Sound Design vs Presets in Maschine

Was watching a interview with Drake's producer 40 (who uses Maschine). He uses presets a lot, and mentions that getting out the idea is the most important thing. Which I agree. and so that comes from ready made presets that inspire during the creative process (maschine kits, omnisphere etc). Timestamp 10:14.




So are you more into creating sounds from scratch or are you someone that loves presets/great maschine kits for use in Maschine?

 

I´m a preset-junkiie for those reasons:
-there´re so many good sound-designers outthere (Joseph Hollo, PlugInGuru, BigTone, Luftrum, The Unfinished, Rob Lee, Plughugger etc.)
and those make so much cool sounds, which I (and maybe many other users) didn´t ever imagine that they´re possible with the synth u use
-I´ve not so much knowledge, made some and was fine with the results,but:
-I´ve not enough time, happy when making musi, and so making presets from scratch to find out that the result is in the synth, but not found out would be making me crazy

and I´m as "40" says: many presets are inspiration and I love this "suddenly there is a new track/idea"

in another forum an user said to me: if you use presets then don´t wonder that you only sound arbitrary
but his every-sound-from-scratch hasn´t brought him more fame nor a contract

 

before i had a maschine i was the guy that wanted to make ALL sounds himself with synths and stuff. i spent allmost 20 years "producing nothing" but synth patches, having fun turning knobs on my synths and jamming along to "stupid basic ugly sounding beats"....(mostly VST's). it was fun but quite "depressing", as i never had anything to show to my friends .... because usually people dont like to only listen to "synth noise" without any arrangement and so on....

that's why i gifted myself an maschine mk3 with complete 12 UCE....

and guess what: i now do use a lot of presets, because for me it's not really "easy" to start a new synthsound from scratch in maschine...because everything is laid out to "perform" rather than "design" sounds...

but to be honest: it really doesnt matter. the art in producing is to create something that sounds good (to me at least). nobody cares in the end, where the sounds are coming from.

and with complete 12UCE it's not easy to not use premade sounds. i mean, how many single synth-presets comes with complete? i reall don't know... a few hundred thousand (it feels so)..

 

K12UCE has over 90.000

I agree with you: the result counts and not if the result is done with presets or not
and tried to explain the other forum-guy that mostly noone can tell if this or that sound is a preset or not. ok, some typical ones are clear: M1-Piano etc, but these are a few compoaired to the 90.000 alone in Komplete, add some 3rd-party for Massive, FM8, Kontakt etc.

 

Whilst people may spend rather a lot of time and money trying to colour a 'preset' instrument ...guitar..bass piano , trumpet etc etc etc to be their 'brand' sound no one ever says hey you're cheating ..you used a preset piano ..yet with synths people get rather stroppy about it. IMHO If something works it works and it doesn't matter if you spend a life time developing what you're using or you found it on the bottom of your shoe one morning and thought...oooh that'll do for me.. ...What you do with it is where it starts to do things.

 

I do both but most of the time I then alter the presets to my fafour but presets are really inspiring and a great starting point. But on the other hand I love it to create my own stuff from scratch with massive and massive x. So I don't care about and just do what I feel, where the flow goes, really simple.

Uwe

 

It matters not what preset you choose, but how you choose to use it...

A preset is just a configuration for an instrument. Like a template is for a document. A preset doesn't make a song, the producer still needs to take that sound, add additional elements and make it into something that can be enjoyed.

I have heard plenty of pop songs that use stock sounds. The producer needs to recognise that some will be able to pick that sound and in almost every case I have heard a stock sound, even in some documentaries where I have heard it's a Kontakt preset from a Heavyocity library or something, I always think "that's cool, I know that sound, I should check that library out again because that's cool...".

I feel it's also important for a user to experiment and know how a synth (or anything) works but just like you do not need to be an expert in music theory to write a catchy choon (im certainly not), you don't need to be a whiz at synthesis to make something that sounds fresh and inspiring and it's perfectly ok to get by just knowing the basics and selecting a preset that sounds like what you are after.

People will moan about anything, who cares. I have 192,229 presets just in Komplete Kontrol and at least 192,000 will probably never be used in anything, but doesn't stop me wasting a friday night having fun with them. I respect sound designers far too much to simply discredit their work as uninspired and non-original enough not to consider using it. I've paid for the instrument that includes their hard work, i'm going to damn well (try) use it!

 

It's not an either/or thing

 

a little funny story regarding "beeing creative and building your own sounds/samples":

- my best selfmade snare / clap sound was created like this:
- we were heating our house with wood / fire in a kind of a "cooking oven" with a metal plate on top of it (where one could cook)
- i took a towel and made it completely wet / soaked in water
- put the microfone near the "oven thing", hit record
- slam / slap / hit that "really hot glowy metal plate above the fire" with the towel as hard as you can or just let it stay there for a second
--> voila, an absolutely lovely sounding record which literaly sounds wet even if its completely dry *lol*

i'd love to share this sample with you. but my brother (thanks, you...) destroyed my laptop where this recording was done....so it's gone.

and now i don't have this "oven thing" anymore to re-record it.

anybody got a very hot "wood-heating-thing" and a towel and water at home? ;-)

 

I agree with most of the posts here, absolutely nothing wrong with using presets. I do some of both, for instance I might dial in a bass or lead on my moog synth, but add in drums from a Maschine expansion kit or a pad from a komplete preset, etc. Doing absolutely everything from scratch is admirable but i rarely have that kind of time. That being said, I would never be able to create an entire beat using all the sounds in an expansion kit or battery kit and feel comfortable calling it my “own”. You’ve got to do a least some degree of mixing, tweaking, adding a unique fx chain to feel like it’s your own production. (In my opinion).

 

Haha same here
I consider presets as instruments , you won't change the mic and strings of your guitar everytime you play a song just to sound different. What i dont like to use are pre-made sample loops except maybe very basic drum ones.

 

The end results speak for themselves. Whatever gets you from point A to point B, with the necessary level of quality required. Sometimes a preset is all that's required, other times you need to do sound design. This is why a lot of movies use sound libraries, whereas others have sounds created specifically for them.

 

I‘m a composer, not an instrument builder. Without presets, I can‘t do my job. Highly developed synths and the wizards who create presets allow me to create results I had never thought would be possible. I love presets.

 

theres nothing wrong with using presets I know on some sites like gearslutz..etc its not the done thing and you can open a can of worms if you even breath I use presets.

but too me they save a lot of time,they are a source of inspiration sometimes and they sound better than something a lot of people could create.

im a twiddler so ill use a preset to start with but I always tweak it in someway wether that means ill add new fx,render to audio then reverse it,resample it into kontakt,stack it with another sound..each project is different so I don't get bored.

im lucky ive got a ton of outboard gear too so for along time I got lazy and moved too doing everything in the computer and my gear was gathering dust but now im trying to do 50/50 so ill start with plugins but finish with sounds ive created on my juno 6 or neutron or other synths..one I highly recommend people check out is the new modal craftsynth 2 at first I wasn't impressed but the more you use it the more I like it ..I hope one day native instruments do a real hardware synth thatd be amazing.