Templates: yes or no way?

[DIYistkrieg]

Hi guys, I'm on holidays and it's kinda boring here today, so my mind went wandering in the "audio world" and came back with a question for you all: do you think using templates is a good thing? Is it really necessary? What are the benefits and the downsides of it?
My personal POV is that templates may be a good way to start things up, but still shouldn't be used everytime, expecially templates like KPA or Axefx's and guitars/bass sounds in general, those are the templates that are the most dangerous IMO! Laziness may prevail and taking the shortcut may end up (as it already did) creating an army of cloned productions, and that's what I despise in the so called "modern metal".
What do you think?

 

[DIYistkrieg]

and of course by "templates" I meant "presets"

 

[henryjarv]

"Yes".
But I almost never use presets or templates as they are, those are just a good starting point sometimes.
.............And why does presets in amp sims (PodFarm, Amplitube...) always sound so horrible?!

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

After watching professionals use them (NTM since January) I'm gonna go with yes.

After making some templates myself, I'm going to say definitely fucking yes.

In fact I would go so far to say it's silly not to at least start with either a preset or a mix template if you ever want to get faster/better at this.

 

[DIYistkrieg]

"Yes".
But I almost never use presets or templates as they are, those are just a good starting point sometimes.
.............And why does presets in amp sims (PodFarm, Amplitube...) always sound so horrible?!

Actualy I find Guitar Rig's presets pretty decent for an amp sim, I guess the other sims you mentioned simply suck, expecially Podfarm!

After watching professionals use them (NTM since January) I'm gonna go with yes.

After making some templates myself, I'm going to say definitely fucking yes.

In fact I would go so far to say it's silly not to at least start with either a preset or a mix template if you ever want to get faster/better at this.

Well, I guess it's mainly because pros use them that I try to avoid doing the same I still think there couldn't be two projects needing the same templates/presets, maybe I could end up using a preset as a starting point on things like reverbs or delays, but that's it for me I guess

 

[MrBongo]

for me there´s a preset master chain, preset room reverbs and plates, track templates for common stuff like drums including parallel compression ... each of them needs a little tweaking on most sessions, still that saves half an hour easily

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

Actualy I find Guitar Rig's presets pretty decent for an amp sim, I guess the other sims you mentioned simply suck, expecially Podfarm!

Well, I guess it's mainly because pros use them that I try to avoid doing the same I still think there couldn't be two projects needing the same templates/presets, maybe I could end up using a preset as a starting point on things like reverbs or delays, but that's it for me I guess

I guess I'm thinking more along the lines of having plugins already where you know you are going to use them along with having all your buses set and your 2 chain stuff dialed in the way you want.

I terms of presets for plugins, I would say using them as a starting point is a good idea as well.

I wouldn't say eq is ever going to be set exactly the same way. Compressors will need to have thier threshold changed everytime etc...

But there isn't any reason to have a mix template setup and ready to go, even if you opt to change it.