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It should be no surprise that I, as a melodic house producer, am a big fan of PML. There’s a reason why countless melodic, deep, and progressive house producers cite them as their favorite preset and sample company – they release often, and everything they release is top quality.
And now, one of my favorite companies has collaborated with one of my favorite rising talents. This is basically Christmas for music producers.
The rise of Jack Willard has been a long time coming. Exploding onto the melodic house circuit with “Big Sky” in December 2023, Jack’s melodic progressive style has shot him to stardom in a relatively short amount of time. He’s fresh off the release of his debut Colorize EP “Patterns“, and has seen support from some of Spotify’s biggest editorial playlists, SiriusXM Chill, BBC Radio One, and Above & Beyond Group Therapy. He’ll also be performing at Colorize’s upcoming shows in New York and Toronto.
As mentioned earlier, Jack kind of came out of nowhere. But, check out his music and you’ll understand why he’s gotten so big so fast: he’s an expert producer and sound designer. Listen to any track on “Patterns” and you’ll be treated to some of the cleanest mix downs you can find in melodic house, as well as gently evolving synths, soaring melodic ambiances, and some of the best bass sound design you can hear right now. He’s been putting in the work for years. Now, he’s beginning to reap the benefits.
And, as it turns out, we can now all be beneficiaries of Jack’s work. He’s teamed up with PML to launch Melodic Progressive for Serum 2, 100 presets geared towards producers of deep, progressive, & melodic house. The pack heavily uses some of Serum 2’s newest features, including the re-worked macro and routing systems. And, Jack’s paired each preset to a MIDI file to give you an instant idea of use cases for each sound. The previews for the pack are incredibly promising: beautiful ambiences built into leads, evolving pads, highly-technical sequences, and some of his signature basses.
It’s not able you’re able to use the same sounds as one of the current hottest names in melodic house is using. With this pack, you can. I was lucky enough to grab a copy of it. Here are my thoughts.
Endless Flexibility in Every Preset
The first thing you’ll notice when opening up this pack is how many ways there are to play.
Jack has included MIDI clips within each preset that you can just turn on and listen to – they work similarly to a sequencer in most cases. The patterns he’s come up with are all great – ranging from arps to techno bass stabs – but you can also just turn off the clip as well and play the instrument the way you’d like to. This is the first time I’ve seen a producer use the clip function like this, and definitely a great feature if you need to get some quick inspiration while using the presets.
Please note that the pack comes with a few wavetables, samples, and impulses that you’ll need to load into the requisite Serum 2 folders to make sure every preset works properly. It’s an easy process, but definitely a missable one if you don’t know any better. Make sure to do this!
There is a lot of technical work on display here. Each preset uses all eight macros, which will allow you to adjust one or several parameters at once. Look at the pathways leading out of each macro and you’ll discover it’s adjusting knobs on various FXs and other parts of the synth there’s a good chance you’ve never even thought to use. The results are mind-blowing, and at times, overwhelming – but in a good way.
Unlike other presets, there’s a good chance you won’t have to go and make specific automation while working with this plugin. Nine out of ten times, everything you need will be handled in those macros, from panning, to filter cutoff, to reverb, to the actual shape of the wavetable itself. All of the hard work has literally already been done for you, making it easier than ever for your synths to evolve with only a few clicks.
You’ll find everything from simple-sounding plucks and basses to highly intricate pads (PD Unreal is absolutely wild), sequences, and basses. One of the sequences, SQ Beginnings, is quite possibly the single coolest Serum preset I’ve ever seen. It’s an entire melody line programmed into E Major, and all you do is hit the bass notes – and you’ve got a song already. Practical? Maybe not, considering that there’s only a couple of melodies that the patch can play. But it’s still a demonstration of just what’s possible with this plugin, and shows that Jack’s clearly one of the best to be designing with it at this moment.
Plus, as I mentioned earlier, there are 100 total presets in this pack, and all of them are highly malleable. There are so many sounds here and so many possible variations of them that it’s unlikely that you’ll use the exact same sound twice. It’s a massive sandbox of a preset pack, inspiring creativity with every automation and every note.
How is it in practice?
It’s excellent in practice.
Below is a demo track that I whipped together in about 20 minutes. I have not used any external processing outside of some light EQ and sidechain. All of the processing you’ll hear in this demonstration is built into the presets themselves, and all of the automations are mostly affected by the macros, although I did use the regular filter knob once or twice. It’s all built around SQ Beginnings, and I even included a little callback to Jack’s “Big Sky”, a track that I mentioned earlier.
Oh, by the way, everything except the kick is coming from Serum. The hats, snares, and claps are from a few of the presets. He really did think of everything.
This is not supposed to represent a finished product. This is just a demonstration of what is possible at face value with the pack. And, as you can hear, quite a bit is. With a bit more love, this could be a sick melodic house track.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
Quantity, quality, and flexibility.
This pack comes with a ton of great sounding presets that use every aspect of what makes Serum 2 so great to play with. You can make every preset your own super easily, and maybe even learn a thing or two about how to use Serum 2 better – considering the amount of technical finesse in each plugin, these presets would be awesome to study and reverse engineer if you want to get better at Serum 2 sound design.
No extra processing needed!
These plugins are about as drag & drop as drag & drop gets. Chances are, you won’t have to add any extra processing to some of these plugins unless you want to – everything’s already been built in. I say this with confidence: this is the most “project-ready” preset pack I’ve ever seen.
Cons:
Don’t get overwhelmed!
When using plugins these intricate, I sometimes find myself getting stressed out at the amount of stuff going on. This happened a few times when I was using these. Just know that, even if things look confusing and stressful sometimes, all you need to do is play with the macros. Don’t overthink it.
Non-house producers, look away.
If you aren’t producing house or an adjacent genre (i.e. techno), then this isn’t the pack for you. But, you’ve probably already figured that out.
Conclusion: Should you get it?
100%. If you’ve got 60 bucks lying around (or if PML is running a sale, which they frequently do – it’s currently listed at $37 USD) and want to get your hands on some seriously impressive sounds, then this is the pack for you.
Hats off to Jack Willard for an incredible first effort at a Serum 2 pack. Whether he’s designing sounds for the masses or releasing his own tracks, it’s clear that he’s going to be a name to watch in this space for quite some time.
Bonus: Tips From The Man Himself
We reached out to Jack for some hot tips on how to use his pack. Here’s what he had to say:
- If you’d like to create your own Macros, you can free up any Macro by right-clicking it, and selecting “Apply and Delete Macro”. This will clear the Macro without altering the sound of the patch.
- You can assign multiple parameters to the same Macro. For example, opening the filter cutoff while also sending the sound to a reverb in Bus 1 with the Mod Wheel.
- The “Global Settings” panel in Serum 2 offers a quick way to add character to any patch. You can randomize the pitch, panning, filter, and envelopes from the Voice Control module.
- Tip: You can also make the entire patch more snappy with the Envelope Scaling feature
- Serum 2 is a powerful tool for idea generation. By setting the Scale (above the Piano Roll) with the key of your project, you can generate melodic ideas using the Arp. Use the Shift value to set intervals of your arp/chord, and the Range value to the number of notes in the arp/chord. The Chance knob allows you to reduce the probability that a note plays when the Arp is triggered.
- For arps, the pentatonic scale will work well with any bass notes or chords, as long as the Scale is set to the key of your track (e.g. C pentatonic minor for a track in Cmin).
- If you stumble across a patch you like, check out the Matrix section to learn how the sound was made, providing an overview of every routing in the patch.
Grab Melodic Progressive for Serum 2 by Jack Willard here.
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