You heard a Flume flip or a Skrillex drop and something clicked: I want to make that. Here’s the good part — the tools they work with have never been cheaper or easier to get. Here’s the catch: there is no way around the actual hours.
Making preset packs is my day job, and a huge chunk of that job is reverse-engineering exactly these sounds. If I had to start again from nothing in 2026, this is the route I’d take.
Why Flume and Skrillex Still Matter
These two rewrote the rules for what electronic music can sound like. Flume handles audio like clay: warped textures, granular mangling, drums nudged slightly off the grid, arrangements that couldn’t care less about the EDM formula. Skrillex made his name on brutal bass design, chopped vocals, and drops that pull from dubstep, trap, house, whatever serves the moment.
And neither has stopped. Skrillex put out two albums in 2023 and kept fueling festival sets afterward. Flume keeps dropping warped, emotional records that half the future bass scene imitates a year later. Studying them isn’t a nostalgia exercise. You’re studying two producers who are still out in front.
What actually sets their sound apart
- Flume: granular textures, pitch-bent chords, foley percussion, huge sidechained pads, and space. So much space.
- Skrillex: FM growls, relentless resampling, sliced vocals, and arrangements where something new arrives every 4 bars.
Step 1: Pick a DAW and Stop Shopping
A DAW is just the room you make music in. Choose one, get fluent, quit comparing.
- Ableton Live: the main tool for both Flume and Skrillex. Strongest at audio warping and resampling.
- FL Studio: quick for beat-driven work, and updates are free for life.
- Logic Pro: Mac only, but you get a ton for the money.
No budget at all? Waveform Free is a genuine DAW with nothing crippled, and Ableton’s 90-day trial gives you time to finish multiple tracks. Forum arguments massively overrate how much the DAW choice matters.
Step 2: Learn One Synth Properly — Serum 2
The original version of this post said “start with Serum”, and that advice held up. In March 2025, Serum 2 arrived as a free upgrade for Serum 1 owners, and it’s now about as close to an industry standard as synths get. You get three oscillators instead of two, five engine types (wavetable, multisample, sample, granular and spectral), fresh FX buses and a sequencer built right in. What used to take a whole plugin folder of Flume and Skrillex tricks now fits inside one synth.
Can’t spend anything yet? Vital is a legitimately good free wavetable synth, and everything you learn in it carries over. But if you’re deciding where your first real money goes, put it on Serum 2; my Serum 2 beginner’s guide walks the interface in plain language.
One warning: don’t try to learn it from a blank init patch alone. Download our free Serum 2 presets (250+ sounds, no strings attached), find the ones that remind you of your heroes, and pick apart why they work. That’s how most working sound designers actually got good.
Step 3: Steal Their Actual Techniques
Time to get specific. These are the moves that show up again and again when I take their tracks apart.
The Flume recipe: granular and pitch abuse
Flume’s trademark texture comes from granular processing: a chord, a vocal or a foley recording gets smeared until it feels alive. Serum 2 now does this natively with its granular engine: drag in any sample, set grain size somewhere around 80–200 ms, sprinkle in random pitch spray (±20–30 cents), then run a slow LFO on grain position. A boring piano chord starts breathing. The full workflow lives in my Serum 2 granular tutorial.
The other half of the Flume sound is pitch itself: entire chord stacks yanked up a fourth mid-phrase, vocals formant-shifted until they become an instrument. So automate coarse pitch, not only filter cutoff.
When it comes to drop chords and supersaw-adjacent territory, that’s what our Serum 2 Future Bass Presets were made for: 40 wide, drop-ready sounds designed around exactly this style.
The Skrillex recipe: FM growls and resampling
Most Skrillex growls boil down to FM plus movement. In Serum 2 that means: harmonic-rich wavetable on oscillator A, oscillator B FM-ing it, then automating FM amount and wavetable position together. Sweep a notch filter through the mids and you’ve covered 70% of the distance. Glue it with multiband upward compression (OTT) at 20–40% depth, not 100%, unless harsh mush is the goal. The complete walkthrough is in the Serum 2 dubstep growls guide.
After that comes resampling: print the growl to audio, slice it, pitch pieces up and down, flip a few backwards, sequence the slices. Skrillex has said in interviews that the bulk of his bass work happens post-synth, in audio. Beginners skip that stage almost every time.
Prefer ready-made launching points? We built an entire pack around this sound: Serum 2 Skrillex inspired presets Vol.1. Tweak them, resample them, break them.
Vocal chops: the shared weapon
Chopped vocals are the one weapon both producers rely on constantly. Grab a phrase, slice it on transients, tune the pieces to your chord progression, and play them like a melody line. Serum 2’s multisample and granular engines have made this far less painful than the old sampler-juggling days; my vocal chops tutorial has the exact settings. And if you need raw material, our Platinum stutter vocal samples exist precisely for this kind of chopping.
Step 4: Samples — Use Them Like They Do
Neither of them drops a sample in and calls it done. To them a sample is an ingredient, never a meal.
- Flume: field recordings, glitched percussion, vocal atmospheres pushed through effect chains until you can’t tell what they were.
- Skrillex: voice clips, film FX, stuff recorded on a phone, then pitched, stacked and distorted.
Where to find material: Splice for the polished stuff, Freesound for strange organic recordings (mind the license). The best source, though, is the voice memo app on your phone. Your kitchen tap, pitched down an octave and drowned in reverb, is more “Flume” than anything in a pack.
Step 5: Finish Bad Tracks on Purpose
The first 20 tracks you make will be rough. That’s the assignment, not a warning. Finish them anyway. A finished bad track teaches arrangement, mixing and decision-making; a “perfect” loop you abandoned teaches nothing at all.
Give yourself a rule: finish one track every week or two, put it on SoundCloud, ask for feedback. That is literally how Flume started. For structure, borrow the skeleton first (intro, build, drop, breakdown, second build, second drop, outro) and save the innovation for what happens inside it.
Step 6: Reverse-Engineer One Drop per Week
Fastest skill-builder I’ve found, period. Choose one Flume or Skrillex track and rebuild 8 bars of its drop from nothing:
- Slow the track down and write out every layer you can hear: kick, snare, sub, mid bass, chords, vocal chop, FX, fills.
- Rebuild each layer in your DAW; presets are fine, samples are fine. Nobody’s grading purity here.
- A/B your version against the original and note the differences. Nine times out of ten it’s the mix and the movement, not the sounds themselves.
Keep that up weekly for six months and music stops sounding the same to you. The exercise forces automation, arrangement and sound design into your head all at once.
FAQ: Making Music Like Flume or Skrillex
What DAW do Flume and Skrillex use?
Ableton Live for both, mainly, with Serum as the core synth and a lot of audio resampling on top. None of it is out of reach in FL Studio or Logic, though; what matters is the technique, not the logo on the splash screen.
Do I need expensive gear to start?
No. A laptop, any DAW, wired headphones and a free or cheap synth cover your entire first year. Neither of them began in a treated studio, and monitors can wait until your room and your ears deserve them.
How long until my tracks sound decent?
Practicing most days, count on 6–12 months before you make something you’re not embarrassed by, and 2–3 years before something genuinely good. Reverse-engineering drops and finishing tracks on a schedule shortens that timeline more than any plugin you could buy.
Should I learn Serum 1 or Serum 2?
Serum 2, no question. Serum 1 owners get it free, every old-version tutorial still applies, and the granular and spectral engines handle the Flume-style texture work that used to demand extra plugins.
Start Ugly, Start Today
Flume didn’t wake up as Flume, and Skrillex didn’t wake up as Skrillex; both finished piles of mediocre music on the way. Copy without shame, finish on a schedule, and let your own weirdness seep in gradually. Someday somebody might be reading a guide on how to sound like you.
Want a head start on the sound design side? Download the 250+ free Serum 2 presets, crack them open, study how they’re wired, and start bending them into something that’s yours.
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 →
