Quick Tip - Gain Staging Virtual Instruments In Studio One 4 Using Macros

The Trouble With Most Virtual Instruments (In My Opinion)

I find that in general, most of the Virtual Instruments that I use (regardless of whether they are soft synths, or sampler type instruments) tend to come in very hot. When I say hot, I mean some of them are literally either clipping or a step away from clipping.

As a side-note, I have created some custom virtual instruments myself, and I opted to "split the difference" and made sure that the levels were nowhere near zero (dbfs) but more along the lines of around -12 or so when played at higher velocities. I personally think that this is a happy medium.

Now as to why VI's output at such a hot level, well to be honest, that's another topic altogether. I've heard some arguments from people 'in the know' that it has to do with noise floor levels when playing back the samples at different sample rates, etc. But in the end, it's an issue that I deal with - and found a way to combat it when working in Studio One that I thought might be useful to some of you.

My Solution To The Problem

I think it's worth mentioning that I'm not trying to re-invent the wheel here, I know lots of people are most likely using a gain plug-in of some sort to tackle the above issue, but what this quick tip is all about is simply automating that process. Which of course just happens to be something that Studio One handles really well via the use of Macros.

In this video I demonstrate how to create a Macro in Studio One 4 that will automatically help gain stage your virtual instruments when needed. In addition, I also outline some other workflow benefits to using a Macro vs manually adjusting the global output volume on VI's.

And as always, if you enjoy this content, please - Share, Subscribe, and hit that like button. :)

Cheers, Marcus

Tip - How To Render Chord Track Changes Into Instrument Parts (MIDI Events) In Studio One 4

Working With The Chord Track

For those of you who may not be aware, The Chord Track is a really killer new feature that was added in Studio One 4. Essentially it allows users to "Map Out" their entire song as a harmonic roadmap - quite similar to what one would do with Markers or The Arranger Track. It then becomes a visual indication of the chord changes that make up your song.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg! Essentially, based on each tracks individual settings, it has the ability to non-destructively alter both Audio Tracks/Events & Instrument Parts in your whole entire song to play perfectly against your chords as defined in The Chord Track. There are obviously some limitations here based on the complexity of the chords being used, but in general it does a great job.

I recently did a video showing some basic work-flow concepts of working with The Chord Track, and how it can be used in a standard production workflow. Long story short, one of the comments that came up was, "How would one go about rendering the changes made by The Chord Track into the actual Instrument Parts?" The reason this question came up is because of the way The Chord Track was designed to work.

Non-Destructive vs Destructive

When working in a DAW, you will most likely hear the above 2 terms being thrown around when speaking to various different work-flows. Let me just get this out of the way and say that in my opinion, there is definitely room for both. As for their meaning, well that's pretty self explanatory.

Destructive would be anything where the results of a process (or action) are rendered into an actual file, where as the opposite can be said for non-destructive.

How This Relates To The Chord Track

According to PreSonus, The Chord Track was mainly designed (but not at all limited) for use in song writing / song production. Hence, their approach was to have the entire process be non-destructive as evident by the ability to toggle the Global "Follow" mode on or off as needed.

But let's break this down for a second. Once you have the results you're looking for, why leave this in a temporary state? If you're happy, then why not commit and render those changes into the file?

This was one of the things that entered my mind when working with The Chord Track, but all the usual approaches that I expected to "work" for rendering did not seem to do the trick. But - there is a way to do it!

In this video, I demonstrate how to go about rendering any changes that were made by The Chord Track into Instrument Parts (otherwise known as MIDI Events) In Studio One 4.

And as always, if you enjoy this content, please - Share, Subscribe, and hit that like button. :)

Cheers, Marcus

Tutorial - Beat Detective Style Multitrack Drum Editing In Studio One 4 [Updated for Version 3.3+]

Drum Editing - Slicing vs Time Compression & Expansion

Without getting into too much detail, I find that there are usually 2 different school's of thought when it comes to editing Multitrack Drums in a DAW. Full disclosure here - yes I'm generalizing, but for those who have been doing this for the last decade or more, I find that they usually rely solely on a slicing method of working. Whereas some of the newer generation couldn't be bothered.

Now first off, let me just get this out of the way - USE WHICH EVER METHOD YOU PREFER! If it works for you then that's great. But while I'm on the topic, let me also say that I personally will always use a slicing method whenever I can on the right sources. ie: percussive / rhythmic elements. To me, there is nothing that beats it despite how good the current time-stretching algorithms may be.

Drum Editing In Pro Tools Using Beat Detective - What's All The Fuss About?

If you are serious about audio engineering and have ever tracked or edited live drums, I'm almost certain that you would have at least heard of this style of editing. Just to be clear - for some of you, you may not have any interest in using slicing (and that's perfectly fine). But for those who (like me) came from Pro Tools, my guess is that the way in which you have become accustomed to working when editing multitrack drums, involved using Beat Detective.

Now for those who have no idea what Beat Detective is, it's essentially a way of working in which audio events (regions) are cut exactly at the initial transient point of say a kick or snare hit for example, and then the beginning of each audio event (representing the start of the transient) is quantized to a grid value. Example: 16th notes. This will obviously result in a vast amount of audio events that are all cut up and shuffled around on your time-line.

Furthermore, any gaps that remain, are then back-filled, and any overlaps that occur would be obviously canceled out. The last step is adding appropriate crossfades between all the adjacent audio events, and double checking your edits - and when done right it's pretty much seamless.

However one aspect that I haven't yet mentioned, is that although the entire process sounds quite daunting and time consuming - Beat Detective in general involves an automated workflow that handles all of these tasks with ease in a few different steps. But here's the thing that I think not a lot of people realize - As of Version 3.3, SO DOES STUDIO ONE!!

Studio One's Take On Automating The Above Process

When I made the move over to Studio One, the one area that I just kept having to hop over to Pro Tools for was drum editing. At that time, Studio One had a few, well.. let's just call them 'quirks' with the way it handled slicing multitrack drums. Long story short, I got frustrated and worked out a workflow that could be used to "mimic" all the steps needed to achieve what I wanted to do without having to export audio events to be edited in Pro Tools & re-imported.

Long story short, my good friends at PreSonus got wind of the video that I had done, and took it upon themselves to basically re-vamp their entire process. About 5 months or so later when Studio One 3.3 was released, (in my humble opinion) it finally worked as it should. The one cool thing though is that Studio One actually does all of the above in 1 single step!

There are a few differences here and there of course, and I would ALWAYS advise double checking your edits before committing. But in general, it's my opinion that it's right on par with Beat Detective in terms of efficiency when used correctly. 

So if you've made it this far through this article, my guess is that this is something you may be interested in. Furthermore, I would encourage anyone editing multitrack drums to at least have a look at this workflow regardless of whether they've ever used Beat Detective or not.

A Quick Note On The Video Above

Yes, the video is long - BUT! My goal here was not only to show how to set everything up and use it in what I consider to be the most efficient way. But also to show how to do manual editing after the fact, to get the timing of your tracks sounding exactly how you need them to without fussing about.

In this video, I demonstrate how to go about using a 'Beat Detective Style' Drum slicing work-flow when editing/quantizing Multitrack Drums in Studio One 4. Although Studio One Version 4 was used, this video is applicable to anyone using Studio One version 3.3 and above.

And as always, if you enjoy this content, please - Share, Subscribe, and hit that like button. :)

Cheers, Marcus

Producing With The Chord Track In Studio One 4 - Working With Instrument Tracks

Working With The Chord Track

When Studio One 4 was released, one of the main highlighted new features that was introduced was The Chord Track. Essentially acting as a Harmonic road-map to your Song - it allows Studio One users to do things that were not possible before in a DAW. Without getting into too much detail, let's just say it's pretty wild and opens up the door to new potential work-flow's when working in Studio One.

But quite often, with features such as this, there is a basic learning curve that one must go through in order to fully understand how (and potentially when) to use it. Having said this, I though it would be a good idea to do a simple video of how to incorporate The Chord Track into your workflow when fleshing out basic song ideas.

In this video, I demonstrate the basics in terms of how to go about using The Chord Track (on instrument tracks) in Studio One Version 4 while producing.

And as always, if you enjoy this content, please - Share, Subscribe, and hit that like button. :)

Cheers, Marcus

Double Clicking MIDI Events In Studio One 4 - The 2 Different Behaviours

Previous Versions

For those who have been using Studio One through the last couple version's, (Version 2 & Version 3) you may have noticed the default behaviour when double clicking Instrument Parts (MIDI Events) has gone through a couple different revisions. This is something that has come up quite a bit with respect to which behaviour user's prefer.

Essentially it boils down to whether a user prefers a "zoom to fit" type of view, or whether they prefer the Music Editor to remember (and recall) the last "zoom state" of the Note Data within the instrument Part. In all honesty, this sounds a bit confusing when written out - but it's actually quite simple.

A Simple Solution

The great news, is that Version 4 allows user's to do both by the simple addition of adding a modifier key when double clicking MIDI Events. In the end, it all comes down to personal preference - and PreSonus have made it pretty easy for user's to choose which behaviour they prefer to use for their personal work-flow.

In this Quick Tip video, I demonstrate the 2 different behaviours that are possible when double clicking Instrument Parts (MIDI Events) in Studio One 4.

And as always, if you enjoy this content, please - Share, Subscribe, and hit that like button. :)

Cheers, Marcus

Importing A Tempo Map & Markers From Pro Tools Into Your Studio One 4 Song

Picking up from where we left off in last week's video, I thought it would be good to do a "Part 2" with respect to AAF work-flow that talks about how to go about getting any additional information carried over from a Pro Tools Session into your Studio One Version 4 song.

If you did happen to catch the first video, you'll recall me saying that having the audio come over via AAF is great, as it allows us to essentially pick up from where we left off in Pro Tools. The benefit here of course being that we still have access to our original edit boundaries. So no need to consolidate files and find out down the line that you (or someone else) missed a bad edit.

But as you may or may not have noticed - one BIG thing that did not get translated during the process is your Markers, Tempo-Map, and any time signature changes!

Tempo Maps, Time-Signature Changes & Markers

Now first off, let me just state the obvious. If you have a basic song, in 4-4 - at 120 BPM, this isn't really a huge issue. Just recreate your markers manually, and it's not a big deal. BUT - if you have spent a great deal of time adding various Markers with specific names, and detailed tempo changes, it would be a shame to have to re-do them. The good news is you don't have to.

Using MIDI Files To 'Carry' The Information

As someone who has spent a great deal of time collaborating with various other engineer's and studio's, one thing I got into the habit of doing long ago is using MIDI files to carry over information that I wanted to translate to another DAW. Regardless of whether I was handing off my work to another studio, or simply working on my own productions, in most cases the material I work on can get pretty complex with respect to tempo changes and time-signature changes, so I really don't want to have to repeat that work, or hand someone else a session where they have no clue what's what.

So essentially this is pretty much the last step I take when exporting content, and this is something I do regardless of whether I'm printing consolidated stems, or using AAF work-flows.

MIDI Files & Markers

One thing that you may find is with specific DAW's, (not going to name any name's here - they all have a different approach) not all the information you would expect to translate over - comes across. A really good example of this would be with respect to Marker's.

In my experience, there is usually (again it depends) some little quirk, where for example creating a NEW SONG from that MIDI file will bring over the markers, where as Importing the MIDI file into an existing song will not. And like I mentioned, this isn't always the case, but I've encountered this with at least 2 major DAW's that I've worked with. (Studio One being one of them)

The Magic Of Import Song Data

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Import Song Data is BY FAR at the top of the list for my favorite new features. The reason being because it essentially eliminates the whole concept of "not being able to bring something into an existing song". Again the keyword here being "existng".

Having said all that - In this video, I'll show you how to go about importing your Markers, Tempo Map, and any Time Signature changes from Pro Tools into your newly created Studio One 4 Song. Presumably created using an AAF from Pro Tools - but the work-flow works regardless of how it was created.

And as always, if you enjoy this content, please - Share, Subscribe, and hit that like button. :)

Cheers, Marcus

How To Open A Pro Tools Session In Studio One 4 - AAF Workflow

Pro Tools In The Audio Industry

Regardless of which DAW you choose to work in, one thing is pretty much certain. If you plan to make a professional career in the audio production industry - at some point you are going to be dealing with Pro Tools, whether you want to or not. Although some may argue with this statement (and that's completely fine) I'd personally go as far as saying that I cannot think of any other audio software program to date, that has made it's way into so many studio's across the world the way the Pro Tools has.

Now having said that, this does not mean that it's "the best" by any means. As has been said by many others before me, and will be said by many after me - the best software is the one that works for YOU. Another thing to point out is the huge paradigm shift we have seen in the recent years as native processing power has improved leaps and bounds. This in itself has had an impact on the whole concept of DSP powered rigs & accompanying software.

Native vs DSP - More Software Options

I think it's safe to say that at one point DSP powered rigs were absolutely essential in professional music production setups, but now with the reliability of High Speed thunderbolt interfaces such as the PreSonus Quantum, (and many others), this is no longer the case.

So where it used to be the case where people ran Pro Tools because the hardware required them to do so - In my opinion, there are now a lot more professionals running different software with 3rd party interfaces for their needs. Case in point: Studio One 4 Professional paired with a Quantum, a DP88, a handful of external Preamps, and a FaderPort 16 is a pretty Badass setup in my opinion... 

Regardless of all this, the concept remains that you may very well be collaborating on a project with a colleague who is using Pro Tools. and now as of the release of Studio One 4 - we have a convenient & relatively painless way in which we can transfer a Pro Tools session over to Studio One.

AAF - Advanced Authoring Format

Without getting into too much detail, the AAF standard essentially allows users to share their projects and sessions with other's running different programs. I think it's also worth mentioning that the initial roots of AAF has to do with post-production vs music, and it's only really as a by-product that we can use AAF's for transferring music related content. But to be honest, I think that's about where I'll leave off with respect to AAF's, but if you plan on using them, I'd definitely recommend doing a bit of research. There's ton's of information available online.

From Pro Tools To Studio One 4

In this video, I demonstrate how to go about exporting an AAF from a Pro Tools 2018 Ultimate session - which can then be imported into PreSonus Studio One 4. In addition, we will also talk about a couple things to be aware of when working with AAF's in general.

And as always, if you enjoy this content, please - Share, Subscribe, and hit that like button. :)

Cheers, Marcus

How To Export Your Custom Impact XT Kits To Share With Others In Studio One 4

One things for certain, the recently updated Impact XT, and Sample One XT instruments in Studio One Version 4 are extremely powerful - and in many cases can easily replace your previous ‘GoTo’ 3rd party VST’s. (No need to name any name's here, but I'm sure you know which I'm referring to.)

To make things even more enticing, they also have a handy feature built right in that allows users to easily export and share their own custom virtual instruments with others!

Now I know what some of you may be thinking - "Why would I need to do that?" Well the simple answer is, when you are working on one system, or sharing a song file, it's not that big of a deal. BUT, the minute you need or want to use the same instrument on another song, or more importantly another system, you may run into problems.

Presets created in Impact XT, or Sample One XT need to reference the location (file path) of any samples used. The minute you accidentally move or delete those samples, you may find yourself out of luck. This becomes even more apparent if you are working on another system all together.

Now before I go any further, there's one thing that I want to point out. the absolute BEST way to create virtual instruments that can be shared or used in multiple systems - is to use the Sound Set Builder which is available as a free download in the PreSonus Exchange / Extensions. This is the proprietary format that PreSonus uses for all of their content, be it Loops, Kits, or Presets.

But having said that, it does take a bit of getting used to the proper workflow. BUT if you're just wanting to quickly share some cool presets, or export some of your instruments to archive - then using a Sampler File is a super convenient feature. The result is a simple encapsulated file that can be dragged and dropped into any Studio One Song, and your Instrument preset, and samples are all retained!

In the above video, I'll show you how to save and package your custom virtual instruments, so that they can be shared with others, and/or recalled on other systems.

How To Import a Mixing Template Into a Studio One Version 3 Song Using Macros

New Features In Studio One Version 4

As many of you know, Studio One Version 4 was recently launched towards the end of May, and along with it, came many highly user-requested features. One of them being Import Song Data. Without getting into too much detail - Import Song Data is an incredibly powerful feature that allows users to choose specific information from external Studio One Songs, and bring it into their existing song. One area where this work-flow really shines is with respect to importing a Mixing Template into your existing song.

What About Users Still On Version 3?

Although this is fantastic news for those who have made the move over to Version 4, not everyone has made the switch. So what does this mean for all the people still trucking along with their trusty Version 3 setup's? Well - have no fear, because there's actually a work-around that can be used for importing a basic Mixing Template by creating a relatively simple Macro.

In this video, I demonstrate a way that users can import a Mixing Template into their Studio One Version 3 songs using a Macro work-around. It's not perfect, but certainly gets the job done for basic Mixing Templates including Bus Channels, FX Channels, track names, plug-ins, and complete FX chains..

**Note - In order to achieve the above workflow - you must be using the most recent build on Studio One Version 3. (3.5.6)