A few times a month my inbox gets the same question: how do you get that lush, expensive RnB sound — the warm electric pianos, the pillowy pads, the round sub you hear on SZA, Brent Faiyaz or Summer Walker records. Honest answer? It comes down to sound choice, mostly. Pick the right patches and what’s left is chords and restraint.
Making preset packs is my job, which means I live inside Serum an unreasonable number of hours per week. Below I’ll cover which RnB Serum presets deserve your attention in 2026, what actually makes a patch read as “RnB”, and the exact settings I reach for when building these sounds myself.
First, a quick update: Serum is now Serum 2
When this post was first published, Serum 1 was the standard. Then in March 2025 Xfer put out Serum 2, free for every Serum 1 owner. Haven’t updated? Go do it; same license, nothing extra to pay.
For RnB in particular, the update matters more than it does for most genres. There are now 3 oscillators where there were 2, plus 5 synthesis engines including granular and spectral. Real sampled electric pianos and vocal textures can now live inside the synth itself rather than being faked with wavetables. And the new FX buses let the keys go to one reverb while the bass runs its own separate chain, which does wonders for a clean low end.
Every Serum 1 preset loads in Serum 2, so no pack below is wasted regardless of which version it was originally designed in. Just getting started with the synth? My Serum 2 beginner guide explains the layout without jargon.
What makes a preset actually sound like RnB
It pays to know what you’re listening for before spending money. When I design RnB patches, these are the ingredients doing the work:
- Soft attack, long release. RnB keys rarely snap at you. My amp attack sits around 5–15 ms with release at 400–800 ms, so one chord melts into the next.
- A closed low-pass filter. Warmth mostly comes from pulling the filter down to 1–2 kHz on a gentle 12 dB/oct slope. Bright patches say EDM; dark patches say RnB.
- Slow chorus or ensemble. Set a chorus near 0.3 Hz with 25–35% mix and you get that classic swirling EP motion without the seasick wobble.
- Subtle detune. 2–4 unison voices, detune in the 0.05–0.10 range. This is not the place for festival supersaw settings.
- Clean sine sub. Bass duty usually falls to a sine or triangle with a hint of saturation so small speakers can hear it. Keep it boring; the personality belongs to the keys and vocals.
Good commercial packs arrive with all of this already dialed in, and that’s precisely why presets are such a time-saver in this genre.
The RnB packs I’d actually start with
Fair warning, these come from my own catalog. But they’re also the packs this article has always centered on, maintained and kept current for Serum 2.
The core pick is RnB Serum 2 Presets Vol.1: pads, keys, plucks, strings and sub basses, all voiced for modern RnB. The macros come pre-mapped on every patch, so the mod wheel and macro 1 do something musical the moment you load it. Here’s a raw preset demo with zero external processing:
Prefer finished musical material to write over? RNB Vol.1 is a sample pack spanning both the modern side of the genre and the 90s side:
A few others, depending on the gap you’re filling:
- KRADE Premium R&B/Hip-Hop Sample Pack — melody loops and one-shots living between RnB and hip-hop, well suited to trap-soul beats.
- Organica — organic textures alongside Serum-built melodic loops, for a warmer and less digital character.
- Running Vital instead of Serum? The RnB Sound Collection for Vital hits the same territory on the free synth.
Want to audition my sound design without spending a thing first? The free Serum 2 presets pack holds 250+ patches, and several of them are straight-up RnB keys and pads.
Whatever you end up with, do the installation right on the first try. Here’s how to install Serum 2 presets so they land in the browser rather than some random folder.
Production techniques that do the heavy lifting
The preset gives you raw tone. The habits below carry you the rest of the way to a record-ready sound.
Chords before sound design
RnB runs on harmony. Feed even an ordinary preset some minor 7ths, 9ths and sus2 voicings and it suddenly sounds expensive. Play a bare minor triad through the greatest patch ever made and you still have a demo. Lift voicings from records you love; every producer you admire did the same.
EQ and compression, with numbers
My usual moves on keys and pads: high-pass at 100–150 Hz to clear space for the bass, pull 2–3 dB out around 300–500 Hz when mud creeps in, and add a small high shelf (+1–2 dB at 10 kHz) for air. Keep compression polite: 2:1 or 3:1 ratio, slow attack (20–30 ms), 2–4 dB of gain reduction. The goal is glue, never pumping.
Space
Give your reverb 20–40 ms of pre-delay and chords stay lush while the transient survives. On lead lines, a dotted-eighth delay at 15–20% mix fills the gaps between vocal phrases nicely. Often I bake all of this into the preset itself using Serum 2’s FX buses; the routing is walked through in my Serum 2 effects guide.
Vocal textures
Pitched vocal chops and breathy textures behind the hook are everywhere in modern RnB. Serum 2’s granular engine makes them almost trivially easy: load a vocal phrase, slow the grain position down, and an atmosphere appears. There’s a step-by-step in my separate vocal chops tutorial if you want the full process.
Should you use presets if you’re not a sound designer?
Yes. Especially then, I’d say. Guitarists don’t wind their own strings and nobody thinks less of them. A preset is an instrument: someone else spent the hours on filter tweaking so your hours can go into songs.
What people underrate is how much presets teach. Open a patch that impresses you, poke through the oscillators, trace where the LFOs are routed. Most working producers learned synthesis exactly this way, by reverse-engineering sounds they liked instead of reading manuals.
One habit worth enforcing on yourself: on a serious record, never leave a preset fully stock. Nudge the cutoff, trade out a wavetable, re-time the LFO. Those five minutes make the sound yours, and they prevent two producers from dropping the identical patch in the same week.
FAQ: RnB Serum presets
Do Serum 1 RnB presets work in Serum 2?
Yes. Serum 2 opens every Serum 1 patch and it sounds identical, and Serum 1 owners get the upgrade free. Every pack named here runs in both versions, though the newer ones lean on Serum 2’s extra oscillator and FX buses.
What sounds do I need for a modern RnB beat?
The minimum kit looks like this: one electric-piano or keys patch, one dark pad, a clean sine sub, one pluck or bell for melodies, plus some vocal texture. Five sounds total. Classic RnB records use fewer elements than beginners assume, because space is baked into the style.
Are free RnB presets good enough to release music with?
Some of them, yes. The distance between free and paid has shrunk over the years; what paid packs really buy you is consistency and coverage. Begin with a free pack and upgrade once you keep needing sounds it can’t give you.
Why do my chords sound thinner than on real records?
Blame voicing and layering before blaming the preset. Spread the chord over two octaves, drop in a 9th, and float a quiet pad an octave above the keys. Then make sure your high-pass on the keys isn’t overzealous; 100 Hz is all you need.
And that’s the entire playbook: warm presets, rich chords, gentle processing, plenty of space. Want to sample my version of the sound before anything else? The 250+ free Serum 2 presets are sitting there for you. No catch. Load them and go play some 9th chords.
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.
