How many of you use factory presets or purchased sound packs in your recordings? If you do, how much of your synth and drum machine use employs them?
I’m asking because I used to be a pretty dyed-in-the-wool sound-design nerd; I liked creating sounds as much as I did playing music with them. It felt somehow dishonest to me to record a song with sounds someone else made.
Lately I’ve almost completely stopped caring. I still like to make sounds with Elektron gear—that’s what I like best about Elektron gear, actually, how much fun it is to design sounds on—and with the OP1F, but with softsynths and the Minifreak that sits on my desk…I generally just find something close to what I’ve got in my head and tweak it to suit. My last album, a collection of synth music for kids, I even built a couple of songs around those sequencer-based presets in the Arturia V collection, something I would have been appalled by a decade ago!
Maybe it’s that I just don’t have the time I used to, or maybe (more likely) it’s that presets have gotten more plentiful. (Compare, for instance, the factory content on the MD to the factory content on the Syntakt, lol.)
Anyway, I feel kind of liberated, tbh. I don’t mind using the same preset on my acoustic guitar over and over, the same one everyone else is using, so, why not use this one preset buried deep in some piece of gear I own that maybe nine people on earth would recognize as “unoriginal,” if it fits the song I’m writing?
I should add that I care less about patch originality when I’m working on a rock song and need just one synth sound that fits the mix, as opposed to when I’m working on ambient or experimental music, where sound design is a bigger part of the appeal of the genre…
I sometimes start from scratch but often I try to find a preset similar to what I want and use that as a starting point. I find it really boring scrolling through presets so I don’t have any interest in buying sound packs.
I don’t use many presets, but it has less to do with any philosophical objection to them. It is just that presets are often designed in isolation to sound great. This means they often take up a ton of frequency space and don’t sit super well in a mix. Or are just too busy trying to catch your attention while you are scrolling through presets.
Zero problem with presets from a philosophical perspective. Nothing dishonest about using them at all imo. I also don’t buy in to the notion that it’s somehow only fine if you tweak the preset rather than using it as is - whatever you do with it is fine from my perspective.
Personally though I find it to be quite a dull experience to scroll through presets though as they almost never hit across what I’m after, so I prefer to make my own sounds purely because it’s a more enjoyable process for me. Presets on FX plugins are a lot more fruitful for me as you are starting from something rather than nothing and it can quickly get into unexpected results/happy accident territory.
Presets are a great thing to save time. And also to learn how to make similar sounds. I also often take a sound from a preset that I like as a basis, modify it to suit my needs, save it and use it in my music. Another important point here is the equipment you use. Some equipment just forces you to program sounds from scratch, especially analog synths where all the knobs are on the panel. On the Dirtywave M8 I hardly use presets and create patches from scratch, as it is very easy. On the other hand, it happens that the very thought of programming sound from scratch fills you with horror (hello Roland MC707 and TR8S).
That’s a very valid point - and even if many may disagree - same goes for drums. Which band re-tunes their drums for each of their songs? Or listen to classical music … strings, brass, wood-wind, percussion … used over centuries and did not much change in terms of “sound-design”.
Back to the topic. Patches from Eric Person on the D-50 and others, of course, made whole albums. There are factory patches, which IMO are overdone, and only show off the capabilities of the synth. Those often don’t go easy with a mix and I avoid them in my music, but I have fun to understand them. Others are quite good standard patches. Those I use often.
With my own patches I try to exploit a synth engines universe, where others have not gone yet
on hardware/instrument plugins don’t use any presets at all, instead of endlessly iterating through presets I’d rather try “get to the sound in my head” with synthesis or with a sample, sometimes I do save sounds I like as presets but never use them again, I think I actually developed a phobia of the presets menu…
but I use presets on compressors/eqs/saturation plugins, just to quickly get different effect on something, usually it’s only on the final stages after stuff is recorded.
Yep use them all the time… … usually tweak them or have them start the idea off and then copy the design with my own flavour…
There are a few preset makers I follow and love how them make certain sounds. I buy their banks, choose a sound and the reverse engineer it. I always ends with something different and far off the original sound…so that’s cool for me feeling like I’m original
I don’t have the feeling to steal something when I use preset.
Lots of preset are well crafted but achievable.
I only have that feeling when using directly some preset which are too distinctive from a preset pack. I mean some really glorious one, that I feel I still don’t have a full understanding why it feel that good playing them. Those one…. Mhhhh yeah I feel I feel a bit bad
And sometimes using the work made by real talented people is really needed ! It transform the use of some box.
For example :
It is context dependent and the term preset can be ambiguous - think 808, 909, 303, DX7/100, Fairlight, breakbeats etc. I have used these often over the years, as have many “people who don’t use presets”
That said I think some presets are just to sound impressive and showcase a synth, others are actually useful, but really it doesn’t matter, if they sound good in your music go for it.
No need to be snobbish about not using them, or to feel like cheating for using them. One persons cliche is another persons staple, there are only 2 kinds of music, that which you like and that which you do not.
I think about this a lot; much of present-day gear is meant to be flexible, and much of older gear is valued for its “sound,” which often comes from its lack of flexibility. We often long for firmware updates that will expand the range of sonic possibility of gear, but maybe the instruments sacrifice some of their essential character the more versatile they become
Agreed, sometimes feature rich synths are said to be lacking character/identity because of this.
Also how a preset is used, tweaked, effected etc can further muddy the waters, like for example Reese bass, essentially a preset that became another preset.
