Does anyone else have issues trying to organise presets?

ralphonz

Inspired
There are 767 slots on my axe fx II XL. Managing them while allowing space for the creation of new sounds is a daunting task. Should they be organised by timbre? Where you leave spaces for new sounds? What happens when new versions of factory presets are released?

I'm using a RJM mastermind and banks on there are organised in groups of 5 presets. But currently I'm looking at a huge list of factory presets and my own presets; trying to find sounds with a specific feel is a nightmare! High-gain, clean, mod effects and crystal reverbs are all intermingled, and many factory presets only provide the most cryptic clues in the names...

I feel like axe edit needs a better system for managing presets, such as colours or descriptive tagging like logics alchemy or native instruments plugins use for preset browsing.

I'd like to hear how others do it? Whats the best way you've found for managing and organising vast amounts of presets? How have you organised the factory presets and how to find the right sounds in the spur of the moment at a jam?
 
I took a look at the song list for my band and matched presets to them. The ones I used most often I put on the first bank in the first slots. Those being my default sounds, they are also the ones I use for anything spur of the moment. Other slots on bank A are for more specialized songs.

In all I am keeping about 30 presets handy and organized this way.

Bank B I am using for presets for recording crunch guitars. It also serves as my depository for crunch sounds. If there's one I want to integrate into the default group I just copy from there. Bank C is clean sounds and I do the same thing.

I deleted most of the factory presets. They are also there to download. I went through them for ideas for my own sounds and took what I wanted.
 
There are 767 slots on my axe fx II XL. Managing them while allowing space for the creation of new sounds is a daunting task. Should they be organised by timbre? Where you leave spaces for new sounds? What happens when new versions of factory presets are released?

I'm using a RJM mastermind and banks on there are organised in groups of 5 presets. But currently I'm looking at a huge list of factory presets and my own presets; trying to find sounds with a specific feel is a nightmare! High-gain, clean, mod effects and crystal reverbs are all intermingled, and many factory presets only provide the most cryptic clues in the names...

I feel like axe edit needs a better system for managing presets, such as colours or descriptive tagging like logics alchemy or native instruments plugins use for preset browsing.

I'd like to hear how others do it? Whats the best way you've found for managing and organising vast amounts of presets? How have you organised the factory presets and how to find the right sounds in the spur of the moment at a jam?


I tend to stick to a core library of around 10-15 presets, clearly named for their specific function (e.g. crunch, edgy, detune, CR+BigDelay. clean->crunch, crunch->solo etc) that I use for gigging, which I keep in a separate bank. Everything esoteric and the factory ones are kept in separate banks and I go there for inspiration from time to time, but find I have everything I need for pretty much any song (live use) within those 10-15. Even then, for any given gig (we're a covers band and play typically 26 songs per gig), I can cover the entire set with 5 presets.
 
I would sometimes have a few or more versions of a preset I am working on. I would end up with a mess of all these presets and no idea what was the good ones. So I started to name the finished presets or really good ones with an asterisk like this. "SuperLead*******". Then when I feel like cleaning out bad presets I can just delete everything without an asterisk without listening to it to see if it is good. Then I move everything left to the front. Nothing great but at least it is some kind of system
 
I feel like axe edit needs a better system for managing presets, such as colours
It has that.

You want to take 700+ active presets to gigs with you? Wow! Regardless of how you organize them, keeping all of those in mind to actually choose one at the gig seems difficult enough. Could you shave it down to say... 20?
 
It has that.

You want to take 700+ active presets to gigs with you? Wow! Regardless of how you organize them, keeping all of those in mind to actually choose one at the gig seems difficult enough. Could you shave it down to say... 20?

Oh sorry, it requires more explanation of my situation I think. So when my band has a song and I know what sounds I'm using, I will create a song on the RJM mastermind and assign the presets to it, then I make a set list of songs for the mastermind. Sorted for gigs, that is the easy part because the RJM offered a system to deal with that.

However, there are a number of situations where that is of no use, if the presets for a song have not yet been decided, like during the writing process or when jamming, or when I'm using the axe as outboard in the studio, I want to find some inspired sounds quickly but usually have particular timbres in mind.

I don't really stick to the standard clean/crunch/solo things with what I do. My music, sound-wise, is much more varied, usually everything is custom-designed to fit with the track, there are tempo synced-delays, spacey pads, solo sounds, synth sounds etc.. a huge array of textures and tones, some multi-layered. A lot of the time I use factory presets or my own tweaked amp-cab combinations as starting points, then adjust as we jam and save those adjusted sound to new preset slots..

Sometimes I'm jamming with the band and I'm like "a lovely pad sound would work well here", or "a muted-picked part with a sweep delay would work there", you get the idea... Currently though its hard to tell which ones are the lovely pad sounds or the synced-sweep delay or the lead melody sounds etc.. As i create more tones this becomes more and more difficult to manage.

So mostly this is about organising presets for jamming and songwriting more than for gigging. It's also about the system being flexible enough be be experimental and creative with all the things the axe has to offer rather than just sticking to the same old group of 20 tones for everything I do. Workflow is everything when creating, and currently the workflow with axe presets is pretty clumsy at best IMO.

I am viewing the Axe from a sound-design perspective; more like one would view a synthesiser with lots of patches and banks. In modern soft synths there are some great solutions to searching and labelling large numbers of presets which make working and exploring with them easier - weather the presets are factory made or custom presets doesn't really matter - except with the axe, when the factory presets are updated, the organisational system should allow for them to be easily downloaded and updated on the axe with out lots of work (i.e moving everything around then syncing the RJM names again!).

For example: if i organised the factory presets in to banks and categories like Clean, Crunch, Hi-Gain, Delay FX, Synths, Pads then over time a new set of factory presets is available i"m going to have to re-sort everything which isn't really elegant and requires lots of computer dog-work but i want to get on and Jam!(time is so precious these days ;-) ). The other thing i've found with that is many presets fit into more than one "box". On the simplest level, one preset might have a clean and a lead scene, but other esoteric sounds might be described as Clean, Synth and Lead. In an ideal world a search for any of those terms would bring up that preset.

Sorry for the long post! Am I making sense?
 
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I have a mastermind gt16, I use it in this way; I have one button that goes to preset mode which shows all buttons as presets, and top 2 are up and down in pages. So I do my presets in banks of 14, when you step on the patch, it loads and goes to CC mode which has all cc's, and 3 scene buttons. My regular guy patches are first 14, then my AIC tribute I do the next 14, and so on, much past that are just old patches I never use. 767 slots seems like a waste of memory, could never imagine ever using that. IMHO - YMMV.
 
I use a hybrid system.
  • My first presets (just 5) are my "main" presets. Like having my favorite amp and a pedalboard. By the way, those 5 presets are duplicated in 5 scenes in the very first preset.
  • My first two entire Axe-Fx banks have special purpose presets and utility stuff. It's my library.
  • The 3rd Axe-Fx bank contains song-specific presets, that I use in the bands I play in.
  • The 4th Axe-Fx bank contains the bare Amp+Cab demo presets that accompany my Amp Guide.
  • The other banks contain test stuff, interesting presets from other users etc.
With my bands I use bank 3. I sort these presets for gigs using my RJM MM/GT. The same can be done on a MFC, using its Songs and Sets.

When we're jamming, I leave the Songs bank, and get back to my main presets, letting me engage/bypass whatever I want (thanks to the RJM).
 
Cheers guys, it's useful to know what you all do to keep it organised. Keep em coming ;-) Yek, your response is very helpful. I think a system similar to yours would help me but I still think it needs more detail to suit my needs... I guess I'm going to really have to set a lot of time aside to sort out my presets.
 
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