1) favorite brands/models of soft plastic?
2) favorite colors/combos of colors
A) muddy water
B) green water
C) clear water

Brands don't matter as much as profile, Get plastics with different profiles, thick, thin, long, stubby, paddletail, straight tail, often it's more profile than color

Muddy- Dark with chartreuse
Green water- natural colors
clear water- light colors with some sparkle

Maybe Tobin will help with these questions.........www.troutsupport.com
He has his own line of soft plastics that work.

Clear. Red white tail.
Green pumpkin chartreuse
Muddy plum/black chartreuse

All of the responses above make sense to me. I’ll add a few personal favorites.

Chicken on a chain, chicken of the C, different names for basically the same thing, sort of the Olive back, light belly, chartreuse tail is a strong all season contender. I’d put this on in the naturals for green water category fishesintress mentioned. DSL and Bass Assassin are a couple of brands I like in this.

I like tuxedo in fall and winter, black back, white belly, no sparkle, no chartreuse. That’s another natural for clear green water. Tuxedo I believe was an H&H queen cocahoe.

Green or blue moon, all pearly white with some sparkle another clear winter water favorite that fits the clear water category fishesintress mentioned. Bass Assassin makes these.

Texas roach, basically black over bronze/gold chartreuse tail seems to be a great muddy water offering.

My neighbor just uses Norton bull minnow in plum/chartreuse. Period. So the real truth is they’ll bite whatever you have confidence in.

Right, fishing with confidence is huge. I would put getting the presentation right as being much more important than color, not that I don’t believe color doesn’t come into play.

Presentation issues are demonstrated when two or three people, often from the same boat, are tossing soft plastics to the same structure using the same color. If everyone is using the same rigs and color, but one person gets 80-90 percent of the fish, I’d work on trying to duplicate the presentation that is working. I’ve seen this scenario work itself out firsthand enough to know the quality of the presentation makes a big difference.

Speaking of confidence... Texas Roach is my go to mostly. I use mostly in sandy green water and it does the trick for me.

Colors are overated IMO. The action/vibration or sound the lure makes along with the size of the lure is more important than the color.

Let's talk about presentation and weights then. Especially for paddle tails. I use 1/8 ounce most of the time except for the winter I switch to 1/16 or 1/32 because I slow my presentation.

I work my paddle tails with the standard shrimp double twitch. Reel, twitch, twitch reel. I also work them like a texas rig plastic worm like largemouth bass fisherman do, a upward sweep of the rod then let it fail and repeat with varying speeds of sweep and fall. I find working it like a jerk bait works extremely well where I fish and finally I just swim it at different speeds.

My confidence colors are chicken on a chain, new penny chartreuse, pearl chartreuse, key lime pie and plumkin chartreuse. Favorite by far are the norton , DSL and saltwater assassin paddle tails.