This is my review of the House Phonk Sample Pack & Serum 2 Presets (Ultimate Edition). Full disclosure: it’s my pack. So treat this less as an impartial review and more as a tour of what’s inside and how I actually use it in my own tracks.
I first wrote this back in 2022. Since then Serum became Serum 2 — a free update for Serum 1 owners, released in March 2025 — so the preset folder now opens in Serum 2 with all the new toys: three oscillators, granular and spectral engines, and a built-in sequencer. Everything below is current as of 2026.
Quick facts up front: the pack costs $30, all samples are royalty-free, and the WAVs work in any DAW. If you want to test my sound design first, there’s a free bundle of 250+ Serum 2 presets — a good sanity check before you spend money.
What’s inside the pack
There are five main folders:
- Phonk Choir Stacks
- Phonk Drum Loops
- Phonk Essential Drum Kit (bonus)
- Phonk Vocal One-shots
- Phonk Serum 2 Presets
There’s also a folder with the preview tracks from the product page. Sounds like filler, but it isn’t. I use those as style references when I’m sketching a new idea and want to check my rough mix against a finished demo.
Phonk Choir Stacks
18 choir sounds, female and male, singing different phrases. They’re cut so you can chain them into loops — alternate two or three phrases and you’ve got a hook.
The trick that makes them sit in a phonk mix: lots of reverb, then saturation. My go-to chain is a hall reverb with a 3–4 second decay at around 30% wet, tape-style saturation after it, and a high-pass filter at 250–300 Hz so the choir doesn’t fight the 808. Messy, tight, atmospheric — exactly what the genre needs.
Phonk Drum Loops
40 house phonk loops with different percussion flavors. Tempos run from 115 to 150 BPM, so there’s a loop for the house side (120–128) and for the aggressive drift side (140+).
Two things I like here. The loops are clean — no baked-in clipping, so you decide how far to push your own distortion. And there’s real headroom in the drums, which makes them easy to fit into a mix instead of fighting a pre-squashed master.
They work in house-oriented phonk and in hip-hop-leaning phonk too. Drop one into half-time and you’re in Memphis territory.
Phonk Essential Drum Kit
One-shots: kicks, snares, hats, percs, cowbells. I’ve run them through NI Maschine and straight into the DAW sequencer — no complaints either way. Firm, whippy, bassy.
This folder is for people who don’t want to spend an evening synthesizing a kick. Grab a kick, a clap, two hats, program a 4/4 groove, and you’re sketching in five minutes.
Phonk Vocal One-shots
Short shouts and phrases for transitions and drops. Pitch them down 2–4 semitones, add a slapback delay, and they instantly sound like a 90s Memphis tape. I barely mentioned these in the original review, which was unfair — I end up using at least one in almost every phonk track I make.
Phonk Serum 2 Presets
Deep, punchy low end plus the lush cowbell leads the genre is built on. Since the Serum 2 update these got more interesting: you can drag any preset’s oscillator into the granular engine and mangle the cowbell into something nobody else has.
New to presets? Here’s my two-minute guide on how to install Serum 2 presets.
How it sounds
Easier to hear than to read about. This demo is built entirely from the pack:
How I actually use it
My usual house phonk sketch, step by step:
- Pick a drum loop around 126 BPM and match the project tempo to it.
- Load a cowbell preset and write a one-bar minor melody, four to six notes. E minor and C minor work almost every time.
- Add a bass preset on the off-beats — the classic slap house pattern. Sidechain it to the kick with 4–6 dB of ducking.
- Drop a choir stack into the break, drenched in reverb like I described above.
- Glue the drum bus with OTT at 20–30% depth and put a clipper on the master with the ceiling at -0.5 dB.
If you’d rather build the sounds yourself from init, I wrote a full phonk Serum 2 tutorial that covers the cowbell and the distorted bass from scratch. For the low end specifically, my Serum 2 808 bass guide shows how to keep the sub clean while everything above it is distorted.
Pros and cons
The original version of this post had a ten-point pros list. Half of it was generic filler — “compatible with multiple DAWs” describes every WAV pack ever made. Here’s the honest version.
Pros:
- Genre-focused. Every sound belongs to phonk, no random EDM leftovers.
- Clean, headroom-friendly processing — you control the distortion, not the pack.
- Wide tempo range (115–150 BPM) covers house phonk and drift phonk.
- Serum 2 presets included, so your melodies aren’t stuck at the WAV keys and tempos.
- Royalty-free for commercial releases.
Cons:
- I always want more presets. There are never enough Serum presets for me, even in my own packs.
- The variety cuts both ways — sometimes I lose ten minutes choosing between two nearly identical loops.
- No MIDI files for the melodic content, so you’re transposing audio when the key doesn’t fit.
More phonk from our catalog
Two more packs if this style is your lane.
Dark Phonk Sample Pack — Gamma is the darker, Atomic Heart-inspired sibling: colder melodies, more aggressive drums, mostly 140 BPM territory.
And if you only want the synth side, the Serum 2 Phonk Presets are sold separately — same cowbells and basses without the sample folders.
FAQ: house phonk sample packs
What BPM is house phonk?
Usually 120–128 BPM — it borrows the four-on-the-floor groove from slap house. Drift phonk runs faster, typically 135–150 BPM. The loops in this pack cover both ranges.
Do I need Serum 2 to use this pack?
Only for the preset folder. The WAV samples and loops work in any DAW — FL Studio, Ableton Live, Logic, whatever you’re on. If you own Serum 1, the Serum 2 update is free, so the presets will load fine.
Are the samples royalty-free?
Yes. You can use them in commercial releases, streams and client work without paying anything extra or crediting anyone.
What’s the difference between phonk and house phonk?
Classic phonk is hip-hop based: half-time drums, Memphis vocal chops, dusty tape sound. House phonk keeps the cowbells and dark vocals but puts them over a 4/4 house kick with off-beat bass. It blew up through drift edits and never really left.
Still on the fence? Start with the free Serum 2 presets — 250+ sounds, zero cost — and see if my sound design fits your taste. If it does, this pack will feel like home.
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 →
