How to change the default soundcard in Debian to an external USB?

Running Jessie and aplay -l gives me this: **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC887-VD Analog [ALC887-VD Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC887-VD Digital [ALC887-VD Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 2: Device [USB Advanced Audio Device], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 The usb card is my only working device (alsaplayer -o alsa -d hw:2,0 rocknroll.mp3 confirms this) so I came up with the following /etc/modprobe.d/sound file and restarted pulseaudio: options snd cards_limit=3 alias snd-card-0 snd-1 alias snd-card-1 snd-hdmi alias snd-card-2 snd-usb options snd slots=snd_usb_audio,snd_hd_intel,snd-1 But still no sound on my system. What am I not doing? I had to create the sound file above as there was none before. So maybe that's an outdated way of doing things.