Deleted all presets, and I’m having a blast!

Yup, all of them, except the ones I made myself. On both my A4, and my DN - which I had some trouble getting in to. Now, as I’m making my own library of presets, starting with the bread n butter ones, I realise this is how one should do it! No distractions, but a need to conjure even the most basic of basses for example. And along the way I come up with stuff that sounds really great. The sounds were probably already there in the presets, but without the special touch that I like personally! The reason for this post is I guess to encourage other people lost in the sea of ready-made solutions - Take the plunge!

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It’s the only way to go, too handy to select a preset tweak it and think yeah I made that, init all they way :crazy_face:

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The only thing presets are good at, for me, is for stealing modulation / interaction ideas :wink:

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How did you even manage to delete all the presets on the Digitone? I’ve been trying without success, and they bloody annoy me! :stuck_out_tongue:

First thing you do when you turn them on.

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Yep, page one of my user manual, delete the pollution…

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I went in to the soundbanks, select all, toggle the lock, delete!

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Yes, i agree, some presets Have great modulations ofc, and the idea, i guess is to have them serve as inspiration! But more often than not, I found myself going through a sound pack of 128 sounds in search of something to kick me in some direction. I may be a bit traditional, but that is never how I write music in on other instruments. It HAS happened though; twice or thrice I’ve stumbled upon something that fits perfectly into an arrangement, and i ended up using it with just a few adjustments.

I can see why people feels this way but it’s too purist for me, I find making everything myself leads to me making similar sounds a lot or weird noise, which is fun and all but essentially futile. Not even for a lack of understanding how to make nice sounds, it’s just that there’s teams of people who are significantly more experienced than myself being paid to come up with creative patches for me to tweak. I say use them sometimes, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing

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I can see your reasoning but I find presets a bit too flashy, as often they are over modulated, and over saturated by effects to be more show offey(new word :slight_smile:) than practical and useable. And then you tweak to try and fit a square peg into a round hole. Where as if you built from the ground up you can get the sound you want or maybe even a happy accident, or occasionally frustrated at your feeble sound design abilities as can often happen :slight_smile: Plus you learn more.

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I never use them. Only for drum sounds.
Designing my sounds is part of the songwriting

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Thinking on it more while sipping a coffee a lot can also depend on the user interface, knob per function makes it easier to create and try ideas than the frustration of a load of menu diving to access a function.

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That is absolutely true, the quality of presets vary wildly and a lot are utter crap. I get exactly what you mean about the flashy thing, a hell of a lot of presets suffer from this

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Just want to give a shout out to our dear Jogging House, I still use his sound pack for AR every now and then, and I’m sure his sound pack for A4 is equally splendid!

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The best way to leave your mark is to begin with an INIT patch. Congrats! Now everything is yours. :slight_smile:

i hate the DT’s preset everything except the kick

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This thread runs perpendicular with where I’m at right now.

I used to be pretty adamant about only constructing my own sounds from scratch- now I’m finally getting acquainted with working with presets as a starting point. There are some pretty sounds to aspire to in the presets. So I keep them and the sound packs I’ve purchased on my machines for potential inspiration- because I don’t know what im doing and occasionally when exploring them I get inspired

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Totally agree with this. I use syntmaster 2 a lot on my MacBook because it sounds great and is kind to my poor old cpu. But creating a patch from scratch with that thing makes my mind melt and I tend to start with a preset and tweak it. And sometimes I find i just made an entire song with the preset and just think, I’ll just turn this knob over here, and THEN it’s my own sound :smiley:

Love making my own sounds though. Just sometimes I’ll have an idea in my head and it’s so much quicker getting it all down with presets. And you my thinking is, I don’t always have to build the guitar to make a song :wink:

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I like that saying(and might borrow it to use in the future :smile: ) , problem is I have become addicted to building the guitar :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I totally get that, It is so much fun, and much more rewarding. I tend to use found sounds a lot, and it just feels better. That said, this is a bad Aphex imitation that I made last night just for fun, with presets from synthmaster 2, zebra, and the stock 808 kit from ableton. That was also fun :smiley:

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