An issue that I often contemplate is, when is it acceptable to use factory presets and samples? I tend not to use them most of the time in favor of inventing new sounds and sampling from my own recordings and instruments. However, sometimes I make exceptions, such as using presets for classic keyboard sounds like pianos and organs, or individual drum samples for programming beats. Personally I have an aversion to using them, but I don’t doubt that lots of excellent music is produced using unchanged samples and factory presets. So the question remains, when is it a good idea and when is it a bad idea to rely on what has been painstakingly produced for us by industry professionals?
When I use presets I usually make some adjustments to in order to get closer to what I’m after sonically. In the piece Rihaku that I wrote with Nils Westdal for our album Truth is Stranger I used the factory sampled piano on the Yamaha A3000. I would have preferred to use an acoustic piano, but opted to give the sampler a go for budgetary reasons. In order to get a bit more sustain out of the sound I made some subtle but effective changes to the patch including manipulating the envelope, adjusting the velocity sensitivity, and slightly compressing the output.
Rihaku by Keston and Westdal
I created this synthesized effect using a Korg MS200 Analog Modeling Synthesizer. I often use this instrument with the external sync enabled for arpeggiation and and tempo delay processing. The delay does some strange things with the external sync enabled. As you adjust the delay time it jumps from different units of time within the tempo including triplets. This can produced some future dub, spaced out, synthethized effects when the feedback is up all the way. 
Here’s the piano from the last entry without the distortion applied. I left on all the other processing including limiting, stereo chorus and reverb. Now you can hear why I was not happy with the original recording. The recording is a bit noisey and although I used a nice mic (AKG c4000b large diaphragm condenser), the piano is quite old and suffers from a thin sound along with knocks and rattles that occur when using the keyboard and pedals. One might hear these features as the instruments character, but that rational only goes so far. I do like how limiting is manipulating the dynamics in the example. Adding the stereo chorus and reverb blends much of the rattling and knocks into the overall sound while the limiter expands the noise as the sound decays.
I recorded these gentle piano chords on March 25, 2008 while working on a classically influenced piece of music. While re-listening to this today I had the idea of damaging the recording as much as possible with processing to see what I might end up with. The main reason I decided to do this was because I was dissatisfied with the sound of the original recording and thought, perhaps I could get something interesting by degrading the signal significantly. I tried a few different types of processing but settled with heavy limiting followed by a high shelf into monster distortion, topped off with almost 5 seconds of reverb. 
Here are the original electric drill sounds from the