Getting the most from synth presets
Snobbery doesn't finish tracks, and although crafting all your synth sounds from scratch is entirely possible, your studio time is precious – so when you get the opportunity to cook up new material and the creative juices are bubbling, do you really want to spend hours building up sounds from an init patch? Dedicated professionals are paid to create awesome-sounding patches and banks for commercial synthesisers. You've paid money for a virtual instrument, so it's your right to use and adapt those factory patches!
First, when surfing through a synth's preset browser, define exactly what kind of sound you're looking for – or accept that you're just hunting for some inspiration. This is where some knowledge of your synth comes in handy: it's frustrating to come across a preset that's close to what you're after, but then have no idea how to adapt it to your project.
Develop a productive workflow for searching presets. Sometimes, it may feel more natural to load sounds while jabbing at the MIDI keyboard. Other times, you might try programming a killer MIDI riff to begin with, then audition patches on that track to see what fits your notes best.
Some synths offer ways to organise your sounds into categories or subcategories via tagging, or even add notes to the patch containing descriptive information. Taking advantage of these means that when you're on the hunt for an ‘atmospheric drone' sound, you won't kill your creative buzz trawling through hundreds of non-relevant patches.
Synths always come with a factory sound bank of some sort – although it can be difficult to comprehensively cater to everyone's individual tastes within 200-300 presets. If you want to broaden your horizons, a good solution is to hunt down and purchase more genrespecific preset banks.
These commercial libraries are often inspired by popular styles, or well-loved artists in a particular field, allowing you to dissect cuttingedge sounds and tweak them into something you can call your own.