Become Lightning Fast in Studio One

hey Joe Gilder here from Presonus today I want to talk to you about my favorite shortcuts and efficiency hacks inside a Studio One but first we need to talk about why speed matters now you might not be as obsessively focused on efficiency as I am but there are still good reasons to find faster and more efficient ways to do things in the studio two main reasons come to mind first of all is efficiency for efficiency's sake now that just bear with me for a second let's say you're on your way to work and you find a new shortcut that gets you to work 10 minutes earlier are you gonna take that shortcut again yeah most likely it saves you 10 minutes which means you've bought back 10 minutes of your life you can now leave for work 10 minutes later or you can now arrive to work 10 minutes earlier or you can leave five minutes later in arrive five minutes earlier win-win-win but you still accomplish the same task you got to work only you did it in 10 minutes less time you did it more efficiently when it comes to working in Studio One or any software for that matter it makes sense for you to spend some time to invest a little bit of your time upfront and learning how to do things quickly and efficiently so on the back end you can get the same amount of work done in less time which leads me to my second point of why speed matters it allows you to make more music what do I mean well chances are you're busy you have a lot going on and you probably can't devote unlimited time to music in your studio whether you can do a couple hours a week a couple hours a month or a couple hours a day regardless of how much time you can invest into your music if you can make the most of that time you can make more music case in point let's say it takes you 10 hours to mix a song how many songs can you mix in a 10 hour day one song but let's say it takes you three hours to mix a song you learn how to do it quickly without sacrificing quality now you can mix three songs in a 10 hour day versus one see what I mean you can make more music given the same amount of time I've interacted with a lot of folks over the years and a lot of times one of the biggest hang-ups I see for people is it takes them so stinkin long to do anything in the software and they get burned out they get tired they get exhausted when if they'll spit some time becoming more efficient becoming faster and moving around then they would get to spend more time making music and less time poking around and doing things the slow way so if you like being slow by all means continue in your slowness may the force be with you however if you find yourself thinking man I wish I could get this stuff done quicker pay attention to some of the hacks I'm gonna show you today I hate the word hack I'm sorry I just said hack pay attention to some of the tips I'm gonna show you today not just keyboard shortcuts but a few like different functionality ways to get around Studio One that will help you be more efficient make more music and just be happy [Music] first thing real quick I'm a Mac guy so if you're on a PC you're probably used to this but when I say command it looks like that little weird infinity symbol that is the equivalent of your control in most scenarios when I say option it's that funny-looking symbol that is typically akin to your alt button shift looks like an up arrow that should be the same for both you may have to modify this just a little bit to get it to work on your system if you're on Windows but you should be able to do everything I show you here on either system okay this first one is quick and easy see these buttons down here edit mix browse they're great they have to put them in there you there's really no reason to ever come down here and press these buttons likewise there's really no reason to ever come up here on the top left and press this inspector button why because you got F keys at the top of your computer that will do that job for you for example the mixer is f3 boom boom boom boom open that mixer close that mixer all day every day you want to open your browser and see your plugin specifically f7 boom f7 f7 want to open the inspector f4 this is a really useful window you can see your plugins on a particular channel you can see a bunch of other stuff you probably don't care about and you can open and close that with f4 and then edit is f2 I don't use edit all that much but it's there in case you want it now if you're like me and you use one of these cute little wireless keyboards from Apple you'll notice the F buttons also do things like turn the screen brightness up and down so by default if you press these they won't do the F functions without holding down the function key there's a way to fix that inside of the Mac come over here to System Preferences go to keyboard and then you'll see this option here something along the lines of use all f1 f2 function keys s standard function keys what this does it flips the functionality so when I press f3 it will bring up the mixer as opposed to having a press function f3 so if you have a smaller more compact keyboard there's probably a way to do it where you don't have to press two keys every time you want to do functions like that so you can see there I pressed the f3 while holding down function and it showed me all the windows for is just doing the f3 function and by the way now's a good time to show you if you aren't curious about any of the keyboard shortcuts you knew there's a shortcut for something you suspect there's a shortcut for something come up to the menu under Studio One keyboard shortcuts you can see and search for everything so you can say man I know Joe had a shortcut for inspector what was it okay I type in inspector it shows me that it's f4 you can also change that if you decide you want to do it differently now let's talk about navigating around the arrange window when you're working on music if you have more than two tracks you're gonna want to be able to get around the session quickly and easily you want to be able to zoom in when you zoom in zoom back out to see the bigger picture and the faster you can get at that the quicker you can get this work done one of the hardest things for me is if I go to a different system a different doll or I don't know all the shortcuts and how to zoom in and zoom out I feel completely hamstrung because it takes forever to do everything so let me walk you through a few of the things that I like to do now you can get to things like down here on the bottom left if we click and drag right here we can zoom in vertically if we click here we can choose different sizes from that menu I never ever use that also over here on this bottom right hand side you can do this to zoom in and out alright I never use that another way to zoom in and out is to come up here along the where it shows you your bars or whatever time base you have you can click and drag down and up and that will zoom in Center it on wherever you clicked and dragged that I will use sometimes but let me show you the faster ways that I found to do this it's funny a Greger said this in a video recently if you have a suspicion there's a faster way to do it there's probably a way you can do it in studio one it's just that intuitive all right I'm gonna walk you through my favorite ways to navigate and I'll explain them all as we go the first is obviously if you have a scroll wheel on your mouse then you'll be able to do things like scroll up and down while you're zoomed in super handy what you may not know if you hold down shift on your keyboard and then scroll up and down you will now scroll sideways so you can quickly navigate down over up over by just switching between holding down the shift button and not holding it down now let's talk about zooming let's say we've zoomed in and we're looking at just these couple of drum tracks but we want to zoom out and see everything else we can still do that with our scroll wheel on our mouse by holding down command and scrolling now we can quickly and easily scroll up and down and I believe it tends to kind of Center on whatever track you have selected so if I click on this guitar and then zoom in it's gonna keep that one in view I use this all the time I'm always moving around my session and then I hold down command and scroll up and I can quickly zoom in to check on something and then zoom right back out to get back to a bigger view that was vertical zoom let's talk about horizontal zoom you might have guessed it if you hold down command and shift and you scroll now we're zooming horizontally so instead of having to come up here and click and drag you can just hold your mouse anywhere and it will quickly by holding down command and shift and scrolling you can zoom in and out so you can see how you can quickly go from this view to command scroll to get up vertically zoomed and then grab that shift button and zoom some more to get the horizontal zoom it'll take a while to get used to that but that is a much faster way than coming over here and clicking clicking that tiny little button and then zooming in and then coming over here and doing like you can see how this would just save you gobs of time over the course of a session the one I use the most is this vertical zoom all the time I'm using that all the time now one more thing that doesn't quite work the way I want it to work but I'm going to talk to the boys in Germany and see if we can make that happen let's say you've zoomed in horizontally and vertically and you want to get back out you're kind of lost in the Wiis or you're finished with what you wanted to do and you'd love to just zoom out and see everything at once be great if there was a keyboard shortcut for that well there is it's option Z and what that does is it seems out vertically to include every channel in your session the one thing I wish it did was I wish it also zoomed out this way so it filled up the screen it tends to do it like this where it's you can see everything but you've got this giant massive amount of blank space over here so maybe we can change that but command Z still is a great way see just there if I hit command Z again that's interests let's see if i zoom in like this and then zoom in like this and then commit or control I'm sorry option Z it pops out to that so still super helpful to just kind of get yourself back to seeing things all in one kind of view over on the left hand side of the screen another quick thing I didn't mention I don't do this a lot but if you just want to focus on one track like this lead electric guitar you can click and drag on the edge of the track and resize it however you want as soon as you go to zoom things vertically though everything will jump back to being the same I just occasionally will do that a lot of times I just zoom everything versus going in and zooming one because zooming everything is faster then going and finding the edge of that channel and then pulling it down okay one special thing for my mac friends if you happen to use a trackpad which I love the trackpad a mouse makes my hands hurt I don't know if it's from moving it or my wrist or using the scroll wheel something about it my wimpy little hands don't like a normal Mouse and I can't stand the trackball thing but I love this trackpad it's essentially just the pad off of a laptop but it's right here and I can use it on my studio computer now a couple of things you can do with a trackpad this isn't unique to Studio One but just generally speaking it has a few functions that are super cool the first is pinching to zoom so if you look at the screen if I go like this I can zoom in horizontally by just doing that pinching motion on the screen I can zoom in and zoom out I use that a lot in my session so I'll use command scroll so scrolling on a trackpad just in case you didn't know scrolling is you put two fingers down and you move your fingers up and down and that will scroll that also works left and right so if I want to get around a session let's say I'm zoomed in and I'm up at the top left of the session I want to get to the bottom right while I'm maintaining this zoom level I can scroll down and I can scroll over on the trackpad it is super intuitive and super super handy I do this all day every day the other thing is using that combination of the pinch to zoom in horizontally and then holding down command and scrolling with two things to zoom in vertically that gets me around the session super fast now I've already shown you how to do that with a regular mouse with a scroll wheel and if you have some variation of that it would probably do you some good to just explore and see what kind of options are available but this trackpad getting around a session like this with just a couple of flicks of the finger super super handy this is one of my favorites and it's not something that I think is exclusive to Studio One but when I first switched it was game changer for me because Pro Tools at the time didn't do it I don't know if it doesn't now and that is simply the ability to use key the s m and r keys on your keyboard to engage mute solo and record so let's say on this this kick drum track if I press s look what happens the kick drum becomes so load if I come over here to this background vocal if I press s it is so load if I press M its muted and if I press R it record enables the track now let's say I want to select all of them and solo them boom I can do that I can mute them all I can record enable them all by just just pressing the buttons to me that is just one of my favourite things there's an added thing you can do with that that's even cooler now this is something I do all the time so for example if I'm I'm editing this lead guitar and I'm at I'm at this section I've zoomed in using the tricks I've shown you I'm right here in the song and I'm like what is that electric guitar doing now I could come over here and press s to listen or I can just click on it because my mouse is right there now that this channel selected and you can tell because it's a slightly lighter color I can just press s so again let's let's do that again I'm over here somewhere and I think what is this electric guitar doing click bass play so so handy imagine doing that a bajillion times over the course of a production you have just saved yourself countless hours okay maybe ours is a little much but imagine how quickly you can get around by just using those keys so my left hand is hovering just on the left hand side of my keyboard which means I can access the s button which is the one I use the most as much as I want right there spacebar s command there alright they're just waiting for me the mute is over here I don't use the mute as much but it's still there and it's makes sense to keep it on the M key because I'm not smart enough to hold a bunch of shortcuts in my head the other cool thing you can do from an advanced standpoint let's say you open your mixer look over here in the top left hand side of the mixer you see this MS and power button power button lets you turn on and off all inserts that's cute but not really the point of what I'm going to show you this if you hover over things by the way if you hover over almost anything in Studio One it will give you some sort of information about it which is super helpful so like for example hover over the mix it says f3 and it's called console but over here this little m and little s is called global solo and global mute this is really interesting so let's say I have soloed my base let's find the bus's let's say I soloed my drum bus and my base bus so we're just listening to those now that's two different things I have soloed how do I go back and listen to everything and then go back and switch back to soloing well the only kind of logical way is to click this click this click this click this that's fine but let's say I had drums bass electrics and acoustics clicked well now I've got to click four times to go back and forth not so fast Kemosabe this global solo command will rock your world so it's command shift s so s for solo command and shift so now I can say whatever I want I've got these three or four things selected as soon as I hit command shift s it turns all the solos off get this when I hit it again it turns on it turns them back on just the ones that I have selected so if I have some weird thing where I say I want to hear this verse vocal and the you know electric guitar - and acoustic guitar - I want to hear what they're doing and then I want to hear everything command shift solo press it again and it goes back to just having those three channels selected I use this all the time if you're trying to solve problems you're trying to just hear how your mix sounds with and without certain elements command shift s and command shift M are your best friends another example of that sometimes I'll mix drums and bass and then I'll turn them off and mix everything else I'll mute the drums in the bass and then I'll just listen along and mix everything then I want to bring drums and bass back in two ways to do it you can select both channels and click M and s and that works fine but if you accidentally deselect them then you can't do that anymore what I like to do you guessed it command shift M will turn them on and off here's what that sounds like [Music] even say let's do that with the drums bass and electric guitars the power to [Music] is super super handy and if you forget it's just it's kind of hidden but it's right here at the top of corner of the mixer window global mute and global solo you can obviously click these to do the same thing look at that I click the solo it remembered the thing I had soloed from a couple minutes ago it just remembers whatever the last one was until you change it super super cool okay here's another one you might not know let's say you just want to set your faders at unity unity by the way is just at zero it's the default place where the faders are there's a number of reasons why you might want to do that I don't care why you're doing it but if you wanted to know how to get it exactly on zero while the answer isn't that you have to do this number what went too far you don't have to do that hold down the command key and click boom goes to zero if it's way down here boom goes to zero it's way up here boom goes to zero that's also true of just about any setting in any plug-in as well let's say I've I've messed around with this EQ and I want to just go back to his default boom command click it goes back to zero also the frequency command click it goes back to its default setting and by the way command Z is gonna be your undo friend you should get used to that with a couple of versions a couple of updates back they allowed command Z to affect plug-in moves so look I just undid a couple of moves on the plug-in and went back to where it was so handy so when in doubt if you're trying to get something to go back to where it should be at the beginning command to click it for example these guitars I don't want you paying left anymore and I don't want to have to come in here and just barely move it to the center command click boom back to the center now I wish there was a shortcut to make it go left and right but that's a subject for another day now here's a basic thing that's really just a computer function but in case you didn't know if you want to select a bunch of things in Studio One and then do something to all of them they make it really easy let's say I want to select all of these tracks through these red tracks here I click the first track I hold down shift I click the last track and they're all selected now I can do things like move all the faders at once or drag a plug-in to all the tracks or create a send on all the tracks at once super handy but what if they're not in or what if we wanted to see these blue faders those are my buses what if I just wanted to select the channels the white faders and not the blue well we can do it a couple of ways but the simplest way is to hold down instead of shift hold down command and click each track that we want to select takes a little more time but once we have them all selected they will do what we said before we can move them up and down we can solo we can mute we can do lots of things based on what's selected this used to be a thing I remember when I use Pro Tools that you really you couldn't do this easily you had to select them all then you had to create a group for them for any of this functionality to work I don't use groups a whole lot in studio one because this functionality is so simple another way to do it click the first one hold down shift click the last one then hold down command to deselect the ones you don't want and that's probably the fastest way to do it but super super handy you can do lots of things I need to turn all my master buses down boom simple easy no need for any fancy shortcut you just select them by holding shift do what you need to do then click somewhere else to deselect them and you're off to the races one thing to keep in mind if you accidentally have multiple selected and you start moving a fader remember it's gonna move all the faders and you might accidentally be turning things up and down so just make sure you're only selecting multiple things for a certain purpose and then click on another track to deselect them to get you out of that kind of danger zone there ok here's a feature that I just love and I use it all the time let's say we've got these in 10 background vocals and we want to run them to a single fader so I can put EQ and compression on all the background vocals as a sub group rather than a queuing all of them individually which would just be a waste of time a bus would be the right solution for that in a lot of other systems you have to create a bus then you have to come and send all the channels to that bus and there's just a few steps involved not so with Studio One click the first one hold down shift click the last one now just right-click on one of the tracks and if you'll notice right here it says add bus for selected channels look what happens boom couple of things just happen one you saw this bus with the blue fader get created but also if you look closely to all these channels they are now all routed to bus one which is this bus here I can change the name to be TVs for background vocals and you can see it shows that they're all being routed to be TVs they're all coming through this single fader and now I can adjust that put EQ compression and things on that all the time if you do a lot of top-down mixing where you're running all your drums to a drum buss all your guitars to a guitar bus this is a quick and easy way to do that and even within let's say you have these two need to be processed differently we can create a bus within a bus we select these two tracks we say add bus for selected channels look what it did it created another bus we can call this bgv one and two but now these two channels are being routed to this bus this bus is being routed to the overall bgv bus that's a feature that actually I contacted aren't over in Germany about when you create a bus it's that bus should be going to wherever the tracks were going prior to creating that bus that just makes more sense so now these are still all coming out in my background vocal bus super handy if you don't use that start experimenting with it might save you a ton of time okay last thing is not a shortcut but is so cool and one of the primary reasons I started getting really excited about studio one all those years ago let's say there's an acoustic guitar like this one and let's say this find one where I came in early okay let's say right here I came in early the beat is right here on this line that you can't see super well and I came in a little bit early historically the way I would edit this if I'm doing it from like a manual editing standpoint is I would cut here I would cut here I would slide it over get it in time then I would drag this edge back and then reach up and figure out a way to do a crossfade there were just several clicks involved and then do a crossfade over here just typical editing that I've been doing in Pro Tools for years but now the way Studio One does it's just great so click here before the transient click over here before the next strum and then I hold down command and option and you'll see the icon change if I click and drag here look what happens I can move the underlying audio without changing the endpoints that's amazing so I can slide this back a little bit I let go now I press X which looks like a crossfade right boom look what happens it did a crossfade at the beginning and a crossfade at the end and it just works like magic [Music] didn't hear any snaps pops clicks I got it more in time life is beautiful look how much time I saved I did two clicks a drag and a button press let me do it one more time just so we're all on the same page click click command option drag to the right spot x4 crossfade and I'm done and I can move on with my life it is just so fun and one of my favorite nerdy little features if you like editing things manually you don't want to go in and have to do time stretching all the time you just need to fix things here and there that is a wonderfully fast way to do that now as we wrap up I don't expect you up ssin Zee to remember all of those things right out of the gate or to even incorporate all of those into your workflow but I do hope that you've got one or two things that got you excited to go try out on one of your sessions moving forward don't be fast because Jo Gilder said to be fast be fast because it makes it more fun if I'm fast at the boring stuff I can spend more time on the fun stuff like making music recording mixing all that jazz as always thanks for watching I will see you in the next one later

Channel: PreSonus Audio Electronics

Views: 85,760

Keywords: Presonus, Studio One, DAW, recording, mixing, editing, tutorial, tips, Joe Gilder, Home Studio Corner, shortcuts, quick keys, mouse, trackpad, scroll, zoom, solo, mute, edit

Id: qi3PBj21IbM

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020