What's your patch management technique?

I tend to use presets as the starting point for most of the sounds I use in my compositions. Because of this, I do not like overwriting or losing any factory presets. The problem is that many synths come with all the preset banks already filled with factory presets.

So, what do you do when you want to save your own patch? How do you decide what factory preset to dump? Even worse is when you purchase a third party "patch pack". Where do you load them? How to decide what factory presets to eliminate? How do you know that you won't lose some good factory preset that may be useful in the future?

The only solution I can think of is to connect your synth to a patch manager, create an empty bank in the manager, and then listen to each preset one at a time and keep the presets you like by adding them to the new bank in the manager. You can then delete the factory bank and replace it with the new bank you created that has the presets you like.

The problem with this is that it is extremely time consuming, and you still don't know if you may be losing a factory preset that might be just what you need in a future project.

So, what do you do? How do you go about creating space so that you can save your own presets or add a new third party patch pack?:thumbsup: