So you heard a Flume flip or a Skrillex drop and thought: I want to make that. Good news — the tools they use are cheaper and more accessible than ever. Bad news — there’s no shortcut past the actual work.
I make preset packs for a living, and a big part of that job is reverse-engineering exactly these kinds of sounds. Here’s the path I’d follow if I were starting from zero in 2026.
Why Flume and Skrillex Still Matter
Both of them changed what electronic music is allowed to sound like. Flume treats sound like clay — warped textures, granular mangling, drums that sit slightly off the grid, arrangements that ignore the EDM rulebook. Skrillex built a career on aggressive bass design, vocal chops, and drops that mix dubstep, trap, house and whatever else fits.
They’re also both still moving. Skrillex dropped two albums in 2023 and kept feeding festival sets after that. Flume keeps releasing warped, emotional records that half the future bass scene copies a year later. Studying them isn’t nostalgia — it’s studying two producers who are still ahead.
What actually sets their sound apart
- Flume: granular textures, pitch-bent chords, foley percussion, big sidechained pads, and space. Lots of space.
- Skrillex: FM growls, heavy resampling, chopped vocals, and arrangements where every 4 bars something new happens.
Step 1: Pick a DAW and Stop Shopping
Your DAW is just the room you work in. Pick one, learn it, stop comparing.
- Ableton Live — what both Flume and Skrillex mainly work in. Best for warping audio and resampling.
- FL Studio — fast for beat-driven music, lifetime free updates.
- Logic Pro — Mac only, huge value for the price.
Broke? Waveform Free is a real free DAW with no crippled features, and Ableton’s 90-day trial is enough time to finish several tracks. The DAW matters way less than people on forums pretend it does.
Step 2: Learn One Synth Properly — Serum 2
In the first version of this post I said “start with Serum”. The advice aged well: Serum 2 came out in March 2025 as a free upgrade for Serum 1 owners, and it’s now the closest thing to an industry standard. Three oscillators instead of two, five engine types (wavetable, multisample, sample, granular and spectral), new FX buses and a built-in sequencer. One synth now covers almost everything Flume and Skrillex do with a whole plugin folder.
If you can’t spend money yet, Vital is a genuinely good free wavetable synth and the skills transfer directly. But if you’re choosing where to invest first, it’s Serum 2 — I wrote a full Serum 2 beginner’s guide that walks through the interface in plain terms.
Don’t learn it from an empty init patch alone. Grab our free Serum 2 presets (250+ sounds, no strings attached), open the ones that sound close to your heroes, and figure out why they work. That’s how most working sound designers actually learned.
Step 3: Steal Their Actual Techniques
Here’s where it gets concrete. These are the moves I keep finding when I deconstruct their tracks.
The Flume recipe: granular and pitch abuse
Flume’s signature texture is granular processing — taking a chord, a vocal or a foley recording and smearing it into something alive. Serum 2’s granular engine does this natively now: load any sample, set grain size around 80–200 ms, add a little random pitch spray (±20–30 cents), and modulate grain position with a slow LFO. Suddenly a boring piano chord breathes. I covered the whole workflow in my Serum 2 granular tutorial.
The other half of his sound is pitch: whole chord stacks bent up a fourth mid-phrase, vocals formant-shifted until they’re an instrument. Automate coarse pitch, not just filter cutoff.
For drop chords and supersaw-adjacent sounds, this is the territory of our Serum 2 Future Bass Presets — 40 wide, drop-ready sounds built exactly for this style.
The Skrillex recipe: FM growls and resampling
Skrillex growls are mostly FM plus movement. In Serum 2: oscillator A on a harmonic-rich wavetable, use osc B to FM it, then automate the FM amount and wavetable position at the same time. Add a notch filter sweeping through the mids and you’re 70% there. Multiband upward compression (OTT) at 20–40% depth glues it — not 100%, that’s how you get harsh mush. Full walkthrough in the Serum 2 dubstep growls guide.
Then resample: bounce your growl to audio, chop it, pitch chunks up and down, reverse a few, and sequence the chops. Skrillex has said in interviews that most of his bass work happens after the synth, in audio. That’s the part beginners skip.
If you want ready-made starting points, we built a whole pack around this sound: Serum 2 Skrillex inspired presets Vol.1. Tweak them, resample them, break them.
Vocal chops: the shared weapon
Both producers lean hard on chopped vocals. Take a phrase, cut it on transients, pitch the chops to your chord progression, and play them like a melody. Serum 2’s multisample and granular engines make this easier than the old sampler-juggling workflow — here’s my vocal chops tutorial if you want the exact settings. For raw material, our Platinum stutter vocal samples were made for exactly this kind of chopping.
Step 4: Samples — Use Them Like They Do
Neither of them treats samples as finished parts. A sample is an ingredient, not a meal.
- Flume: field recordings, glitched percussion, vocal atmospheres run through effect chains until unrecognizable.
- Skrillex: voice clips, film FX, sounds recorded on a phone — then pitched, layered and distorted.
Good sources: Splice for polished material and Freesound for weird organic stuff (check the license). Better source: your phone’s voice memo app. A recording of your kitchen tap, pitched down an octave with reverb, is more “Flume” than any pack.
Step 5: Finish Bad Tracks on Purpose
Your first 20 tracks will be rough. That’s not a warning, it’s the assignment. Finish them anyway — a finished bad track teaches you arrangement, mixing and decision-making; an abandoned “perfect” loop teaches you nothing.
Set a rule: one finished track every one or two weeks, uploaded to SoundCloud, shared for feedback. That’s literally where Flume started. Structure-wise, steal the skeleton first: intro, build, drop, breakdown, second build, second drop, outro. Innovate inside it later.
Step 6: Reverse-Engineer One Drop per Week
This is the fastest skill-builder I know. Pick one Flume or Skrillex track and rebuild 8 bars of the drop from scratch:
- Slow it down and list every layer you hear: kick, snare, sub, mid bass, chords, vocal chop, FX, fills.
- Recreate each layer in your DAW — presets allowed, samples allowed. This isn’t a purity test.
- A/B against the original and write down what’s different. Usually it’s the mix and the movement, not the sounds.
Do this weekly for six months and you’ll hear music differently. It forces you to understand automation, arrangement and sound design at the same time.
FAQ: Making Music Like Flume or Skrillex
What DAW do Flume and Skrillex use?
Both work mainly in Ableton Live, with Serum as the core synth plus heavy audio resampling. But nothing in their workflow is impossible in FL Studio or Logic — the technique matters, not the logo.
Do I need expensive gear to start?
No. A laptop, any DAW, wired headphones and a free or cheap synth are enough for the first year. Neither of them started with a treated studio, and monitors can wait until your rooms and your ears are worth it.
How long until my tracks sound decent?
With near-daily practice, expect something you’re not embarrassed by in 6–12 months, and something genuinely good in 2–3 years. Reverse-engineering tracks and finishing music on a schedule compresses that timeline more than any plugin purchase.
Should I learn Serum 1 or Serum 2?
Serum 2. It’s a free upgrade for Serum 1 owners, every tutorial for the old version still applies, and the granular and spectral engines cover the Flume-style texture work that used to need extra plugins.
Start Ugly, Start Today
Neither Flume nor Skrillex became themselves overnight — they finished a lot of mediocre music first. Copy shamelessly, finish consistently, and let your own weirdness leak in over time. One day someone might be reading a guide about how to sound like you.
If you want a head start on the sound design side, download the 250+ free Serum 2 presets — open them up, see how they’re built, and start bending them into something of your own.
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 →
