The KHORDS Expansion Pack: Future Bass is a 65-waveform, 100-preset content drop built specifically for Future Bass and Future Pop producers who already own the KHORDS base plugin. At $19 regular price (and lower on promotion), it's a targeted genre toolkit. Whether it's worth your money depends entirely on one question: do you actually make this genre, or are you just curious about it?
The problem it solves is real and annoying. You open a session to write a Future Bass drop. You need a stacked, slightly detuned chord pad with a rising Mod Wheel swell. Your existing KHORDS library has 450-plus presets, but most of them are too neutral. Too genre-agnostic. You're burning 20 minutes auditioning sounds that are close but not right, when you should be writing the actual track.
That's exactly who this pack is for: the KHORDS owner making Bass Music or Future Pop who wants to stop browsing and start building.
The Chord Gap That Kills Sessions
Harmony is where most producers slow down. Not because they don't know music theory, but because translating a chord feeling into a playable, production-ready sound takes time. A Fmaj9 voicing is easy to notate. Getting it to sit right in a Future Bass mix, with the right amount of upper harmonic spread and the Mod Wheel controlling a filter swell in real time, is a different job entirely.
The Future Bass expansion is a collection of 65 elegant and melodic chords and stabs designed specifically to work within Bass Music productions. That genre focus is the whole point.
In detail, you get 65 brand new waveforms, broken down into 25 Major Feel Chords, 25 Minor Feel Chords and 15 Root or Open Notes, plus 100 presets all with Mod Wheel performance setting ready to perform.
The 15 Root or Open Notes category is the underrated piece here. It's not something most pack marketing leads with. But having clean, uncoloured root and open-string-style waveforms means you can layer your own intervallic voicings on top of the more complex chord shapes. That's actual creative headroom.
How It Performs in a Real Session
We loaded the pack into KHORDS after a quick .pkg install on Mac. No drama. No authorisation wall to climb. It was in the browser in under two minutes. That part is satisfying.
We pulled up one of the minor chord presets and ran it straight into an 808 bass bus. The voicing sat with more mid-range presence than we expected, with a slight nasal quality around 1kHz that could clash with a busy lead. A small cut of about 2dB at 900Hz with a Q of 1.2 cleaned it up immediately and let it breathe around the bass.
The Mod Wheel integration is where the presets genuinely shine. We mapped the wheel to a filter cutoff on a major pad preset and swept it live during a drop. The movement went from a tight, almost plucked attack at 0 to a full, air-y open sound at full throw, covering roughly 2 octaves of filter range. It's performance-ready in a way that most preset packs aren't.
The raw samples cover all the main sounds you'd expect in Future Bass: smooth pads, classic keys, rich synths, delicate plucks, brassy leads, and emotive strings. We found the pluck waveforms and the brassy leads to be the standouts. The strings are decent but feel a little polite. They don't have the dramatic swell that some of the Arturia Analog Lab presets pull off in this space.
CPU impact is light. KHORDS is not a heavy engine, and loading expansion waveforms doesn't change that. We ran 8 instances on a single session bus without noticeable meter movement. That's a real-world comfort.
The collection features 100 expertly crafted and expressive KHORDS presets for instant gratification. If you make Bass Music or Future Pop, you'll need these sounds. That's the marketing line, and it's mostly true. "Mostly" is doing some work there, though.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The genre focus is the strongest argument for buying. You're not getting a general-purpose library padded with sounds you'll never use. Every waveform is positioned for Future Bass. That's a discipline that most sample companies don't have.
The Mod Wheel performance settings on all 100 presets are a real strength. We love that detail. It means you can perform expressively from the first note without going into the KHORDS editor to wire anything up manually.
The weaknesses are structural, not cosmetic. First: this is a dead purchase if you don't own KHORDS. This software requires a copy of KHORDS, and you need to ensure KHORDS is updated to version 1.0.4 or higher before installing. That's a hard gate. No base plugin, no expansion. Simple.
Second: 65 waveforms is a light count for the full price. Some competing KHORDS expansions, like Cloud Waves, target a more atmospheric niche where the narrow count is part of the design. Future Bass is a broader genre. You'll cycle through the 65 waveforms faster than you'd like.
Third: there's no sound design rabbit hole here. What you get is what KHORDS' engine lets you do with it. If you want deep FM layering or wavetable morphing, this isn't the workflow. It's a preset instrument. Know that going in.
Value for the Price
At a promotion price, this is a no-brainer. Buy it without thinking. At the regular $19, it's fair but not a steal. Twenty bucks is two cups of overpriced coffee and a fraction of what a Splice credit pack costs for worse sounds.
The bundle play is smarter than buying individual packs. The full KHORDS Expansion Pack Bundle gives you all five packs (Future Bass, LoFi Keys, Cloud Waves, Drum & Bass Aurora, and Analog Vapors) for over 300 new waveforms and 500 presets. Check the Plugin Boutique product page for current bundle pricing, because it moves.
If you're already invested in the KHORDS platform, this is a sensible $19 spend. If you're not a KHORDS owner, no version of this price is right for you.
Who Should (and Shouldn't) Buy This
- ✅ Buy if you already own KHORDS and you actively make Future Bass or Future Pop productions.
- ✅ Buy if you're watching it on promotion. At that price, the genre-specific value is easy to justify.
- ✅ Buy if you want performance-ready Mod Wheel presets and don't want to spend time wiring up macro assignments yourself.
- ❌ Skip if you don't own KHORDS. This does nothing without the base plugin.
- ❌ Skip if you make genres outside of Bass Music or Future Pop. The genre focus that makes it strong for the right producer makes it useless for everyone else.
- ❌ Skip if you want a deep sound design tool. This is a preset library, not a synthesis engine. You're working with pre-voiced waveforms inside KHORDS' existing architecture.
You’ll also want to read our full KHORDS base plugin review before committing if you don’t own the instrument yet.
Score Breakdown
| Category | Score | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sound Quality | 4.0/5 | Plucks and brassy leads are excellent; strings feel polite compared to the competition |
| Value for Money | 3.5/5 | Fair at full price, strong at promo price, and 65 waveforms is lean for what you pay |
| Ease of Use | 4.5/5 | Install is frictionless; Mod Wheel mappings ready from the first load |
| Features | 3.5/5 | 100 presets and 65 waveforms covers the genre but won't last you forever |
| CPU Efficiency | 4.5/5 | Light load; 8 instances ran without stress in testing |
| Overall | 3.8/5 | A solid genre-specific expansion with real limitations if you're outside the target audience |
Alternatives to Consider
If you're already in the KHORDS world, the KHORDS Cloud Waves expansion takes a narrower atmospheric angle. It's a different flavour. Worth comparing before you buy either one individually, since the bundle pricing may make the decision for you.
Outside the KHORDS ecosystem, Arturia Analog Lab V carries a huge bank of Future Bass-appropriate presets across its synth collection. The upside: vastly deeper sound design options. The downside: a much higher price, and you're trawling through thousands of presets instead of 100 focused ones.
Spire by Reveal Sound with a Future Bass preset bank from a reputable sound designer (Output, Cymatics, KSHMR Sounds) is another route. More CPU-hungry than KHORDS by a significant margin, and you'll need to buy Spire itself on top of any preset bank. But the synthesis depth is genuinely in a different league for producers who want to go deeper than preset-tweaking.
For producers who want chord content without any plugin dependency at all, a well-curated MIDI chord pack gets you closer to DAW-agnostic flexibility, though you lose all the performance and Mod Wheel elements that make this expansion appealing.
At a promotion price, skip nothing and just buy it. At $19, weigh the bundle pricing first. The bundle makes more financial sense than three individual packs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need the full KHORDS plugin to use this expansion?
Yes. This expansion does nothing without the KHORDS base plugin installed and updated. You'll need KHORDS v1.0.4 or higher before you can install or load any of the Future Bass content. If you don't own KHORDS yet, check our review of the base plugin first before spending money on expansions.
What's the difference between the 25 Major, 25 Minor, and 15 Root waveforms?
The Major and Minor waveforms are pre-voiced chord shapes, full stacked harmonic content tuned to a specific emotional character. The 15 Root or Open Notes are simpler: single-note or open-interval waveforms that give you a neutral harmonic base to layer with other sources. They're the most flexible waveforms in the pack for custom sound design within KHORDS.
Can I use the Mod Wheel performance settings in any DAW?
Yes. All 100 presets include Mod Wheel assignments that respond to standard MIDI CC1. That means any DAW that passes MIDI to your plugins, Ableton, FL Studio, Logic, Bitwig, Cubase, will let you perform those movements. You can also automate the Mod Wheel lane directly in your DAW if you want to write the performance rather than play it live.
Is this expansion worth buying at $19, or should I wait for a sale?
At the promotional price, buy it now. At $19 full price, it's fair but the bundle is better value if you think you'll use more than two of the KHORDS expansions. The KHORDS Expansion Pack Bundle on Plugin Boutique combines all five packs for significantly less than buying them individually. Check the current bundle price before committing to single-pack purchases at full price.
