How to make the most out of stock instruments and effects

YOU don’t need to buy lots of expensive hardware to get a wide range of sounds. Many DAWs come bundled with a wide range of instruments and effects.

Ableton, for example, offers several tiers of Live 10 depending on how much bundled instruments and sounds you want. Logic too has a great selection of instruments.

But here’s the thing, they are often limited within that DAW and don’t work cross-platform. This is one of the reasons people buy plugins.

In addition, plugins offer a much broader range of sounds as there is a whole global market to choose from. You only need to buy the ones you need, as opposed to having a large selection of bundled sounds designed to suit everyone.

So, with all my raving about how great third-party plugins can be, why am I writing about making the most of stock sounds? It’s simple – they are essentially free (or at least covered in the price of the DAW).

So here are my suggestions for getting the best out of what you already have:

1. Read the manual

This one is really simple and for good reason. Stock instruments and effects are well documented, normally all in the same chapter, of your DAW’s manual.

This makes them very easy to learn, and you often get a good understanding of how they were designed too!

While they may not always be the prettiest synths or effects, they will be optimised for the software and work very well.

2. Favourite and classify the stock presets you like

In Ableton, you can tag sounds, samples, instruments, and effects with coloured tags.

This is a great way to make life easier in the long run. As an Ableton user myself, I am not a huge fan of 70% of all the instruments presets built-in. To get around this, I tag the sounds that I like and add them into a favourites category.

This makes it a lot easier to filter through the good options that relate to your sound, and as time progresses, you may find certain presets are your go-to options and start becoming part of your style.

In other stock plugins that load more like the normal VSTs, just save the presets you like into a folder set aside for you. Make sure you know which ones are made by someone else so you don’t sell them as artist presets when you get big and famous.

3. Track templates

Do you find that you have the stock EQ plugin followed by a compressor on every track? Try setting it up as a track template so it is immediately available and you don’t have to sort through lots of different options each time.

In DAWs like Reaper, which I use for podcast creation, I use Reaper’s stock plugins for editing the voices. Reaper allows you to save an FX chain, which means you can have a default setting for each person’s voice saved to their name.

Ableton also allows this feature, with the convenient placement of macro-mapping.

4. Watch YouTube Tutorials

I didn’t rank this as high up as other suggestions for the reasons that many YouTubers won’t spend as much time on stock instruments, but nevertheless, it is a good way to learn them.

Ableton especially has a lot of coverage for its stock instruments on YouTube. Search up video guides to find tips and tricks for how to use them. Match what the guides are doing and save the presets to expand your preset library.

5. Model a genre

Generally, stock instruments fit into an era. I have found a lot of stock instruments work great for the sounds of old UK Garage tracks for example. This is because many were used when these genres were kicking off.

The simplicity of stock instruments leads to some rather generic sounds, but that is usually because they were well used in the past.

If you are making a track based on a certain genre, there’s a good chance you can create those sounds really easily from stock instruments.

6. Drafting sounds for a low spec computer

I am not a big fan of the sound quality of stock instrument libraries, as a general rule.

Ableton’s pianos, for example, aren’t the nicest sounding and can leave the song sounding a bit dull. What they do offer though is a low hit on performance.

Sometimes if you just want to quickly jam out ideas, stock sounds are fine and then you can replace them later at the mixing stage.

One of my favourite piano instruments is Una Corda by Native Instruments in their Komplete bundle. I don’t have Komplete installed on my laptop, but do have it on my main PC so using stock instruments until I can get things replaced is a really convenient option.