06/07/09 20:34 Filed in:
Music
Production
Abandon the
Presets
One of the potentially negative things to come out of the digital
home recording revolution is the over use of preset settings in
plugins. There’s nothing wrong with using presets as a feature but
the problem arises when there’s no preset for the task at hand. How
do you accomplish your goals if you have no idea why those settings
are doing what they’re doing? It may be high time you learned. The
good news is that learning this stuff can be fun!
If you are a preset junkie who wants to take the music to the next
sonic level you could try the following:
Step 1: Take the mix that you made with the presets, mix is down
and use it as a reference.
Step 2: Do a second mix and make every setting manually yourself
mix that down and compare the two.
What’s better or worse about your manual mix as compared to the
mixed where you relied on presets? The things that sound better or
different in a good way are your fault so pat yourself on the back!
The things that don’t sound better or as good as the preset mix
will show you where your weaknesses are. It’s all about learning
how to create or more importantly re-create types of sounds at
will. It’s just like playing an instrument the more scales and
chords you know the more broad the palette of sounds you can
create. Likewise as a recordist knowing how to achieve a wide
variety of sounds will enable you to give each song the treatment
it deserves. Bottom line is that presets were designed for “generic
music”, and I know that if you’re here reading this you’re not
looking for generic sounds you’re looking for that sound that makes
your music stand out from everyone else.
One of the first steps to creating your own production style is to
abandon those presets! It might be scary at first, and the mixes
might be a little weird for a while but in the long run you’ll be
very glad you did!
Tags: presets, suck
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