Big commersial songs/producers using factory presets?

[jancivil]

who cares

I tend to doubt chart hits are where we'd look for deep sound design

[Chrisk-K]

Every famous classical pianist has used only the preset of the grand piano.

[m-ac]

One of the earliest and most blatant examples is 'Beat it' by a certain Mr Jackson - not just the sound, but also the composition from the 'factory demo' too. Naughty boys.

[canadian_moose]

Zedd is fine with presets. He doesn’t understand people looking down on those that use them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/ ... s_presets/

[BONES]

Who is Zedd?

Anyone using a DX7.
I understand alot of commercial guys use Nexus presets for alot of stuff. If you understand deadlines and budget restrictions it makes good sense to do so.

I dunno, trawling through endless banks of presets can be at least as time-consuming as making your own from scratch. Who here hasn't spent an entire evening just going through one synth's factory presets? But I can't say I've ever spent an entire evening making just one patch.

Of course, the really successful artists pay other people to patch their synths for them.

Every famous classical pianist has used only the preset of the grand piano.

Which is probably why I couldn't name even one classical pianist, except maybe for the character Geoffrey Rush played in Shine, if he counts.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

Anyone using a DX7.
I understand alot of commercial guys use Nexus presets for alot of stuff. If you understand deadlines and budget restrictions it makes good sense to do so.

Bones wrote...

I dunno, trawling through endless banks of presets can be at least as time-consuming as making your own from scratch. Who here hasn't spent an entire evening just going through one synth's factory presets? But I can't say I've ever spent an entire evening making just one patch.

Quite true. This the main reason I got into programming synths. Before we had good Preset browsers in Synths......you could easily burn up a session searching for a pad.

[tactile_coast]

I heard about this from deadmau5...
https://www.masterclass.com/classes/dea ... zed-sounds

My favorite was-- and God bless them, a talented bunch of guys-- it was The Prodigy with Firestarter.

They were big fans of this synth that came out, and I of course, didn't know this at the time.

But I had found a Korg Prophecy a long time ago, and it is a weird alien spaceship looking thing.

It was at the time the holy grail of these new synth things, and a buddy of mine had one.

So I go over to his place and check it out and I'm pressing some notes, changing some patches.

And of course, there's this one patch that just sounds amazing.

And it's like this cool 8-bit arpeggiation textural wash.

And it was called FireStar, and it's the second preset on the Korg thing.

And then of course, it's the opening of the track Firestarter by The Prodigy, and I thought that was the most hilarious thing in the world is they named the whole track after a preset, which they used in the first thing of the thing.

And that was kind of cool.

But of course, that gets abused a lot.

Nice story but unfortunately Deaudmau5 is not quite correct. I've owned a prophecy since they were first released and of the 128 factory presets there is no patch called 'Firestar' The second factory patch on bank A is called 'Airworks' which is a modeled reed and similarly on bank B 'Reedfife'. The owner of the Prophecy in question must have created an original patch called 'Firestar' or taken one of the several virtual analog presets obviously used by The Prodigy moved it to position 2 and renamed it.

[monkeygenius]

This Youtube video identifies it as "B00: Space Adventure", so the first sound in the second bank I guess. The direct comparison can be heard at 5:09.

[Aloysius]

'80s. Anything with a DX7.

[ecasasmusic2]

Most songs featuring the Roland D-50 are factory presets. Classic examples are Jean Michel Jarre (Revolutions album, plenty of D50 factory presets, some of them from expansions), Enya (Orinoco flow and many more songs), Tina Turner, etc

[PieBerger]

I would love to use more presets, trouble is no third parties seem to program the kind of patches I like/want/need and they're always drenched in FX that you have to disable or dial down every time, it gets tedious to the point where it's just easier to program something from scratch.

I do enjoy a bit of preset surfing from time to time and I certainly don't look down my nose at anyone using them, if anything I envy them

[Krakatau]

there was a time when the market wasn't such invaded by numerous presets packages of all kind so yes the choice being currently so huge that it doesn't make sense anymore to systematically do everything from scratch

[Krakatau]

One of the earliest and most blatant examples is 'Beat it' by a certain Mr Jackson - not just the sound, but also the composition from the 'factory demo' too. Naughty boys.

There's one thing I'd like to add about the introducting synclavier's sound of "beat it" : the story beginning through sewer's canalization, the sound of this peculiar preset, reminding tunnel's resonances seems relevant and make sense in it relation with the images, me thinks

totally appropriate on that respect...

[dionenoid]

If i had to guess i'd say one of the most used presets is "Lately Bass" from the Yamaha DX/TX series. I bought a TX81Z especially for that preset.

[dionenoid]

And yes, big names use factory presets. Nowadays Splice is very popular amongst electronic music producers tho. Just like Vengeance cd's and/or Nexus were up until a few years back.