I Made a Whole Song Using ONLY Serum 2 (No Other Plugins, No Samples)

Serum 2 dropped yesterday. So I did the obvious thing. I opened a blank Ableton project, told myself "no plugins, no samples, no third-party anything," and tried to write a full Dubstep tune using only Serum 2 on every single channel. Drums included. Vocal included. Risers, FX, sub, lead, all of it.

It worked way better than it had any right to.

The whole build is in the video below. Every preset I dug through, every Holy Trinity stack, the moment I realized I hadn't saved the project once, the part where I do a Batman voice into a mic for the pre-drop vocal. It's a lot.

Watch the Build

Prefer reading? Here's how the track came together and the tricks I leaned on along the way.

How I Start Every Song (Tempo, Key, Root Note)

Two things I do before I touch a single sound: pick the tempo, pick the key. For this one I went 145 BPM in E minor, because E minor is the best key ever and you cannot change my mind.

From there, the move is simple. Write a long note on the root. That's the entire intro foundation. Multiple voices, detune turned down, low pass filter on it, a little Drive and multiband compression for grit. Add a second oscillator an octave up at lower volume and route it through the same chain. Done. You now have a low, slightly mean drone that the rest of the intro sits on top of.

This is one of those tricks people overcomplicate. The root note holds the whole thing together. Trust it.

Building the Intro With Serum 2's Multisamples

I wanted to dig into the new presets, so I went looking for plucks and ended up in the orchestra section. Mallet, strings, that whole world. Serum 2's multisamples are no joke, and I figured if I'm going to lean on them anywhere, the intro is the place.

Wrote a little orchestral phrase, gave it 16 bars, and set up a filter automation that opens up over time so the intro breathes into the big moment at bar 17. Standard tension build. Once that's working, switch to the bass line and lock everything to the key. I always write the bass line first, because once you have your bass line, you have your chords. You can copy those notes up an octave and turn them into a chord pattern in about 30 seconds.

The Borrowed Chord Trick (Make It Major)

Here's a thing I do constantly. When you're in a minor key, find one of the minor chords and make it major. It pulls your ear in a direction the listener wasn't expecting.

Easiest place to do it: the four chord or the five chord. Both of those almost always sound great as borrowed major chords inside a minor progression. Try the five first. The five always hits.

Then for extended voicings, take the middle note of every chord and put it up an octave. That's it. That's the whole trick. You go from "blocky chord stack" to "actually sounds like a producer made this."

One thing to watch for: when you make a chord major, you've borrowed a note that's technically out of scale. So whenever that note shows up in your top melody (in this case, a D#), you have to commit to it. Use it where there's an E or D in your melody, otherwise the major chord sounds like a mistake instead of a choice.

Making a Riser Inside Serum 2

People assume you need a sample pack for risers. You don't.

A simple white noise riser is just two ingredients: noise, and a high pass filter with resonance. That's the skeleton. Then you can add tonality if you want it to feel more musical, lock that to the key, and automate the pitch bend amount upward so the tonal layer climbs while the noise layer stays where it is.

Add some compression at the end. Some Reverb to push it back in the mix. Done. If you want it to sound different, swap the high pass for a band pass. Make it longer. Push the pitch bend higher. The shape of a riser is mostly the filter sweep and the resonance, not what plugin you used.

Drums (Yes, From Serum 2)

I'm not going to pretend Serum 2 is a drum machine. But the kick designer / kick generator presets actually slap. There's even a Mr. Bill kick patch in there, which felt right. Found one I liked, ran a transient shaper on it, and moved on.

For the buildup, snares from the multisample library, with the classic exponential roll trick: whatever pattern your kick is doing, take that same rhythmic seed and accelerate it on the snare. So one hit per bar becomes two, then four, then eight, then sixteen, by the time you hit the drop.

I don't pitch bend kicks. I do pitch bend snares. Slight bend up gives the snare roll that "rising" feel without doing extra automation work.

Drop Sound Design With the Holy Trinity

Drop time. Here's how I think about it.

Your drop should reference your intro somewhere. Not literally the same notes, but a callback. It glues the song together and makes the writing feel intentional instead of "two ideas duct-taped to each other."

For the actual drop sound, I do what I call the Holy Trinity: Distortion, multiband compression, and Dimension Expander. Stack those three on a simple wavetable patch and it instantly sounds like a drop. From there I add filter movement (low pass with the LFO doing the work), a second wavetable for harmonic richness, and FM modulation for the chewy mid-range.

Quick Serum 2 thing worth knowing: FM from B is traditional FM, like Operator or FM8. FM from C is Phase Distortion, which is what most Serum 1 patches were actually using. If you're loading old patches and they sound off, that's why. Switch the FM source and it'll sound right again.

The Yoi (And the Pre-Drop Vocal)

The yoi is non-negotiable in Dubstep. Mine is one note, doubled with a fifth on the second drop for variation, processed with a low pass with peak resonance, downsampling distortion, and the drive control mapped to vowel position.

For the pre-drop vocal I just talked into a microphone. The trick is to talk like Batman. Drop your voice an octave in your head, growl the word, then in post you pitch it down two semitones in Serum 2 and run it through Serum 2's ring mod. Ring mod is genuinely underused for vocal processing. As the cutoff gets lower, the vocal gets more guttural and broken. Find the sweet spot, compress, de-ess if you have to, fade the front end in slightly to tame the harsh transient. Done.

Save Your Projects

About two-thirds of the way through the build I realized I hadn't saved the project once. Not once. The whole thing was sitting in unsaved RAM.

Save your projects. Save them constantly. Cmd+S is free. I'm telling you what I should have told myself.

What I'd Tell You to Steal From This

The root note carries the song. Pick a key, write a long root-note drone, and let everything else sit on top of it.

Write your bass line first. Once you have the bass, the chords are mostly already written. Copy the notes up an octave and shape them.

And honestly, Serum 2 by itself is enough. Multisamples handle the orchestral stuff. Kick generator handles drums. Ring mod processes the vocal. Wavetables for sub. You really don't need a sample pack to finish a Dubstep track anymore.

Ready to Actually Learn This?

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Dubstep forever.

Sources

• Making a Song From Scratch Using ONLY SERUM 2!!! on the fly (Futureproof Music School, YouTube)
• Serum 2 — Xfer Records