The Preset Pros Story
Our Origin Story
The idea for Preset Pros came to us as we were working in some of the biggest studios in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York. We’d always see engineers walk into the studio to work on mixing the next big record (think Drake, Justin Bieber, Post Malone, Doja Cat, etc.). We’d go into our production session next door, and by lunchtime, we’d see that the engineer was ALREADY 95% DONE with their mix.
This was so crazy to us - we’d spent 3 hours auditioning different kick drums, and next door they were getting an amazing mix for a hit record 95% done! We asked ourselves:
- How are they doing that so fast?
- Why don’t these engineers ever get stuck?
The Realization That Changed Everything
One day, we were waiting for our Postmates to arrive and happened to be chatting with an engineer who was working on one of these hit mixes. We finally asked point-blank “what’s your secret? How are you doing these amazing mixes so quickly?”
He looked at us and said enthusiastically “wanna see?”
Of course we did! We followed him back to his mix room, and he pulled up the session.
“See this vocal chain? This is my preset, I load it up in one click and it basically gets me 99% there for the lead vocals” he said casually.
We looked at each other like “WHAT!!” That would have taken us hours to get something set up that was half as good, and he just got there in ONE CLICK?!
We knew we had to make this accessible, it was just too good not to.
Our Design Process
So we went to work, reaching out to and working closely with top engineers throughout the industry to construct the best and most versatile collection of vocal preset chains ever assembled.
We spent months dialing in the compression, EQ, de-essing, reverb, delay, and effects to provide the absolute best starting point for vocal mixing.
After over a year of testing on tens of thousands of vocal recordings, we could confidently say that we’d built the best vocal preset pack ever created.
But then we realized something - in order to replicate these chains, someone would need to buy hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of plugins. Which definitely didn’t help with our ORIGINAL mission to make these chains accessible.
Back to the Drawing Board
So back to work we went - figuring out the best way to make these incredible sounding chains accessible. We started testing them against the stock plugins in our DAWs, and we had a major realization:
The Stock plugins sounded just as good - and in some cases actually sounded BETTER - than our existing chains. AND they were more CPU efficient.
How could this be? We started talking to as many plugin developers as we could to understand more about how this was even possible. There’s no way a $200 plugin could be replicated using a stock plugin, right?
Wrong. We learned that in many cases, the results from the 3rd party plugins could be easily replicated using stock plugins because it’s all about HOW you set your plugins, not which plugins you use.
Stock plugins might be slightly clunkier or harder to set up initially, but they certainly sound just as good - if not better - than 3rd party plugins.
Our Mission
So that brings us to today - two years after we had the original idea and formulated the mission for Preset Pros - we are excited to be actually fulfilling it. Our pack gives you the tools you need to get pro results FAST and EASY - just how the biggest engineers in the world do it. And it’s accessible - using the tools you already have in your DAW.
We love to hear from music makers from around the globe, and we've been fortunate to help thousands of producers and engineers of all levels achieve their goals of getting a great mix. If you have any questions or feedback at all, please reach out! Contact us here and we'll be in touch!
Your friends and fellow music makers,
The Preset Pros Team