No. Presets are not cheating. Every professional producer whose name you know either uses them now, used them on the way up, or built a career on a sound somebody else programmed. The real puzzle was never whether it counts as cheating. It’s why the guilt around it won’t die.
I sell presets for a living, so obviously I have a horse in this race. I also spent years carrying that exact guilt myself, so instead of brushing the question off, let me actually take it apart.
Nobody agrees on what the “cheat” even is
Chase the logic downward and you never hit a floor. If a preset is cheating, what about playing a synth you didn’t design? A guitar you didn’t build? Nobody demands that photographers grind their own lenses.
Musicians have always stood on other people’s tools and other people’s sounds; all of music history works that way. And the border between “instrument” and “preset” is blurrier than people admit: a piano is, if you think about it, a single preset with no edit button.
Sixty years of presets
This argument is older than laptops. The first modular synths came with patch sheets: actual diagrams showing which sockets to cable up to reproduce a known sound. Producers traded them around like recipes.
Then came the 80s, when an enormous chunk of the decade’s hit records ran on stock factory patches from famous digital synths. Sounds that millions can still hum were presets somebody chose, not programmed. Nobody accused those producers of cheating. They were simply doing the job: finding the right sound for the record.
A modern preset pack is the same patch sheet in file form. The business model evolved; the practice never did.
What the skill actually is
This is the part the guilt has backwards. The skill separating finished tracks from abandoned ones is not sound selection. From what I’ve seen it breaks down roughly into: choosing the right sound, adjusting it until it sits in YOUR mix, and then arrangement, with arrangement towering over the other two.
- Picking is taste. You build it through listening, not through turning knobs.
- Tweaking is craft. Nudging the filter, replacing the reverb, redrawing the envelope until the patch belongs in your track. Ten minutes that outweigh the original hour someone spent designing it.
- Arranging is the song itself. No preset can do it for you. Tracks live or die here, and here is where your hours belong.
What a listener hears is a chord progression, a vocal, energy that rises and falls. Not one in a thousand hears “factory wavetable.” The scorekeeping exists only among producers.
For perspective: the demo below runs entirely on our presets. The writing is what makes it worth hearing; hand the same patches to someone playing badly and nothing would sell.
Where the guilt actually comes from
Three places, in my observation:
- Gatekeeping with a survival instinct. People who sank years into learning sound design protect that investment. Human, understandable, and none of your concern.
- Confusing process with product. Enjoy sound design? Then do it; it’s real craft and a perfectly good hobby. But it runs parallel to making music; it is not an entry requirement.
- The tutorial economy. A video titled “from scratch” outperforms one titled “I picked preset 34 and turned the cutoff down.” So beginners come away believing from-scratch is the norm. It never was, not even inside professional studios.
One fair warning though: dropping a preset in 100% untouched, as the loudest front-and-center hook of your track, can backfire once a hundred other producers own the same pack. That isn’t an ethics issue, it’s a distinctiveness issue. Two knob turns make it go away.
Use them like a professional
Think of presets as starting points that come with a warranty. Load one, then alter something — the cutoff, an envelope, one FX unit — until it reads as yours. For free practice material, grab our free Serum 2 presets and set yourself one rule: no preset gets used until you’ve changed at least two things. Tweaking skill builds itself on autopilot that way, and I go further into the habit in my list of Serum 2 beginner mistakes.
Whether packs deserve real money is its own, more practical question; the math is in are preset packs worth it. If your answer ends up being yes, the Serum 2 preset bundles are the best-value way to grow a library once the freebies stop being enough.
FAQ
Do professional producers really use presets?
Constantly. Deadlines settle the question for them. What makes a pro a pro is knowing which preset to reach for, and which two tweaks will make it sit.
Should I still learn sound design?
The fundamentals, yes: filter, envelopes, LFOs, one FX chain. That knowledge converts every preset into raw material. Going full from-scratch is optional, the way building your own guitar pedals is optional.
Can I release music made with presets commercially?
Yes, with royalty-free packs like ours. Finished music is covered by the license; the only forbidden move is reselling the preset files themselves.
Will my track sound like everyone else’s?
Only if the flashiest presets go in raw as your central hook. Alter the envelope, the FX and the surrounding context and recognizability drops to zero. Digging beyond the obvious picks helps too: the full Serum 2 preset catalog holds far more than the three packs everybody downloads.
The debate will outlive us all, because gatekeeping always does. But you personally can put it down. Redirect the guilt-energy into arrangement, the one part of the record nobody else can do for you.
I run Monosounds.studio and make the packs myself. Ten-plus years of producing, 97+ releases, 16,000+ downloads. Every Serum 2 preset we ship passes a CPU check on a mid-range laptop and gets used in a real track before release. If it does not survive a mix, it does not go in the pack.
More about Maxim & the studio →
