Right Use of Presets

I'll start with a basic claim I will try to back up: Almost Everybody Uses Presets Wrong.

If you are producing a track, use your own presets, and only your own presets. Moreover, only use presets to accelerate the production process in the sense that using a preset only achieves what you could have done yourself. If you know how to use an MSEG in Zebra, it's ok to use a preset that does that for you. If you know how to set up a 3 oscillator and one filter patch, again it's ok to use a preset to do that for you.

What everybody does wrong is to buy a pack of presets, especially ones labelled 'production ready', and actually use them as is in their productions. Every time you do that, you cheat yourself out of the learning and practice experience of making the patch yourself. If you don't do it yourself, you don't reinforce the mental pathways that make it. And the key to knowing your way around a synth is to be able to make it all yourself.

So what is the right way to use presets? As study material. Look at somebody else's presets, especially the factory ones that come with your synth, and see what they are doing. Make notes, and then create fresh patches using only what you remember and what's in your notes. Probably your results won't be identical to the professionally made preset. That's fine! The thing is, over the weeks and months and years you play the 'build it yourself' game, you will learn the myriad nooks and crannies of each synth you spend time with, and you will learn the many generic techniques that you can apply to basically any synth. And once you've learn those, you can apply those generic sound design skills to any synth. And if you don't, you don't.

As I write elsewhere, it is important not to measure yourself against the pros. Nobody gets to grade 8 piano in a few weeks, many aspiring players don't get there at all. (I learned piano as an adult and never took grades, but just have to be content with what I can do and practise, and not worry about what I can't.) So don't be a perfectionist, and aim to do everything yourself. Only use presets that you've already made, and that you could have made from scratch from your memory or your notes.

The thing with this approach is that your results will necessarily sound distinct from everybody else's, as the subtle details of each patch will be unique to the track you made with it. Especially if you make many patches on the fly for each track, each track will sound distinct.

An additional consideration is that if you are someone who just buys a pack of presets, or a synth with 2000 factory presets, it takes a considerable time to audition those many presets, and it is an impossible task to remember what the first preset you tried sounded like after you have tried 100 more. If you understand how presets work, to the point that you can make your own, and know how to tweak things, it takes less time to program a patch that works for your track than it takes to audition 100 presets. Thus it makes sense to thorougly learn a few synths so that you can make patches specific to the tracks you are writing.