Recording - July 2018 - 56

PREVIEW

PreSonus

Studio One 4

New content, new virtual instruments,
and all-new ways to create music fast
REVIEW BY MIKE METLAY

n 2018, Studio One has pretty much shed its "scrappy newcomer" image and is an established and wellloved member of the DAW pantheon. Over the years

since Studio One came out in 2009, new versions have
gradually added features that high-end users asked for,
and PreSonus has been responsible for establishing at least
one spec that has been adopted by competing DAWs:
Audio Random Access (ARA), which allows programs like
Celemony Melodyne, which usually process audio offline,
to open inside a DAW for a seamless workflow.
The arrival of Studio One 4, just a couple of weeks before this issue went to press, heralded new tools and new
workflows with the potential to open up this DAW to a
whole new userbase. I was excited enough by the new
capabilities in Studio One 4 to want to point readers to
them immediately, but they have enough depth to support
at least one followup Reviewed & Revisited column later
in the year. With that in mind, here's a fast overview and
early impressions of the new stuff in version 4.

RECORDING July 2018

Who's the target?

Until now, Studio One has lived pretty firmly in the "linear
recording and song creation" genre of DAW workflow. While
there have been some additions that hint at pattern-based song
creation (most notably the Arrange Track, Scratch Pads, and
Info View in version 3), the linear focus of the DAW has pretty
much remained intact. That's great for users who record in the
traditional one-take-at-a-time fashion, but it's less optimal for
folks who like to build out songs in blocks and patterns, laying
down beats and chord progressions in a nonlinear way.
Studio One 4 doesn't change its fundamental approach to
song creation, but there are many more nods to other ways of
building tracks. Most of the new tools in this version are aimed
at simplifying the process of song development for beat-builders.
Thoughtfully, they are added in a modular fashion without affecting the underpinnings of the DAW, so folks who rely on the linear
approach won't be disturbed at all. It's easy to experiment with
the new features, and many of them will also be useful to more
conventional songwriters as well.

Chord Track

Probably the biggest win for users who
want to experiment
with harmonies and
song structure but who
might not have a lot of
music theory under
their belts is the Chord
Track. The basic idea is simple: like the Arranger Track, it's a
separate Track that runs the length of your Song and contains
information about your song structure, but unlike the Arranger
Track, which primarily exists to rearrange and color-code/
organize existing audio and MIDI, the Chord Track lets you
directly change your music on the fly.
You can build up a chord progression in a variety of ways:
manually entering chords into the timeline, playing them on
an external keyboard, or feeding the Chord Selector an existing Track and having it extract the chord changes automatically. This can be done from Instrument Tracks or Parts (MIDI)
or from an Audio Track.
Once your Chord Track is populated, you can then elect to have some
or all of your Tracks follow it. MIDI
and audio are transposed automatically, so you can hear how your
music will sound in various progressions. This process, called Harmonic
Editing, isn't 100% perfect-it can
get confused by some melodies, and
simpler methods (like straight parallel
pitch shifting) may place some notes
out of mode. You'll have to play with
it to get the best results, but it's great
for quickly trying out entirely new
chord progressions without having to
re-record anything.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - July 2018