Every tech house track lives or dies on its bassline, and making a proper tech house bass in Serum 2 is mostly a tuning problem. The patch itself is usually simple. One oscillator, a filter, a short envelope. What kills most attempts is the tuning of those three things, plus a groove that never leaves room for the kick.
I’ve been building tech house bass in Serum 2 for our packs since the plugin shipped in March 2025, and the core recipe hasn’t changed much from Serum 1. What changed is how fast you get there. The new analog filter models, a proper per-oscillator filter routing, and separate FX buses mean you can saturate the mids without ever touching the sub.
Below are the two patches I build most often: the classic rolling bassline, and the vocal-ish stab that carries half the FISHER and Solardo style records out there. Real settings, real numbers, nothing left as “tweak to taste”.
What Makes a Tech House Bass Work
Strip down any Hot Creations or Repopulate Mars record and the bass does three jobs. A clean mono sub holds the low end. A midrange layer gives the sound character on phone speakers. And the notes sit between the kicks, not on top of them.
That last one matters more than any synth setting. The kick owns the downbeat. Your bass owns the offbeat. If both fight for the same 50-100 Hz space at the same moment, no amount of sound design saves the mix.
So the patch has to be tight: instant attack, short decay, controlled low end. Everything below follows from those three words.
Recipe 1: The Rolling Tech House Bass in Serum 2
This is the workhorse. One oscillator, one sub, one filter, two envelopes. It takes me about five minutes and it works at 126 BPM every single time.
Oscillator Plus Sub
Set Osc A to the Wavetable engine and load Basic Shapes. Park the wavetable position on the saw frame. Unison stays at 1. Bass wants to be mono, and detuned unison smears the low mids into soup. Octave at 0, and write your notes around F1 to A1 so the fundamental sits between roughly 44 and 55 Hz.
Now turn on the Sub oscillator: sine wave, same octave as Osc A. Enable Direct Out on the sub so it skips the filter and the FX section completely. That’s the whole trick behind a low end that never wobbles. The sub stays pure while everything above it gets processed.
Filter Choice
Serum 2 shipped 11 new analog-style filter models, and they’re the main reason my basses moved over from old Serum 1 patches. For rolling bass I reach for one of the ladder-style low-passes. Cutoff around 300 Hz, resonance at 12-15%. That’s enough resonance to put a small click on top of each note, not enough to whistle.
Route only Osc A into the filter. Serum 2’s dual filter section lets you assign oscillators per filter, so the sub stays out entirely. I compared every filter model for bass duty in Serum 2 filters explained if you want to hear the differences before committing.
The Amp Envelope Is the Patch
Env 1 (amp): attack 0 ms, hold 0, decay 150 ms, sustain all the way down, release 50 ms. This gives you a note that fully dies before the next kick lands. If your bass sounds like mud, shorten the decay before you touch anything else. Nine times out of ten that’s the fix.
Then drag Env 2 onto filter cutoff. Amount around +2.5 octaves, decay 100 ms, sustain zero. Every note now opens bright and closes dark. That movement is what 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 aiming at.
Write the Groove on the Offbeats
Set the project to 126 BPM. Kick on every quarter note. Now write bass notes on the offbeat 8ths, the “and” of every beat. Keep note lengths around a 16th and let the amp envelope handle the tail.
Then break the pattern, because a static offbeat loop gets boring in eight bars. Slide one note down a fifth at the end of bar two. Sneak a 16th-note double right before beat three. Keep offbeat velocities around 100 and ghost notes around 70, with velocity mapped to cutoff at about 15% so quiet notes also sound darker.
Serum 2’s built-in sequencer is genuinely useful here. Per-step note, length and velocity means you can audition a groove without leaving the plugin, then rebuild the winner in your DAW’s piano roll.
And if you catch yourself writing longer, darker lines that ignore the offbeat rule, you’re drifting toward a different genre. That recipe lives in my melodic techno in Serum 2 guide.
Saturation and the Sidechain Pocket
Here’s where Serum 2’s multiple FX buses earn their place. In Serum 1 you had one FX chain, so distortion hit everything including your sub. Now route Osc A to bus 1, and since the sub is on Direct Out, it never sees the drive.
On bus 1: Distortion in the new Overdrive mode, drive at 30-40%, mix at 60%. Follow it with the EQ, high-passed around 100 Hz as insurance, then a light compressor. The goal is midrange density you can hear on a phone, not fuzz.
For the sidechain pocket, less is more. Because your notes are already short and offbeat, the bass mostly ducks itself. I still add a gentle 20-30% duck triggered by the kick, release around 100 ms, just to clean the transitions. In tech house the duck should be felt, not heard. If you can hear pumping, back it off.
Recipe 2: The Vocal Stab Bass
The second sound you hear everywhere: a bass that almost talks. Mid-heavy stabs with a vowel movement baked in. It sounds complicated. It’s one filter choice.
Start from the rolling patch, then change three things. Osc A goes to unison 3, detune 0.10, because this sound lives in the mids where a little width helps. Swap the ladder filter for one of the Formant types. And push Env 2 into the formant morph instead of plain cutoff, amount around 40%, decay 120 ms, so every note does a quick “ow” or “uh” as it closes.
Two finishing moves. Add a subtle LFO, synced to 1/8, barely moving the vowel position, so long phrases don’t sound copy-pasted. And route Env 3 to coarse pitch: +12 semitones with a 40 ms decay gives the stab that percussive spit at the front. The sine sub stays underneath exactly as before, on Direct Out, untouched.
Or Start From Presets and Reverse-Engineer
Building from init teaches you the most, but sometimes you need eight basslines by Friday. I rounded up ready-made options in my post on the best Serum 2 presets for tech house, and two of our own packs are built exactly around these recipes: the Fishlake tech house Serum presets for the rolling and stab sounds, and the bigger tech house Serum presets collection when you need full track coverage.
Here is one patch from that second collection so you know what you are getting.
If you want to test the workflow before spending anything, our free pack with 250+ Serum 2 presets includes bass patches wired up this exact way, sub on Direct Out and all.
One honest warning: the analog filter models and stacked FX buses cost more CPU than Serum 1 ever did. Keep unison at 3 or lower on bass, cap polyphony, and check my Serum 2 CPU optimization guide if your project starts crackling.
Common Questions
What’s the best filter for tech house bass in Serum 2?
For rolling bass, a ladder-style analog low-pass with cutoff around 300 Hz and modest resonance. For vocal stabs, the Formant types. Both benefit from Serum 2’s per-oscillator routing so the sine sub bypasses the filter completely.
Do I need sidechain if the bass is already offbeat?
Barely. Offbeat 16th-length notes with a 150 ms amp decay leave the kick alone by design. A light 20-30% duck with a 100 ms release cleans up overlaps, but heavy pumping is a house-and-trance move, not a tech house one.
Why does my tech house bass disappear on small speakers?
Because it’s all sub and no mids. Small speakers can’t reproduce 50 Hz at all. The saturated Osc A layer is what survives on a phone, so if the bass vanishes, raise the Overdrive drive and mix on bus 1 until the harmonics carry the note.
Do my Serum 1 bass presets still work in Serum 2?
Yes. Serum 1 presets load in Serum 2, and the upgrade itself is free for Serum 1 owners, straight from Xfer Records. Old patches won’t use the new filters or FX buses until you swap those in yourself, which is usually a quick upgrade worth doing.
The Short Version
Sub on Direct Out. One filtered saw for the mids. Amp decay at 150 ms. Notes on the offbeats at 126 BPM. Overdrive on the bus, never on the sub. That’s the entire system, and the discipline is in the tuning, not the patch complexity.
If you’d rather start from working patches, grab our free 250+ Serum 2 presets. No strings attached. Pull the bass patches apart and check 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.
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