I am an amerture composer who was classically trained. Most of what I want to write involves a few acoustic instruments with an occasional synthesizer. I can always hear what I want to have that synthesizer sound like in my head but rarely can quite find the right one. Or I will think I found the right one and listen to it again the next day and realize it did not match what was in my head and I had "settled."

It's a pretty common frustration for me because I do often have an exact idea of how the synthesizer should sound and behave but I dont have the vocabulary to search for it. Sometimes I have a rough sense of what sort of wave created it so that narrows it down slightly but I still cant often find it.

It doesn't help that many synths have a completely different timbre if you touch them lightly or play with how you hold onto the notes.

And I wish I could say there were a "common" set of synths I want for my compositions but very few of the presets I scroll through I find "bad" they just dont fit this specific song.

I spend hours in Logic Pro flipping through presets, going through alchemy with some filters and coming up with 10-20 presets that are close but not quite it.

I wish I had better intuition of how to categorize these presets. Like I have a sense of the difference between a lead or a pad but obviously a lead can be played like a pad sometime and some dont neatly fit into that category. Im bad for some of the sounds of telling if it's more of a bell, more analog, more strings, more traditional synth. Often times I can find something close but it's got an awful reverb baked in or doesnt have the right overtones

Has anyone else ran into this? How did you get over it yourself? Are there ways to get better at this?