Hello
fustrun!
Here are, to me, the things I’d go with:
1)Pdf - Gordon Reid: Synth Secrets in 63 Parts (SOS Articles)
https://www.mediafire.com/file/7w2dcsqmkbeduea/
2)Article - Cryonautmedia:
Reverse Engineering Presets: An Interactive Guide
https://cryonautmedia.com/reverse-engineering-presets-an-interactive-guide/
But even without those fabulous SOS Articles,
Use digital technology (something like Zebra) to your advantage, that is:
learn by doing, and failing, and doing it again, as many times as it takes...
I could be wrong but,
I think that Great Presets are practically all the beginning to advanced mentorship you need, they are the equivalent of having the score of a great master in your hands, just waiting to be dissected...
Learn it like a kid who’s ignorant and unintimidated of his own ignorance would...
And question where the authority of the most valuable resource really is...
I’m always reminded that it’s as if you were to find the still-functioning remains of an alien aircraft, what do you do? You can of course, first, learn all the theory there hopefully exists to know and understand every separate components, metals, electronics, associations as basically and as deeply as you can from the outside, and there certainly is value in that, or...
You can get excited by it like the kid inside you, and go directly second or exclusively, right at the source and pick it apart, where the eureka moments are, until you get a deep intuitive feel for it. And really, at the core of it all you trust yourself, that it’s ok to be on your own, that your brain will find the way all by itself, even when you don’t know anything yet...
Thanks to presets, you will then have at your disposal the experience of making endless variations of different families of sound within strings, brass, woods, perc, that no outside tutorial or book will ever give you... Presets are a very worthy resource of your time which I don’t think even the oldest masters of Synthesizers had at the time they started their journey in sound making...
So...Ultimately, learn from the masters, of presets you admire, because presets are not the opposite of an education in Sound Synthesis, even though digital, they are the established language, the knowledge, the history of synthesizers and more...
Happy Practicing!
A.