Trying to understand the Preset Pool on Digitone II.
In a typical workflow, it seems that I don’t have to use the Preset Pool at all. When I load a preset onto a track, the sound is stored with the project, so deleting or changing the original preset later does not affect the track.
Because of that, I currently don’t see much benefit in using the Preset Pool for normal track sounds.
As far as I understand, the situation changes when using preset locks (or other workflows that require multiple presets to be available within a project), since those presets need to be added to the Preset Pool.
I’m interested in hearing how other people use it:
When do you use the Preset Pool, and when do you ignore it?
What are some useful workflows or creative ideas involving the Preset Pool?
Besides preset locks, what advantages does the Preset Pool provide?
Are there any downsides to relying only on the global preset library and not maintaining a Preset Pool?
It’s possible I’m missing something, so I’d appreciate any corrections.
For me realising the preset pools potential was when I wanted to add fills on the end of every bar.
It made it very easy and very complex fast. Say you have a basic groove going with the drums, melodic elements and other stuff. You can populate the preset pool with say a lot of different SFX sounds. You get one track and put a different SFX on the end of every bar, and bam. Hope it was understandable.
And the best thing is with the SFX presets you can play it really high or really low on the keyboard and they sound different enough so that it has an added layer of variation if you want.
Yep, I also use it for risers and sound effects, and also for drum fills—you can activate the arpeggiator on a sound and use the arpeggiator rhythm possibilities with keytracking options (turn Tune to -8 to cancel out keyboard values, then adjust noise/osc balance, mix, decay, or other params) to add percussion top line fills, snare rolls, or snippets of breaks.
(Also, from one of the kit manage pages, you can add whole kits at a time to the preset pool—keeping some utility patterns with fill and sfx sounds makes it easy to load in a 1-page punch-in sound board to the preset pool.)
It’s a killer feature on both DT2 and DN2 for me, but I’ve very seldom seen it used or talked about.