Club Bass Blueprint: Serum 2 Tech House Bass Recipes

This guide is for producers who open Serum 2 with a club bass in their head and end up with something thin, muddy or lost under the kick. You can follow a tutorial. But when the video ends, you still can't build the next bass on your own, because nobody explained why each step was there. Club Bass Blueprint is a written, step-by-step breakdown of eight bass builds in the style of current tech house and club records. Each recipe lists the oscillator setup, which envelope drives which destination, the distortion and effects order, the EQ moves, and the sidechain approach. Between the recipes you get the patterns that repeat across all of them: kick-wavetable basses, stacked sub layers with phase and fine-tune adjustments, envelope-controlled filter plucks, monoing the low end, portamento on overlapping MIDI notes, and bouncing and reversing audio for transitions. You'll also get a troubleshooting section for the usual problems: phase cancellation, a sub that disappears on club systems, and distortion that eats the low end. By the end you should be able to hear a bass in a track, guess its construction, and build a working version in Serum 2 in under half an hour. You should also be able to design your own variations. I'm Sam Smyers, a Los Angeles music producer and sound designer. I make Serum 2 presets, courses and samples, and I regularly post bass breakdowns of current club tracks. These recipes come from those walkthroughs, with the reasoning I usually have no room to explain in a short video.