Is it lame to.........

No, nothing wrong with just tweaking presets - but do tweak them just so you can sleep with yourself at night. Otherwise you'll wake up feeling all dirty in the morning.

But seriously, if it works use it. That is the most important thing. You'd be surprized at those doing music for a living that just go with what the factory put on.

I find myself using many of Rapture's presets or slightly modifying them.

Nothing wrong with that, Adam. I don't think that anyone starts out thinking, "Hmm. I need a pulse waveform through a bandpass filter, then a slow attack & quick release in the amplitude EG." OK, so maybe Bob Moog did. Point is: if it sounds good to you, use it.

Tweak it to customize it for your own unique slant, and to learn a bit more on how everything fits together. Synth 'manufacturers' assemble world-renowned sound design specialists to bring the best out in their creations. And that sells synths. So there's bound to be some really good stuff in there. Consider the talent pool.

That's the way most people work, and HAVE worked since synth manufacturers pre-loaded memories with presets to show what their synths were capable of.

Now within what JS stated there lies the only real 'danger' (if considered as such). A lot of people work this way, so you join a large group of individuals using the exact same resources. The end results start to sound very similar. That could be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on what you're after.

It all can get to the point where you say to yourself, "This guy used such & such preset on this-or-that synth." Personally, I think that the line between "player and programmer" is starting to blur. And you can thank the soft-synth revolution for that.

Several top-notch sound designers have spent dozens of hours doing those patches. Please do use them!





-René

I am a preset abuser.

Several top-notch sound designers have spent dozens of hours doing those patches. Please do use them!

Any chance you can point them in this direction René...

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.asp?m=746751

I feel no more need to make my own presets than I do to take a soldering iron to my trombone.

me

presets can make magic for me sometimes..

ORIGINAL: awilki01

Is it lame to use presets? I find myself using many of Rapture's presets or slightly modifying them. I would just like to get a general consensus on what others think.

Some of those presets are just inspiring to me......

I think it's lame to have a synth where you can't use the presets, or one where running through the presets doesn't inspire a bit of a song.

Granted, it never hurts to be able to roll your own, because there isn't always overlap between the people who can write synths well and those who can write patches well.

Being that I'm not a synth player and the fact that DP has so many presets, I doubt that I'll ever use anything but the presets, but who knows, as my knowledge grows, so may my desire to tweak.