And the award for best factory preset goes to….

Band Commander.

The Fender amp that got no love in real life has shown itself to be a perfect clean amp and pedal platform in the afterlife (after it died and went to Fractal, I mean). It’s my discovery of 2021. Perfectly not fancy, it works everywhere.
I've tried so many clean amps, but keep coming back to the band commander. Been using that for the past couple of years after I first saw Cooper Carter playing through that in one of his videos
 
I'll go for the Plexi presets. Granted, you can tweak them to make them sound even better but those were the first presets that really deeply wowed me when I got my Axe 3 even though I've already been using an Axe 2 for a long time.
After that first positive shock I tend to really enjoy the Drones of Arrakis, even without the synth, the basic lead tone is also glorious. And honestly, most of the factory presets are so good that I'm just picking an amp that I like, find the factory preset for it and just play away with minimal tweaking.
 
I'll go for the Plexi presets. Granted, you can tweak them to make them sound even better but those were the first presets that really deeply wowed me when I got my Axe 3 even though I've already been using an Axe 2 for a long time.
After that first positive shock I tend to really enjoy the Drones of Arrakis, even without the synth, the basic lead tone is also glorious. And honestly, most of the factory presets are so good that I'm just picking an amp that I like, find the factory preset for it and just play away with minimal tweaking.

exactly - even without the synths it sounds great !
 
"The Planets"

I stumbled upon this riff with an Axe-FX Ultra years ago and it's one of my favorite things I've ever come up with. Oddly enough I thought the preset sounded better in the Ultra than the II and III. The pitch shifting in the Ultra version sounded more synth-y which I thought gave it a super unique vibe. Will eventually make it into a full song, concept album, ect.

 
One thing I find odd, is even though I own a Mesa 100 watt DR, and can get awesome tones from it, on the III I actually prefer the Soldano-based presets. (Yes, I know. ;) ) Being able to find a tone I like from one of the SLO's is just way less effort for me than trying to dial in a desirable Recto tone. I even tried the Thorendal model, once I learned it too is a Recto model.
For me, it's just too easy to find a great factory preset, even if it needs a little tweaking, than to spend a bunch of time trying to match a preset to an amp I own.
 
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