I've been making music for like 10 years now, and messing around virtual instruments for maybe 6.
Recently with all the time I had I decided to sit down and really check out those soft synths FOR REAL. So I apparently must have spent like 2-3 weeks trying out all those famous plugins like Diva, Zebra, Serum and some chiptune microsynths and D-50 and Juno emulations. (While at the same time switching from S1 to Reaper-another story).
So I was going through all those hundreds of presets of each of those synths(and downloading more and more of them), and maybe 3% I was finding useful, and was sorta comparing them by their preset banks (LOL) and I finally realized- man I would have learned all that synthesis inside-out by now!
WTF I'm even doing? I don't even remember the last time I tried to mess with the knobs!
I guess this stems from a bigger issue- the tendency to seek shortcuts.
Now that's something that just developed over years of "not having the time" logic I was driven by as a guitarist who wanted to spend most of the time practicing. I'm sure many of you can relate.
So I'm back to square one, not just with the synths but with DAW work in general. I mean for heaven's sake! Only recently I started to think about things such as "what does the waveform actually represent... and why is it not symmetrical?!" hehe.
But back to the presets thing. Whether they are shit or not, I think it's safe to say that you're going to get to the sound you want by yourself way faster then blindly going through the presets... If you know what you want.
Oh you don't really know what you want? Oh but you do! You wanted "some kind of lead sound" right? So what kind of lead sound? "some soft buzzy sound" wait what soft buzzy sound? bright or dark? round or sharp? Spacial or dry, rich or simple?
If you just ask those questions a lot you're gonna get there. And every time you're gonna get there faster. And having a context is going to make it way faster, because the song will tell you what kind of sounds it needs!
Of course you could be one of those typical edm producers who only listen to the most ubiquitous music and are totally satisfied with the stock Massive presets, but I am sadly not one of them lol.
So finally I loaded an 8bit chipsynth (Kraken I think), cranked it, added TAL chorus, added some kind of drive to distort it like hell, compressed the hell out of it, added a reverb and said to myself- this is the best sound I ever heard! LOL.
Now I know there are many different workflows and learning Reaper inside-out is helpful but one thing(or one of the things) that's going to determine your writing experience the most is the way you approach the instruments.
Are you just fucking around with sounds hoping to ignite a creative spark? That's fine, you can use presets like that.
Are you starting with an idea(in which case you already by default have a sound associated with them) and trying to find that sound in the preset bank? Good luck!
So I never realized this, but I'm MUCH more of a second case person.
I just think it's really important, REALLY REALLY important, okay VITALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT to be aware of which mindset you're in. Sure it's fine to just turn the thing on on totally random patch and just bang on the keys to just play around. In my case, it's the $10 Casio CTK keyboard I like to do it with. I must do more of that in fact!
DAMN OBVIOUS I KNOW. But I hope somewhere down the line this little rant will convince some dude who's so far proven to be totally immune to the "don't rely on presets!" advice hah.
Oh and hi everyone, my name is Johnny, glad to join
. This is a very lovely community! Yadda yadda