State of Epicicity
Fractal Fanatic
Dude, other people’s presets, or OPP, as the song goes, should totally sound bad, unless you’re playing a guitar that sounds remarkably similar to the author of the preset, and you play like the author.
I truly do not mean this statement in a confrontational way, but audio is not plug and play, it’s a developed skill to which some people dedicate their entire lives. It shouldn’t be easy to jump in and create the tones a great engineer created for an artist; it’s a difficult thing.
I’ve purposely matched my guitar, a superstrat, with lower output PAF style pickups, and almost anyone else’s presets sound like crap when I go through them. I tried out a set of really high output humbuckers for a few days, and nearly every factory preset sounded godly. I went back to my low outputs because I love them, but it does mean presets that other people make will consistently sound bad. And that’s fine! I make the best guitar tones I’ve ever heard all the time on the AxeFX III, and it’s because I figured out that my guitar, with its low output either agrees with IRs from small cabinets, or with large cabinets that I’ve processed heavily with the Smoothing parameter in the cab block.
When I posted a single preset on the forum that sounded huge and awesome with my guitar and my technique, it didn’t seem to gel well with others, but that’s just an indication that our guitars sound completely different from one another, and so does our playing too, probably. But if I posted a recording of me playing through that preset, it would sound awesome, not because it’s empirically awesome, but because it’s tailored to my slightly less usual mismatch of guitar, hardware, and pickups, and perfectly supports my playing style.
So my advice is to change how you view presets, that they are a guide, but not significant. If they sound awesome for someone, it’s because of a match to the preset author, if they don’t, it’s just a mismatch, not a bad preset, or on your end, a bad pickup.
I used to watch Pensado’s Place, where there were really in depth interviews with engineers, and I so remember this one discussion of presets, where the dude was just saying that a preset has nothing to do with the real world, that everything you do in audio is based on the context of a song, and there should never ever be a one size fits all solution. Now, they meant stuff like mastering compressor or vocal EQ presets, but to me, the concept transfers elegantly to guitars.
I love looking at others’ presets as a learning experience, to gain tips and tricks that may or may not help me achieve my tones, but a good preset should be yours, just totally tailored to you, in my opinion. We have the most flexible and powerful tone generator on earth for that reason, to be able to make a tone that wraps around your guitar perfectly, not a perfect tone that you wrap your playing around. Again, this is all just my perspective, so take it with a grain of salt (hopefully that goes without saying).
I truly do not mean this statement in a confrontational way, but audio is not plug and play, it’s a developed skill to which some people dedicate their entire lives. It shouldn’t be easy to jump in and create the tones a great engineer created for an artist; it’s a difficult thing.
I’ve purposely matched my guitar, a superstrat, with lower output PAF style pickups, and almost anyone else’s presets sound like crap when I go through them. I tried out a set of really high output humbuckers for a few days, and nearly every factory preset sounded godly. I went back to my low outputs because I love them, but it does mean presets that other people make will consistently sound bad. And that’s fine! I make the best guitar tones I’ve ever heard all the time on the AxeFX III, and it’s because I figured out that my guitar, with its low output either agrees with IRs from small cabinets, or with large cabinets that I’ve processed heavily with the Smoothing parameter in the cab block.
When I posted a single preset on the forum that sounded huge and awesome with my guitar and my technique, it didn’t seem to gel well with others, but that’s just an indication that our guitars sound completely different from one another, and so does our playing too, probably. But if I posted a recording of me playing through that preset, it would sound awesome, not because it’s empirically awesome, but because it’s tailored to my slightly less usual mismatch of guitar, hardware, and pickups, and perfectly supports my playing style.
So my advice is to change how you view presets, that they are a guide, but not significant. If they sound awesome for someone, it’s because of a match to the preset author, if they don’t, it’s just a mismatch, not a bad preset, or on your end, a bad pickup.
I used to watch Pensado’s Place, where there were really in depth interviews with engineers, and I so remember this one discussion of presets, where the dude was just saying that a preset has nothing to do with the real world, that everything you do in audio is based on the context of a song, and there should never ever be a one size fits all solution. Now, they meant stuff like mastering compressor or vocal EQ presets, but to me, the concept transfers elegantly to guitars.
I love looking at others’ presets as a learning experience, to gain tips and tricks that may or may not help me achieve my tones, but a good preset should be yours, just totally tailored to you, in my opinion. We have the most flexible and powerful tone generator on earth for that reason, to be able to make a tone that wraps around your guitar perfectly, not a perfect tone that you wrap your playing around. Again, this is all just my perspective, so take it with a grain of salt (hopefully that goes without saying).
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