Hey guys, just wanted to know your thoughts about presets!

I'm more into creating my own sounds but IMO sometimes presets can be useful when I get a creative block or if I want to learn how a certain sound is made, and then fooling around with it to get a new sound

They are great, most people dont have the time to handcraft their own sound library.

Personally I find them to be a great starting point also layer a few presets give you a whole new sound of your own!

Also I learnt so much through reverse engineering a lot of presets.

I love presets.

I personally don't use presets that much, but in general I think they're a tool just like anything else. Either as a starting point for tweaking or just as they are. Sometimes people say it's cheating, boring, "makes you sound like everybody else" etc, but... I think there's just so much more to making music than sound design, and for some that's an important part and for some it's not.

That said, some specific presets may be so widely used that they can't be used without getting associated with other things. Just like a specific sample that's already been used in other things may not be a good idea to use again.

Either way, I think the only people that care at all are other producers, who probably aren't your key demographic for your music.

I have tons of my own presets that I use.

I don't usually use presets, purely because I've hardly found anything that fits into my own music. Presets are usually too novelty and specific for my music. If I ever do find anything that's appropriate then I'm definitely gonna use it. If presets work with your music, then go ahead and use them. There are people out there who have a problem with producers using using them and think that it takes away from the integrity of the music but that's rubbish. It's about what you make, not how you make it.

i much prefer not to use presets, i design all my patches by hand usually. but (especially for beginners) presets can still be a useful tool to get closer to a sound that you don't have experience making, and there's nothing wrong with using them.
i do save my own patches as presets and load them up later and tweak them further, which helps to give a kind of stylistic continuity to my tracks sometimes. but i still don't generally use presets made by other people.

I believe the use of presets is fine. I don't really see an issue with it at all, same goes for samples. They're there for you to use to create music. A preset will only give you a generic preset track though - to make it unique and make it your own, you eventually will have to tweak them in some way, shape or form.

Laidback Luke once said that there comes a point in your career that you will need to focus on sound design and creating "your unique sound" - but that comes at a later point in your career.

An amateur producer would have relatively little benefit to creating his/her own sound if they have no way to utilize that sound. Sound design is pretty intense, it requires complete understanding of your synth.