Presets are the fastest way into Phaseburn One, and a fast way back out of a blank page. The browser holds eight factory banks and eight user banks — A through H, 32 slots each. The factory library is being built through the open beta: Bank A is being redesigned, the banks after it are reserved for the sounds the beta brings, and the strongest user submissions ship in it, credited. The user side is fully functional today — saving, renaming, import and export all work now. This chapter covers the browser, saving your own work, recalling presets from your host, and sending yours in.
The browser
Click the preset name at the top of the window to open the browser — or step through presets in place with the prev/next arrows beside it, which move through every non-empty preset, factory then user, loading each. Down the left of the browser is a list in two groups: FACTORY, the built-in banks, and USER, the ones you fill yourself. Each bank shows how many of its 32 slots are in use, and a bank with nothing in it is drawn dimmed — dimmed, not disabled: an empty user bank is exactly where your next save goes, so the row still clicks and still selects, and brightens when it does. Pick a bank and its presets fill the main view as two columns — all 32 slots at once, no scrolling — and clicking any one loads it immediately, so browsing is just clicking down the list and listening.
The ★ button flips to favorites only: star the presets you keep coming back to with the star on each row, then filter to just those when you are working. Rows can carry two badges. A preset that carries its own groove is marked SEQ — that patch brings a sequence with it, not only a sound, so loading it hands the sequencer (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer) a pattern to play. A preset marked FX is built to process external audio: it has AUDIO IN patched somewhere, so it is meant to be loaded on an audio track and used as an insert rather than played from the keyboard. The one cable that does not earn the badge on its own is the Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) reference, which every preset carries by default — that one counts only when the PLL’s INPUT REF blend is actually open, either at the knob or through a modulation route pointed at it. No factory preset wears FX today; it lights on the ones you build.
KEEP SEQ flips the SEQ behavior around for browsing: while it is lit, presets load their sound only, so the pattern you are playing carries on while you audition patches. It is a session switch — it holds wherever you leave it for the rest of the session, including closing and reopening the window, and it starts off again the next time you load the instrument.
The strip along the bottom names the loaded preset — its title, author and description — so you always know where you are; hover any row and it previews that preset’s info instead, so you can read a description before committing to a click. INIT in the window’s top bar clears the engine back to a plain default when you want to build from nothing rather than from someone else’s patch. Between the browser and favorites, finding a sound is a few seconds’ work, which is the point: the browser is a place to pass through on the way to playing.
Saving your own
When a sound is yours, keep it. SAVE opens a dialog that writes the current state into one of your USER banks — the same A-through-H layout as the factory side, 32 slots each. Pick the bank and slot, give the preset a Name and an Author (both required), add an optional Description for the footer, and save. If the slot is already taken the dialog warns you before it overwrites, so you will not lose a patch by accident. SAVE works from anywhere in the browser, the factory side included: press it while a factory preset is loaded and the same dialog copies that preset into a user slot. Clicking an empty slot does not open the dialog — it clears the engine back to the plain default, like INIT, with one difference: it respects KEEP SEQ, so a lit switch keeps the running pattern going while the sound resets.
A saved preset captures the whole engine — every source, the filter, the effects and their routing, the modulation, the aftertouch routing. If the sound includes a sequence, that travels with it and the preset shows the SEQ tag; recall it later and the groove comes back with the patch. Loading is deterministic: the engine restarts every free-running piece of the sound — the PLL loop’s chaos and lab state, the effects’ program memory, the parameter glides — from one canonical point, so a preset sounds the same on every recall, never colored by whatever played before it. A handful of things stay deliberately outside presets because they are instrument-wide settings, not sound: the oversampling and base rate, the internal-sequencer switch, the output limiter, host sync, global volume and pitch-bend range.
User banks are yours to reorganize. Double-click a preset’s name, or use the pencil on its row, to rename it in place. IMPORT and EXPORT move presets as files: export works on any preset, factory or user — hand a patch to someone, back it up, or pull a factory sound out as a file — while import fills a user slot, with an overwrite warning if that slot is full. That is also how a preset someone sends you gets into your library.
Whole banks travel the same way. EXPORT BANK writes the bank you are viewing — factory or user — into a single file, all 32 slots; IMPORT BANK replaces a user bank with such a file, after a confirmation when the bank is not empty. One file per bank makes backing up or swapping entire libraries a two-click job.
The factory banks
The factory side has room for eight banks so the library can grow by theme, and during the beta it is being built bank by bank rather than shipped full of filler. Bank A is being redesigned as the beta runs — treat whatever lineup your build carries as a moving target, not the finished library. The banks after it, B through H, are reserved and empty for now: they fill through beta updates that bring new and reorganized factory sounds, and through shipped user submissions — credited to their authors — which is exactly how that library grows. A bank that is still empty shows 0/32 in the sidebar; that is the room the library grows into, not a missing download. Load a bank, click down the column, and keep what stops you.
Because the library moves, keep your own work on your own side of it. SAVE stays available while you browse the factory side: press it and the dialog copies the loaded factory preset — reworked into something of yours, or untouched — into one of your USER banks. User banks are your files, an installer leaves them alone, and a patch parked there rides through every update. EXPORT does the same job as a file, and EXPORT BANK does it for all 32 slots at once — that is the copy to keep if you also move between machines. One detail to know while the beta runs: stars on the factory side are remembered by slot rather than by name, so once a bank is reorganized a star can land on a different sound than the one you starred. Anything you lean on is worth a user slot of its own.
Presets in your host
Phaseburn One’s presets also show up in your DAW, not only in the plugin’s own browser. In a host that supports CLAP preset discovery, the instrument publishes its whole factory and user library to the host, so you can browse and recall Phaseburn One patches from your DAW’s preset menu the same way you browse any plugin’s. Factory presets appear prefixed by their bank — Factory A and so on, then the preset’s name — and load the identical patch you would get from the browser inside the window.
Practically, that means two ways to reach the same sounds: the browser in the window, with favorites and the SEQ marker, or your host’s preset list, which some producers prefer for tagging and quick recall across projects. Either route loads the same preset. Hosts that do not implement preset discovery still have the full browser inside the plugin, so nothing is lost — this is an extra door, not the only one.
One thing to re-check after a beta update: a host remembers a factory preset by its place in the library, so a reorganized factory bank can leave that recall pointing at a different sound. Presets you saved into a user bank keep the place you gave them, and a project that stored the parameters themselves plays back the same either way.
Send us yours
Made something worth keeping? Send it in. During the open beta — submissions are open until October 1, 2026 — you can submit presets at /beta/submit-preset — one preset, several at once, or a whole bank: EXPORT and EXPORT BANK write exactly the files the form accepts. Any preset you submit can ship as a factory preset, credited to you by name. Submitting grants us the right to include it and creates no obligation on our side — but if at least one of your presets ships, a solid discount on the full license is the least you will get, and ten beta users of our choosing get the full license free. All of that is at our discretion, and the beta comes with no guarantees; the full terms live on /download.
Two things to know before you export. First, level: shipped presets are brought to a consistent output level, so before saving, click AUTO on the Mixer’s PRESET fader — one click levels your patch to the factory reference, and what we ship will sound the way you sent it. Second, words: if a name or description does not fit print we may trim, adjust or drop it — the sound itself is never touched. Standout submissions may also come back to everyone later as free add-on banks, credited the same way.
What makes a preset shippable is not complexity — it is character. A sound that does one thing with conviction, named well and described in a line, is worth more to the bank than a patch with everything turned on. Export it from your user bank, or submit it through the form, and tell us what it is for. The factory bank you browse today is built exactly this way.