Recording - June 2016 - 58

...where we bring you follow-up articles
with application hints and upgrade news
about gear already reviewed in Recording

PreSonus Studio One 3.2
The tradition-breaking DAW
continues its path of innovation
by Jon Hillman

this into my own workflow, as the organization it affords should at least make tracking
down ideas much faster, and will probably
promote more experimentation... of which
you can never do enough.
A neat combination of these features
exists in the Inspector (to the left of the
Arrange view) when the Arrange Track is
selected, where you'll find Arrange Track
blocks and Scratch Pads listed and
grouped. As you'd expect, you can
reorder the arrangement very easily here,
but you can also drag from Arrange
Track blocks into the Scratch Pad area to
create a new Scratch Pad based on that
block. In the other direction, you can
drag Scratch Pads into the Arrange Track
list to drop that Scratch Pad into the
arrangement. This kind of intuitive workflow is a hallmark of Studio One.
Creating complex sounds
Imagine you have a fairly boring stereo
drum loop you want to take up a notch
(you shouldn't have to imagine too hard!).
There are a lot of ways to approach this,
and I'd wager that the more interesting

Studio One entered the market in
2009 at a time when few understood
what a new DAW could possibly have
to offer. As PreSonus' Product Manager
for Studio One through version 2 (I parted ways with PreSonus in 2014), I can
say we felt that a new DAW had quite a
lot to offer! For those unfamiliar with the
DAW, it might be helpful to explain the
foundation of what defines Studio One.
In my opinion, much like approaching
the speed of light, computer workflow is
always chasing the unattainable speed of
the creative mind. As such, any creative
software design is well-served by getting
out of the way as much as possible,
reducing clicks and mouse travel, understanding and premptively supporting decisions, and so on. In that context, Studio
One is all about workflow-keeping you
in that precious moment of creativity as
consistently and for as long as possible.
I'm proud of my past work with the
Studio One team. As an outside user, I am
happy to see version 3 continue the good
work of improving workflow for us all.
Arranging and experimenting
While my own work as a composer
rarely involves a traditional song structure, I
can appreciate the fact that most music production does. Studio One 3 introduced the
Arranger Track, which speeds up this kind
of production. With the Arranger Track,
you can quickly paint sections above the
58

RECORDING JUNE 2016

timeline to define ranges of song sections,
with the ranges automatically named using
common song structures like 'Verse' and
'Chorus'. You can then rename, recolor,
and most importantly, rearrange those sections by dragging the respective blocks in
the Arrange Track. All of the events within a
range neatly follow along as you drag the
range, where re-ordering or duplicating
whole sections becomes as easy as drag
and drop. If pattern-based arrangement is
your thing, the Arrange Track will be indespensible. See Figure 1.
Another interesting feature is the Scratch
Pad, which essentially is a place you can
experiment without disturbing your existing
arrangement. Existing as an alternate timeline in a vertical split view next to the main
Arrange View (as shown in Figure 2), you
can have any number of Scratch Pads you
like, and rename them easily. You can drag
elements back and forth between the
Arrange and Scratch Pad views at will,
making it very simple to repurpose existing
material, or bring entirely new material into
the arrangement. I'm learning to integrate

options involve fairly complex routing and
busing schemes to achieve. Enter
Extended FX Chains, where the complex is
made simple, all within the context of the
channel insert. In this view, which is available in every Channel Editor, you'll find
the ability to split the insert signal path at
any point before and after the source
track and any insert in the chain. At the
end of all these splits, everything is
summed to the output for you.
Consider the stereo drum loop example above-in a few seconds you could
create a single split, effectively duplicating the signal path down two new independent paths. Then, you could easily
insert a lowpass filter and saturation
plug-in on one side for low end interest,
and a highpass and short delay for
sparkle on the high end-the outputs of
this split signal path are summed to the
output and you're done. You can even
split based on channel or frequency. No
new tracks, no aux sends or returns...
and your final result can be saved as an
FX Chain preset.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2016