Only insecure people don't use presets
If your experience with Toxic Masculinity Music Media has been anything like mine was, you might have arrived at the idea that presets are for people who don’t know what they’re doing. That Real Music People™ understand the best way(s) to use every piece of gear, and that if you want to be a Real Music Person™ then you should be like that too. With the implication being that, if you’re not, something’s wrong with you.
And that’s horseshit! Presets are amazing. We have all these new advantages now that we’re working with computers — and we should take advantage of them!
I use presets constantly. They’re such a good source of inspiration! Even for stuff like delays, which I definitely know 100% of the ins and outs of … sometimes flipping through some presets will land me on an idea for a treatment that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own. Even if it’s something simple like the amount of saturation in the delay path; it can change the vibe!
Another place I check out presets is with saturation effects. Take Black Box HG-2MS1, for example. I kow how it works. But also it’s a complex and nuanced piece of gear, and I for sure haven’t managed to experiment with every possible permutation of settings! The other day I was working on finishing a mix — it was really good, but it just needed a little more grit and liveliness and shine on the master bus. So I pulled up Black Box and flipped through some presets for inspiration — a preset called something helpful like “Mix Buss” turned out to be an inspirational starting point.
I’m mastering a record at the moment for this pop-punk band from Boise, and the drums are killer. I learned in talking with the point person that they’re programmed — that’s awesome, I do that too — and then in a subsequent conversation I learned that they’re mostly preset beats!
tbh it made recording a breeze bc you can set mt22 to like play a certain beat for so many bars and add fills but then go in and edit the midi
The record that she made with this technique is killer; it sounds like a badass drummer recorded in an excellent studio.
Don’t let Dudes On The Internet shame you into not using presets, or more generally into adopting the idea that the only valid way to do things is the way they did them before computers. That’s a stupid mindset.
Using all the tools — jamie
Currently on sale for $30!
MT2 Power Drum Kit is a free drum kit plugin that sounds fantastic!