Having Factory presets programmed “over the top” was (not so much anymore) a common thing among manufacturers. The idea was that the units would be tried out in noisy music stores and its purpose was to grab the buyer right out of the gate. With the advent of YouTube and a million gear demo channels this attitude has diminished a good bit. However, I never felt the H9’s preset FX levels were very extreme. At least not compared some digital MultiFX units of the 80’s and 90’s. It was a given back then that it would be necessary to make your own or tweak the factory. ….
This is a really good point. I have a few friends who were amp designers for Fender in the 90’s and heard about marketing executives changing amp designs with the conscious goal of wowing potential customers in music stores (arguably to the detriment of subsequent use).
I also could have made my point better. Yes, I have dialed back H9 presets to suit my pedestrian tastes. But my point regarding H9 user diversity really speaks to the percentage of the presets inapplicable to me. That isn’t really a tweaking issue. It’s an issue of the intended customer for some of the 99 factory presets (understandably) being someone else. It’s a big world and me and my ilk are just a sliver of it.
But it is also worth noting that there are something like 600 other presets in an H9max and not on the 99 factory preset list. Quite a few of those presets suit me just fine as is. Plowing through the haystack to find those needles is the task there. There have been several occasions when I worked on a preset for an hour or two only to find a factory preset that was essentially the same (but better) right there all along.
