tech house, and two of our own packs were built directly on these recipes: the Fishlake tech house Serum presets for the rolling and stab sounds, and the larger tech house Serum presets collection when a whole track needs covering.
Here’s a patch from that second collection so you know what you’re buying.
To try the workflow before paying for anything, our free pack with 250+ Serum 2 presets ships bass patches wired exactly this way — sub on Direct Out included.
Fair warning before you go: the analog filter models and stacked FX buses ask more of your CPU than Serum 1 ever did. Cap unison at 3 on bass, limit polyphony, and my Serum 2 CPU optimization guide is there when a project starts crackling.
Common Questions
What’s the best filter for tech house bass in Serum 2?
Rolling bass: a ladder-style analog low-pass, cutoff around 300 Hz, resonance kept modest. Vocal stabs: the Formant types. Either way, Serum 2’s per-oscillator routing lets the sine sub skip the filter entirely, and both sounds are better for it.
Do I need sidechain if the bass is already offbeat?
Hardly. Offbeat notes at 16th length with a 150 ms amp decay stay out of the kick’s way by construction. A light 20-30% duck with a 100 ms release tidies the overlaps, but heavy pumping belongs to house and trance, not tech house.
Why does my tech house bass disappear on small speakers?
All sub, no mids. A small speaker physically can’t produce 50 Hz. The saturated Osc A layer is the part a phone can carry, so when the bass vanishes, push the Overdrive drive and mix on bus 1 until the harmonics hold the note on their own.
Do my Serum 1 bass presets still work in Serum 2?
They do. Serum 1 presets open in Serum 2, and the upgrade costs Serum 1 owners nothing, direct from Xfer Records. Old patches won’t touch the new filters or FX buses until you swap those in by hand, a quick upgrade that’s usually worth the effort.
The Short Version
Sub on Direct Out. One filtered saw carrying the mids. Amp decay at 150 ms. Notes on the offbeats at 126 BPM. Overdrive on the bus, never the sub. That’s the complete system; the discipline lives in the tuning, not in patch complexity.
Prefer starting from working patches? Take our free 250+ Serum 2 presets. No strings attached. Open the bass patches and verify every setting in this article against the real thing.
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 all my Serum 2 preset packs — sorted by genre and by sound, with a demo on every one.
