Why Great Synth Presets Don’t Always Fit Your Mix

Presets are built to sell the sound.

You load one and it sounds incredible.

Huge. Wide. Expensive.

And while you're writing, it works.

It sits. Nothing's fighting yet, because there isn't much there to fight with.

The trouble arrives later.

The arrangement fills out.

You stop writing and start producing.

The vocal. The snare. The pads. The bass.

Everything needs its place.

So you reach for the EQ.

Maybe a compressor.

Perhaps a transient shaper.

Then a thought crosses my mind.

What if the sound I'm trying to fix is already carrying its own effects chain?

That's when I open the synth's effects page.

The Sound Has Already Been Shaped

Serum is a great example of this.

Many presets arrive with a full chain already running:

• Reverb

• Chorus

• Hyper

• Delay

• Distortion

• Compression

• Flanger

• Phaser

• EQ

  
  

None of these are wrong.

They're often the reason the preset sounded so impressive in the first place.

They were designed to make the sound work on its own, in a demo, with nothing else playing.

Now you’re asking it to work with a bunch of other sounds.

That's a different job from the one you need it to do.

Every Effect Shapes the Sound

You just want to understand what’s shaping that sound.

The first thing I usually do is turn the reverb off.

I prefer placing the sound into the same acoustic space as everything else in the track using my own reverbs.

The exception is when the reverb is part of the character of the sound itself.

Then I’ll simply adjust it rather than remove it.

The rest of the effects are different.

Chorus.

Hyper.

Distortion.

Saturation.

Compression.

Stereo widening.

These are often part of the sound’s character.

Rather than removing them, I listen to what each one is contributing.

Is the chorus making the sound wider than the mix needs?

Is Hyper making it bigger than necessary?

Is the saturation adding character, or just filling up the midrange?

Is the compressor helping, or simply making the sound harder to place?

Sometimes they stay exactly as they are.

Sometimes they only need pulling back a little.

Sometimes they get turned off completely.

Once you know they’re there, you can decide whether they’re still the right decisions for your mix.

The Difference in Intent

Presets are built to impress you.

Your job is to make them work with everything else.

Those are two different jobs.