Paid presets ... pfff

yek

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The overload on social media of individuals advertising their paid presets is turning me off.

I just saw one that said something like: "Hey, I just made this preset in a few minutes. Buy it for $5."
I know several offerings that are of very questionable quality.

Everybody is entitled to making a buck, but it's getting ridiculous, and the early years of sharing stuff with the community / offering real content seem to be over, sadly. A stark contrast between getting constant firmware updates for free <> monetizing.

BTW, this is by no means an attack on the well-known parties providing high-quality presets and offering support for those.
 
I detest the whole idea of buying and sharing presets. Might as well come play the dang thing for them too. The one didn't dude you this technology, everyone tend to sound the same.
 
The overload on social media of individuals advertising their paid presets is turning me off.

I just saw one that said something like: "Hey, I just made this preset in a few minutes. Buy it for $5."
I know several offerings that are of very questionable quality.

Everybody is entitled to making a buck, but it's getting ridiculous, and the early years of sharing stuff with the community / offering real content seem to be over, sadly. A stark contrast between getting constant firmware updates for free <> monetizing.

BTW, this is by no means an attack on the well-known parties providing high-quality presets and offering support for those.
I agree. Besides these well-known parties, all that I've found is pure BS.

And there is a vendor that responded with resentment at this forum when kindly asked about an update of the one and only preset that he sells (a preset sold as for the Axe-FX III but obviously created with the Axe-FX II, converted with FracTool, and never tested on the Axe-FX III)
 
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It's a free market. If someone wants it and wants to pay for it, let him. Otherwise we should forbid Alibaba too if we care about quality.
 
It it was limited to a market, fine. But the offerings are overflowing other content on social media.
 
It's a free market. If someone wants it and wants to pay for it, let him. Otherwise we should forbid Alibaba too if we care about quality.

That is not a good example. I purchase very high quality products from Alibaba
 
It’s just as bad if not worse in the synth market. Either guys are just creating a few dozen patches on synths that have automatic randomize functions and selling them as their latest “pack”, or on some analog synths that don’t even have preset memory they are charging money for a pdf picture that shows knob settings, and it’s silliness like two different patches only having the cutoff or envelope level raised slightly between them and saying it’s a totally new sound.

Then again, that is probably better than the loop based content for Splice etc where your dragging a dropping a complete track, popular with many “producers” these days....


It’s like everyone wants to just make a buck, or wants to call themselves a musician without having to learn anything, so I guess the two parties feed off each other well lol
 
In a similar fashion, I sigh every time a forumer posting on the Recordings sub-forums is put down just because he/she doesn't want to share his/her presets. Even a guy told a forumer why bothering to post an audio clip if he wasn't willing to post the preset too... That kind of entitlement really puts me off. C'mon people, that's why there's a Preset Exchange sub-forum, there you CAN expect people posting their presets.
 
I agree Yek.... It's somewhat annoying. But, If it wasn't generating money, it wouldn't be growing. I guess there are a lot of people that want instant gratification as opposed to creating and learning themselves.
Preset sharing is cool as I've learned many things over the years from what others have shared. Buying presets just seems counterintuitive to me. But, I like to create, not copy.
 
It's weird, presets never sound good on my guitar anyway, not without massive tweaking. I love looking at players' presets just to learn things, but they always just make me feel like there's something wrong with my playing or my guitar. I'm glad there are presets out there for people that work for them, and to me, if someone else's presets gets you to the good place of focusing on playing or writing, then it's a fantastic thing, and more power to you. It's a very difficult thing for me to judge the quality of anyone else's presets, other than just to listen a recording of them playing and to say, "That has all the right character."

More to the point of your post yek: that said, I do think people love monetizing anything and everything online, regardless of it's actual worth, and sometimes in contrast to it's actual worth. To me it's a character flaw. Social media influencing (basically acting as a commercial) is one symptom of this mentality. I like people who work for a living. Not everything everyone does is worth the fruits of someone else's labor.
 
It's weird, presets never sound good on my guitar anyway, not without massive tweaking. I love looking at players' presets just to learn things, but they always just make me feel like there's something wrong with my playing or my guitar. I'm glad there are presets out there for people that work for them, and to me, if someone else's presets gets you to the good place of focusing on playing or writing, then it's a fantastic thing, and more power to you. It's a very difficult thing for me to judge the quality of anyone else's presets, other than just to listen a recording of them playing and to say, "That has all the right character."

I also have the feeling that most 3rd party presets sound bad on my guitar. In particular the high gain tones, not the cleans. It is like they have too much fizz at the high frequencies. I call it "can of bees syndrome" :D

It could be that they have lost hearing at the high frequencies, so they do not notice, or that they do not play with their head right in front of their monitors/speaker, or that their monitors are not truly FRFR, or that I am too sensitive to these frequencies, or just different tastes.

Normally I do not cut the high frequencies, because then it sounds muddy. For me it is a question of finding the right IR with the mike in a sweet spot (normally excluding the nasty SM57)
 
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I also have the feeling that most 3rd party presets sound bad on my guitar. In particular the high gain tones, not the cleans. It is like they have too much fizz at the high frequencies. I call it "can of bees syndrome" :D

It could be that they have lost hearing at the high frequencies, so they do not notice, or that they do not play with their head right in front of their monitors/speaker, or that their monitors are not truly FRFR, or that I am too sensitive to these frequencies, or just different tastes.

Normally I do not cut the high frequencies, because then it sounds muddy. For me it is a question of finding the right IR with the mike in a sweet spot (normally excluding the nasty SM57)

I'm always thinking just that any preset is based so fundamentally on how the character of an IR melds with how a particular pickup on a particular guitar with a particular setup, with a particular pick attack, etc. And I think it can line up really well for two players with pretty similar guitars. Like, I'll look at a Leon Todd video, where he's not trying to sell you a preset, but doing the awesome thing of showing how to use the Axe in different ways, walks you through his creation, posts his preset, and gives you his IR...and I try that preset, untweaked, playing the same thing he plays in the videos, and it sounds like garbage mixed with crap mixed with trash mixed with refuse, on a shit sandwich. And then I realize, "Oh, yeah, I'm not playing his guitar, and I don't hold my pick like he does, etc. If he played one of my presets on the guitar he's using in this video, it would also sound terrible." And that totally makes sense to me. I remember one of his where I had to boost my input insanely to get anywhere close to what he was getting, and still the EQ of the guitar was just bad with his settings. On the other hand, if he took that particular guitar and played through one my presets, it would massively overload and probably sound like the most biting harsh thing on top of being an unintelligible mess. Especially because I really favor these Saturday Night Specials, which are pretty low output, they can sound really weak on a preset made for powerful pickups, or they'll sound muddy on a preset made for a single-coil. Not to mention, my guitar has such a weird wood combination (Black Limba body with Wenge neck), I'm sure that's altering things too. Plus, the fact that my relatively low output pickups are also set very far away from the strings, and on top of that, my bridge is a Floyd. Normally a Floyd just seems to pair with high output fire breathing pickups. Mine is just a weirdo combination, but I love it haha!

We're in this new era of tone being also about audio engineering, and that's a skill all of its own. I respect great players, and I respect great audio engineers, but it's a weird thing that getting a great guitar tone with IRs gets you so into that world of engineering, much moreso than tweaking a tube amp in front of you. And for that reason, I totally understand going to others' presets, to get a feel for the engineering methods that feel right to you as a guitarist. I mean, I don't see guitar heroes of the past giving any thought to high and low pass filters to apply off the Neve console. I think, as with anything in playing, you're so much better off eventually to hone your own engineering go-to techniques, but I'm always thinking your time is better spent on being an awesome player and an awesome writer, and whatever gets you there is okay.
 
Great players sound great with most any amp/gear. For some reason lots of people think it’s the rig/preset.

It’s like telling someone “what a great meal, I must know what type of stove you use”

I mean come on, I could get a copy of every preset from famous artist fractal user and would I sound just like them ? Nope, because I can’t play like them, so why should I obsess over their settings so much ?

I saw Zakk Wilde play no more tears on a practice amp and epiphone and it still sounded way more like the song than I could sound with his exact touring rig.


Unless presets come with a Matrix style direct neural download that gives us the playing jobs along with the amp settings, presets are not going to give talent
 
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