This comes from the guy who does the Recording Excellence website, newsletter, YouTube videos, etc. I agree that presets can be good starting points. What do you say?
It depends on the plugin, tbh. Take Valhalla Ubermod as an example. There’s lots of parameters and it can do lots of different kinds of sounds, so it’s fantastic to have presets grouped into logical folders to use as jumping off points - like, do I want a smooth chorus, a flanger, a wobbly long delay? Much easier to use a preset than set all that up from scratch.
On the other hand, I have no need for presets on EQ or Compression because they’re totally source dependent - the presets can’t have any idea what sound you’re going to feed into them, so unless the programmer is psychic I’d rather just adjust them based on what I can hear.
Then you get presets for things like La2a models, where the thing only has two knobs… 
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Presets are great. I usually scroll through presets till I like one, and start tweaking from there. And I always save my presets with a descriptive name, so I can remember what it is in the future.
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This right here. And as Josh said, so much easier to start that way than to put it all together from scratch.
Totally agree also about not needing presets for EQ and compression. But for pretty much everything else I use, I start from a preset (amp sims, saturation plugs, channel strips, anything I’m using on a send channel).
Another good thing about presets is that it allows those with less experience to at least get into the ball park in terms of things sounding decent. That can be a confidence builder at a time when one is “drinking from the firehose”…
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What i’ve learned is the mix is decent when it sounds good after using a plugins’ preset. But i really started to learn when the plugins i used had no presets at all.
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I never use presets for eq or compression, makes no real sense to me really .
Verb yes I do a lot.
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No question about it. But when one is new, using presets is a great way to start learning. It certainly helped me.
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