The Secret To Serum Is Tweaking Great Presets

Sound design is arguably the most important part of your unique sound as a producer. Sound design makes you sound like, well, YOU. Here at Hyperbits HQ, we strongly fight against the narrative that “real producers” build their sounds from scratch. The truth is, very few producers actually do that. Most producers find great presets, tweak them, and call it a day.

Why is this so crucial? Let’s be honest, all of us can’t be the best sound designer in the world. Fortunately, the people who are the best sound designers in the world often make their presets available to us. What great producers do is find high-quality source material (like a preset), and modify it to their needs. Maybe they tweak the envelope, change the filter parameters, or modify the waveform.

My message to you is this: stop doing sound design from scratch! Instead, stock up on presets, find one that is close to the sound you hear in your head and make the necessary subtle tweaks to get the sound you desire.

Now, let’s get to those presets. These are the 15 Best Free Serum Preset Packs on the internet along with a massive list of honorable mentions at the end.

The List: The 29 Best FREE Xfer Records Serum Preset Banks Available

1. EchoSoundWorks Unison

What You Get: This free grab packs a punch across many different genres. It is built up of 60 unique patches that are all modeled after some of my absolute favorite vintage hardware synths (Junos and Moog Models and even that classic Prophet sound).

Why You Need It: Serum gets some flack for sounding a little too digital. I simply don’t believe that’s true if you’re using the right presets. EchoSoundWorks Unison is designed to bring analog life into a digital synth. Making house, lo-fi, techno, or synthwave? This preset pack is for you.

If you’re looking at a modern, fresh take on the ever-popular old-school vibe, this is a must-have.

Genres It’s Best For: Future Bass, Chillout, Retrowave, Pop, and LoFi.

2. Cymatics Xfer Serum Starter Pack

What You Get: 100 presets and 50 wavetables custom-built for grizzled and aggressive sound designs. Cymatics is a name all over the world of music production. And their free Serum starter pack doesn’t disappoint. This pack contains basses, leads, pads, keys, and more — is a great starting point for your newly minted preset pack library.

Why You Need It: Getting unique sequences, patterns and wubz can be one of the most time consuming parts of creating modern bass music. But this free pack cuts those corners and gives you interesting patches that are filled with character and radio-ready to make your fans headbang on the nearest handrail 

Genres It’s Best For: Dubstep, Riddem, Future Bass, and Drum & Bass

3. Hyperbits Ultimate Serum Bank

What You Get: Dozens of atmospheres, noises, wavetables, leads, basses, and chords that are sonically proven to move a dancefloor. What does “sonically proven” mean? It means that we’ve used these exact patches in some of my most popular tracks, that all went to millions of plays.

Why You Need It: Here at Hyperbits HQ, we hand crafted this preset pack with one goal in mind: to make the best free preset pack on the internet. Of course, you need to be the judge of that — we’ve made this pack from our instructor’s own tracks and have bona fide proof that these presets sound great in top-tier productions. Beyond your normal basses and leads, we’ve also included some unique atmospheres and noises.

Genres It’s Best For: This pack is the perfect blend of patches that suit any modern genre perfectly. They are ideal for anyone wanting a modern sound with little or no additional processing.

4. Surge Sounds Future Bass

What You Get: Surge Sounds Future Bass pack is actually a paid preset pack, but they offer a high-quality demo pack for free. With Future Bass being one of the most popular genres of electronic music right now, it’s extremely valuable to have a set of sounds specific to the genre. Future Bass producers: be sure not to sleep on this one.

Why You Need It: It’s no secret that future bass is the most oversaturated genre in the game right now, which means that your sounds absolutely must stand out from the competition. This pack offers that in spades, and arms you with some of the best patches for the genre you can find. 

Genres It’s Best For: Future Bass (duh), but also Chillout, Retro Wave, and Vaporwave.

5. r/SerumPresets

What You Get: To a degree, you get everything. r/SerumPresets isn’t actually a preset pack itself, but rather a forum dedicated to Serum Presets of all kinds. The content you’ll find here is a bit of a mixed bag — YouTube tutorials, paid packs, free packs, and discussion threads — but there are some gems here waiting to be discovered. 

Why You Need It: This is also an AWESOME place to post questions you have about Serum for other users to help you with. Even if you don’t find anything at first glance that piques your interest, it’s included on this list because it should at least be on your radar. Check it every few weeks and you’re bound to find some quality stuff to use in your next track.

Genres It’s Best For: Every genre is welcome here, it is the internet after all.

6. 7Skies Free Serum Wavetables

What You Get: 7Skies is one of the most knowledgeable producers and sound designers in the game right now and actually hosts a massive arsenal of production resources completely for free on his site (linked above). Not only do you get a wealth of wavetables and presets, but you can also find high-quality patches for other popular synths like Sylenth, Massive, and more. 

Why You Need It: Serum is a wavetable synthesizer, meaning three-dimensional wavetables are used to produce sound, not two-dimensional waveforms like in other synths. 7Skies Serum Wavetables is a wavetable pack — you can use these wavetables to get cool, unique sounds, but you can still customize the other parameters to your needs. I recommend this pack for advanced producers who are comfortable with Serum’s interface.

Genres It’s Best For: 7Skies made his name in the trance and progressive scene, and similar producers will clearly find the most usage out of his patches. But that being said, with the sheer amount of quality stuff posted on his site, I’m sure that all producers have something to gain.

7. Sound Terminal Terminal Waves

What You Get: Over 260 multi-genre patches that are fully mapped and ready to use in your music. These patches run the gamut of leads, chords, pads, basses, and FXs. Long story short, they have a little bit of everything, but they certainly tend to favor more modern-sounding bass genres. 

Why You Need It: 264 is no joke, and it is the perfect amount to complement and build up any library. So whether you’re just starting out with Serum and looking to get your library off the ground, or if you’ve been using the same patches for years and are looking for a  fresh perspective and sound, this is a jackpot bank of patches. 

Genres It’s Best For: Dubstep, Future Bass, and Trap

8. Gravitas Create Catalyst

What You Get: 164 patches all designed by some pretty dope names including Mr. Bill, Mindex, Orenda, Secret Recipe, Templo, and more. This pack is pure hype mode and offers a ton of powerful weapons to use in your next bass-focused tune.

Why You Need It: Gravitas Create Catalyst offers a huge number of presets that were all designed by accomplished producers. This pack offers an exceptional variety of modern synth tones — this pack will be a useful tool for a producer in any genre. These sounds are damn inspiring and keep you focused on grinding on making tunes that smack.

Genres It’s Best For: Dubstep, Trap, Bass House, Future Bass, and Bass House

9. VIPER Xfer Serum Tech House Presets

What You Get: A grab bag of basses, stabs, plucks, sequences, drums, and more. But that’s not all, as you get a handful of super interesting wavetables and resampled noise shots taken from hardware synths. It’s the perfect mix of warm outboard sounds and modern, crisp digital patches. 

Why You Need It: Tech House has absolutely exploded as a genre over the last few years. And let’s be honest, a lot of the genre’s appeal is in its cool, glitchy sounds. VIPER is a compact but effective collection of 17 presets and 19 wavetables to get you started in the genre.

I’m LOSING IT…

Genres It’s Best For: Modern Tech house and Classic House genres

10. BVKER and Diode Eins Cosmic Techno

What You Get: Rumbling basslines, ambient drones, and reverby stabs — this pack will get you started with 17 Serum presets and over 100 samples.

Why You Need It: Our good friend BVKER is back with another solid preset pack, this time targeted towards techno producers. These presets, and accompanying samples are handcrafted it take your listener on a journey. It can be hard to find quality samples and sounds in the dark techno space, and this pack is the answer to that need. 

Genres It’s Best For: Techno and other darker genres

11. Synthctrl Vaporwave Keys and Pads

What You Get: 25 lush keys and pads that positively drip with the nostalgia of my childhood in the ’90s. Think computer games, shopping malls, and music still on MTV.

Why You Need It: You’ll find some sort of piano or keyboard in almost any genre of music. Serum is exciting in that we can expand beyond our typical piano sounds into a whole new world of keyboard tones. Vaporwave lets us use Serum to capture the nostalgia of 90s shopping malls and video games — even though there are only 15 sounds included, they’re high quality and are certainly worthy of making it into your productions.

Genres It’s Best For: Vaporwave, Dreamawve, and chillwave are the first that come to mind but I’m sure LoFi producers and beatmakers would love these too.

12. Gum Road Serum Lo-fi Vol. 5

What You Get: Consider this bank of patches to be an entire suite of lo-fi tools, including atmosphere, pads, chords, and softer leads.

Why You Need It: Gum Road actually offers tons of free preset packs: Lo-Fi Vol. 5 is our favorite of the bunch. Once again, this pack showcases Serum’s versatility as a tool that can make sounds that range from the modern cutting edge to the retro and classic. This pack is “pay what you want” — so while it could be free, it might be nice to throw the creators a little dough 

Genres It’s Best For: Lofi, chillwave, Dreamwave, and any of the softer and chiller genres...

13. Bantana Future Vibes Vol.2

What You Get: 50 presets that include chords, leads, basses, plucks, and more. All these presets are rich and lush and fit perfectly into one of the most popular genres out there right now. If you’re looking to tap into that Mad decent or Bitbird sound, this is the easiest way to do so.

Why You Need It: Once again, this preset pack is a hotbed of great sounds for future bass producers. Inspired by the likes of Marshmello, San Holo, and Mura Masa, Bantana Future Vibes is all about analog leads, warm pads, and huge basses. Plus, they’ve even added in some experimental sounds for other genres.

Genres It’s Best For: Future Bass, Trap, and Pop.

14. WA Production Future Bass Mega Pack

What You Get: This Mega pack has everything a producer could need: samples, MIDI clips, and 60 Serum presets. Looking to build out your production library beyond just Serum presets? Start here for a great one-stop-shop solution.

Why You Need It: Because this stacked pack has not a little bit, but a LOT of everything producers love most. It’s got presets, MIDI files, and samples so that you can immediately start using them (even if you’re just starting out with production). I’m legit shocked at how much is included in here, and how quality all the stuff is. 

Genres It’s Best For: Bass house and progressive genres are what I usually attribute WA Productions too, but to be honest I’m sure every producer will find some value in it.

15. Lionshare Sound Sunrise Trance

What You Get: Here you’ll find 101 trance presets to get you feeling like you’re on the White Island in 2003 in no time.

Why You Need It: Trance and sunrises go together like peanut butter and jelly. If you want those uplifting, Baeleric, sunrise vibes, look no further than Lionshare Sound Sunrise Trance. These genres thrive on a classic set of sounds, and this pack delivers a quality arsenal of everything your fans are craving (even if they don’t know it yet).

Genres It’s Best For: Trance, progressive, and melodic house & techno.

Honorable Mentions (...and why they're great)

Formula XP: Snag this if you’re making 808 Mafia or Travis Scott type beats

HAWK’s Presets: These are delicate and light, and perfect for any melodic producer

Mellotron: A small and effective pack for anyone making dark beats and ominous tunes

Future Bass Toolkit: A quick grab from the talented designers over at Stickz

Higher Dimensions: Wanting to sound like Marshmallow? Look no further

TONAL: I just found these guys and they’re crushing it in the deep house world! Damn

WA Productions: Sure, we mentioned them before but here’s more dope presets.

Neostra: These are some seriously floor-shaking basses.

Pump Your Sound: Crisp, modern lead sounds for the progressive and melodic house.

Emerlands: Lush presets made by a super talented artist

Spaced: Modern hip hop leads that still have the warmth of analog gear

Strange Things: Nostalgic sounds of the 80s and of my favorite Netflix show

Production Music Live: Quality patches for any underground genre of dance music.

Diode Eines: A fresh addition for more dark, rumbling techno productions.

How To Use Serum Presets

Great! You’ve downloaded a few packs. Now what? Time to get them up and running in Serum, which is pretty simple. Just follow these steps:

Step 1: Download and unzip the library, if necessary.

Step 2: Move the presets into your Serum Presets folder.

• For Mac users, the folder is located at: Macintosh HD//Library/Audio/Presets/Xfer Records/Serum Presets/Presets/User.
• For Windows users, the folder is here: C:\Users\___\Documents\Xfer\Serum Presets\Presets/User

Step 3: Open your DAW and Serum, and you’ll see the Presets in the dropdown menu.

Step 4: Get to work! 

Final Thoughts on Free Samples and Serum

A full library of presets is a great foundation to create music. But remember, presets are only one part of the puzzle: you need great samples, MIDI, FX, and a bank of knowledge to aid you in making great music.

That’s why we created the Hyperbits Creative Suite, which comes free for any students we work directly with at the Hyperbits Masterclass, is designed to give you a complete tool kit of everything you need (including Serum Presets!) to make amazing music.

Now that you’ve got those presets, get out there and make some incredible sounds!