Presetophobia
I’ve said “When we surpass limitations, we seek to recreate them.”
By some estimate, we went from having a few dozen hardware synths in the 1970s-1980s to thousands of ‘em in 2025, including all the software varieties. And as digital memories developed, so did a profuse abundance of presets, or as they were also quaintly called, patches or on-board factory programs.
“100” presets is a nice round number, and back then that must’ve felt like a near-endless sea at the time, but that’s since been dwarfed by the sheer scale by titans like Spectrasonics Omnisphere (plus the incredible 3rd-party market, and fun fact: everyone who’s listened to modern music has heard Spectrasonics); UVI Falcon (which doesn’t have many external libraries, but a profuse in-house range); you must count all the ways you can make music with Native Instruments Komplete; I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the recursive inclusion of Arturia Analog Lab V packing in the original sounds (now emulated!); plus myriad more. Then we have the revivalist dedication of The Usual Suspects, bringing to bear an easier-browsable Access Virus for today’s contemporary tastes, but with those respective thousands, you can see/hear why I continue to champion random preset loaders EVERYWHERE!
Y’know, it used to be a point of pride to gleefully boast, “I deleted all the presets and started over!”, with said synthesist pointing to the blank-slate user memories. Yanni did, which accounts for his unique timbres like the sly bastard of a hammer dulcimer + 12-string steel guitar. Robert Miles once encouraged me to get away from the onboard presets of my Alesis QS, suggested adopting a greater range, and he used his K2000 sampler as an example. I was so naive back then, I hadn’t even gotten around to exploring breath controllers or understanding said distinction betwixt synthing vs. sampling, but I felt like there was a fashion-cyclical way I could max out presets and couple them with more bizarre fare, which I termed something like “infectious melodies combined with experimental techniques”.
Synth presets used to get knocked badly as “cheesy”, because you heard the same few famous sounds used in so many hit songs. And yet it practically didn’t make sense, ‘cuz those OG sound designers knew their beasts firsthand — remove the cultural connotations and flash-forward, and I’ve observed many early negative assertions didn’t hold up. What was overused becomes fresh again, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the intrinsic qualities of the preset. But just as formulaic movie fare functions as comfort food and “ooh, cute meta-references!”, no doubt bringing back the Synclavier gong for Deadpool did the same thing to audiences who instantly associated it with Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”.
Things gradually folded back on themselves, with talented contemporary sound designers deliberately and painstakingly recreating those vintage sounds — and doing their own twists — on current machines, which gave rise to its own cottage industry. Sometimes they get presented quite elegantly, compleat w/history lesson, as anyone who’s had the archaeological pleasure of sifting thru Reverb Machine will attest to.
A brief aside: I enjoy observing what gets overlooked, there’s also the curious case of Trevor Horn copying Max Martin’s style (from one super-producer to another) and adopting that tilt on orchestral hits for LeAnn Rimes’ “Can’t Fight the Moonlight”. But wait, you say, Horn did it first with Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart” — shades of the same spectrum, mayhaps. And you can’t stop there without also referencing Art of Noise, sooo I’ll chalk this up to Horn being an orch hit superfan across the ages. Said orch hit is in a preset class of its own.
However, on the topic of slamming presets, I remember when Jean-Michel Jarre himself was raked over the coals for “OMG! I can’t believe he used presets in Téo & Téa!” I always maintain he approached it with playful curiosity. Alas, presets didn’t have quite the same stain as being clever enough to quasi-cratedig for an obscure-ish sample and recontextualize it, which accounts for such paired gems as Enigma and Tangerine Dream both lifting the same Spectrasonics Heart of Asia extended vocal goodness — I prefer the former’s supporting chord progression more, but am glad they both exist.
But, history is weird, and humans don’t listen to music in isolation, it gets attached to something (visuals? A feeling? Someone you care about?) which adds meaning. And just like we can get past a trough of disillusionment with tech, we can do the same thing with musical taste — cynical irony gets worn down to a dull nub, and we get whole genres celebrated for everyone using the same sounds, like synthwave/vaporwave, in itself a callback to (sub-)genres birthed from a few presets like the Korg M1’s “01 Piano16” ➜ 90s house music.
Today, starting points are a lot more profuse, and so much ground has been covered (I knew the time had come when IDM/braindance sample packs caught fire to make FSU as easy as microwave meals), such that coming up with a “signature style” has a lot to do with your idiocracies in expressing the same sounds everyone else has. Which I suppose brings us back to why so many piano players can sound different at the same Yamaha, or how a versatile MPE preset can sing so fluently via a virtuosic performer. Always remember the theremin, which makes it abundantly clear how starkly different the simplest of waveforms — the humble sine wave — can sound in various hands, ranging from kazoo-adjacent to Carolina Eyck.
We now live in age where many presets don’t even get the privilege of being “deleted” per se — they aren’t even used or discovered! The attack(decay/sustain/release) of the aforementioned titans demands a capable patch browser that empowers exploration. So, the real questions are along the lines of:
How many presets are going to waste?
What can we do to make presets more valuable?
How much more awesome music and derivative genres can be made from these unexplored aural territories?
Strange, also, that with so much quality soundware, producers would even have problems making music, but therein lies the flipside of abundance: analysis paralysis, aka the possibility of too many great choices prevents us from making even one good one.