Get Started in Presonus Studio One 4.5 | Made SUPER-SIMPLE & IN-DEPTH!

now that I'm able to capture better quality video I want to take a moment to update my getting started in studio one series the last one was done about a year ago and that was for version 4 and I'm going to make this one a little bit different we're gonna look at 4.5 but as much as in the past I've tried to explain things in a simple manner when you've been working with music production or music production software for so long you forget how daunting it all is for a complete beginner if you imagine someone who just found out what a doll is and has never heard of quantization compression bit dips and so on maybe they just bought a device and it came with the studio one and they are completely lost so this time around I'm going to make the getting started video a lot longer and I will be briefly explaining some of the technical terms as we go along so I'm gonna be keeping that individual in mind who's just found out what a DAW is just found out about studio one and it's feeling overwhelmed and they open it up and they just can't get anything done so if you're already somewhat familiar with studio one you're really not gonna want to watch this video it's gonna be super simple slow down a bit and a bit more relaxed than my normal tutorials if you're completely new to working with a doll or sweetie 1 then this is going to be for you lastly you will see cards that are gonna pop up in the upper right hand corner here and these are going to be at various points in the video and they will take you to more in-depth tutorials on a particular topic that I'm discussing so as much as I'm going to slow this down and make it more simplified than before there are still concepts that I'm just there's going to be limitations of how long I can spend on them because otherwise we'd have a four hour or an eight hour video we'd be here all day so if I'm talking about a particular topic and you see a card pop up and you're not happy with the depth of the explanation that I gave in this video just click on that link and it will take you to a more in-depth one now with that let's go ahead and get started taking a look at studio 14.5 I'm working with the profession version now once you launch to do one this is the page that you're gonna see it's called the start page and this is where we can begin a new song to record our live instruments to record our MIDI information a mix of the two we can mix our song to balance the levels between the different instruments we also in the professional version have the project page which will allow us to master and we're not going to talk about that too much because if you're just getting started you're not going to be working with mastering now the first thing you're going to need is audio that's critical I've got Windows audio in order for me to capture audio from studio one in my screen capture program I have to use this otherwise I would have my audio interface so you'll want to be sure that your audio interface is here what that's going to do is give you less latency so if you're using an external keyboard and you press a key there that that signal has to pass into studio one through your computer and then back out to your headphones and there can be a delay if you're on a slower computer and you're using Windows audio and that's one of the things that the audio interface is going to help alleviate is that delay that latency so the way that you can choose your audio interface is by clicking here or on configure audio device so if we click that we have the options menu here and it's taken to the audio setup tab now you can see your audio device that's currently active as I said I'm using the windows audio for the tutorial if I click on that down arrow you can see my focus right I have a scarlett solo if I'm working on something myself this is what I would be using to get rid of the latency it also allows me to connect an external mic that has an XLR cable or that uses an XLR cable you can also bring in MIDI from controllers it can send out MIDI and you should have better quality preamps on your audio interface now by clicking on the control panel you're gonna access settings for your particular audio device and what you see when you click on that is going to vary depending on the particular model or brand that you're working with this is what shows up for the windows audio and this is actually the latency that I'm working with here or that delay from the time I'm a trigger to hearing it back or being recorded within Studio One I'm gonna close that for now if you want to learn more about setting up your audio interface just click up above there on the card I will cancel out of this window for now so that's how you can set up your audio and at any time you want to access that options menu to make some adjustments there you would control comma on the QWERTY keyboard and that will bring that up and you've got a general tab here where you can actually do sets do some settings here general settings you can change the appearance of Studio one there are some presets down below based on colors so if you choose blue moon camouflage and so on so you can make those adjustments from the presets or you can use these sliders up above to adjust the settings as you would like I'm going to cancel out of there to take it back to as it was I'll control comma again we've got keyboard shortcuts so you can set your own here if you were to search for say record and say you want to assign a key on your Cordy keyboard to enter into record by default you can use the asterisks on the number keypad but it's say you want to change that in here here's the transport record you can select that and you can see the number pad Asterix here is the current default setting but you can enter a key into here and then choose a sign for whatever key commands that you want to set up all right and also down at the bottom by default we're gonna be using the studio 1 scheme but you can click here and you can choose Cubase if you're coming well if you're new you're not going to be coming from a dull most likely but if you are you could choose Cubase Logic Pro Tools cakewalk and though these will use the key commands for those dolls in studio one okay and I think that's maybe getting a bit ahead more advanced but we've got locations and we'll take a closer look at that in a moment audio setup and our external devices and this is where you can add your external controller if you have a MIDI keyboard or a pad 16 pad device I'm actually using the atom and that has 16 pads on it that's already set up here if we come to the ad this is where you can add your controller now there are different manufacturers here to the left and so if you see years here you can choose that so for instance if you have a mpk mini that's down here you can select that and come to the receive from and you'll see your mpk mini pop-up in this window if you have it connected you can set it so that it's the default instrument input whenever you create an instrument track and that will make more sense in a little bit but yeah if you've got a controller just take a look here and setting those up varies depending on the manufacturer you may have software that came with it that you can install and it will map it to studio one maybe you don't and you'll need to do it manually if you need to do it manually then you would come to new keyboard and then this is something else that you can take a look at the card up above to find out more information about and then finally we have an advanced and this is advanced so this is a beginner tutorial we're not going to cover that at the moment let's come back to the general and I'm going to cancel out now from the start page everything begins here we can create our new song by clicking here we can create a new project but that's for mastering that's more advanced or we can open an existing document and this is going to take you to your studio 1 folder and then here you have songs your songs will be listed there now to the left we have recent files now anything that you've been working with is going to pop up here you can always right click and choose to remove it from the file list if you'd like you can choose to show it in the Explorer or the finder on the Mac and you can see the song here and the file path to get to it we'll close that out we can also see different versions autosave versions we can come to the left here and we have this pin icon that pops up and if we'd like to keep that song hanging around in this field as you continue to work this is going to dynamically update but if you'd like for something to stick around just click on that pin there here we have an artist profile and then you can click down at the bottom here and then name put your artist name if you have one so that whenever you create a new song I just clicked on that you can see it's going to have your name there unless you rename it okay you can put in a genre by clicking once you can put in a website here if you have one and then in the center area here you can attach an image to your song file so by clicking on the ellipsis here then you can navigate so if I were to come to my quanta folder web promotion here's my little logo if I open that up then you can see it doesn't look right but that could be adjusted I'm gonna click the X to get rid of that if you have a SoundCloud and you'd like to link it directly with Studio One then you can use this tab to do that and just click here and then that will allow you to connect your SoundCloud and you can upload your completed songs to sound load directly from within Studio One now to the right we have a news feed so we've got propaganda coming from Studio One here to the left you can scroll through and see different sales that are happening different products and various things we've got demos and tutorials here so if you want to open up some songs that other artists have done and see what they've done to their songs you can take a look here there's some tutorials as well now at the bottom you can check for updates to see that you are running the latest version I'm all set there and normally you'll receive a notification saying that there are updates available for studio one and you'll have the option to apply those or download them and install them now in the upper right hand corner we have start song and project these are going to show whether you're working on the project page whether you're working on the song page or you're here on the start and we'll come back to these in a moment once we once we begin our song so let's get to creating a song the first step you want to do is click on create a new song we have this dialog here now on the left hand side we have a variety of templates that you can choose from so these are ones that personas has created so that if you have different setups say you're doing a band with this will give you a template for a band it has 16 tracks instrument set this is going to load different instruments within studio one if you're recording a rock band this is going to set up like eight different inputs for your drum kit it's going to set up a track for vocals for guitar and all of that's going to be done for you so that you can save time and get started if you are working with a particular interface by persona say you bought that and it came with Studio One artists then you may be able to find your interface here so the audio box USB is pretty popular you can select this and that's going to set up the ins and out outs on that device for you so you don't have to worry about setting out the routing as long as you have your audio interface connected just choose the one that you're using if it's by personas and then your ins and outs are going to be set up for you and ready to go now here the final one is user these are going to be user presets and we can create a preset that's going to have everything loaded and set up that we would typically work with for our situation and that will save us time getting started if you'd like to see more about setting up templates just click up above here all right we're just going to start with a basic empty song though we're just going to start from scratch we can name our song here I'm going to call this first song and this is the file path where it's going to be saved this is always going to be the same and this is where we'll come back to the options menu so I'll control comma let's come to the locations user data and this is where it's pulling that location whatever you set here so currently mine is set to go to my desktop my Quanah folder and Studio One if you'd like to change that location just click on the ellipsis button there and setup whatever location you'd like for it to default to when you're creating a new song now let's come back to create a new song and just know that okay so that's that location and it's always going to go there but you can also choose to have this go where if you'd like so for this instance I'm going to choose my desktop and select that folder now the song that we create in this tutorial is going to go directly to my desktop let's put in the first song again now here we have sample rate and as I mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial I'm going to take a brief moment to describe these things so sample rate is basically going to determine the quality of the audio CD quality is 44 point 1 kilohertz and 16-bit resolution so if you're familiar with the quality of a CD that's what those settings are going to give you 48 is a bit better 24-bit is a bit better and talking about these can be we could spend a lot of time here but just know that most people are going to set the resolution to 24-bit and this is going to kind of determine the amplitude of your song the dynamic the dynamics of it again this is going to determine the quality and an important thing to keep in mind is that the higher your sample rate so say if we were to go to 96 kilohertz that's not available on the windows audio but that's going to stress your processor more and the difference you may hear may be negligible there's we're not going to go there to talk about sample rates the best one to use I'm just gonna say for me personally if I'm working on a song I'll usually roll with 48 kilohertz and 24-bit I would recommend spending some time as you progress in your music journey doing more research on sample rate and resolution to determine where you'd like to be but most people you're gonna probably find using 24-bit and 48 kilohertz or 96 kilohertz if you're talking about a major studio they're probably going to be doing 192 now by default the song length is going to be set to 5 minutes but don't worry about this I'd say because you can change that at any time you want you can set the tempo for the song here but again we can change that at any time we'd like you can set your time signature I don't really change this that often you can put in a key signature and then here we have stretch audio files 2 song tempo so when we actually get to our song if you bring in loops or audio files that have tempo information say you have a loop that was recorded at 120 or 140 beats per minute if you bring it into your song and you want it to match up with your song it's not going to you if you deselect this of course that's something we can change in the song and we'll take a look at that once we get to the song but this is just going to adjust the tempo of any loops and audio files that you bring in to match what you have set here and again we can always change this within the song so don't stress too much about whether you should have this on or off I'll typically leave it on I wouldn't worry about the play overlaps either so I think at this point we're all set we've chosen an empty empty song for it our template or to begin with we've named it for a song we've chosen the desktop we're going to work with 48 kilohertz in 24-bit at this point I'm gonna click OK and we're taken to the song page and this is where all of the magic happens and I'm just thinking here how to begin approaching this because and I'm reminding myself that this is for a complete beginner to working with a dull and music production in the box and so with that in mind I'll just say that the song page we have this is the arranged view here in the center this is going to contain your audio and your MIDI so if you're going to be recording a vocal it's going to be recorded in this view and you're going to see it as a waveform if you're going to be recording using an external MIDI controller a keyboard or some pads the MIDI data from that device is going to show up here and then in this way you can arrange the parts move them around as you'd like and you can get even further into editing the individual MIDI notes which we'll take a look at in the future in this video okay so this Center area is going to hold all of your audio and MIDI so that you can arrange it and access it for editing over to the left we have a track column and this is going to have all of your tracks and we'll see that in a moment here you can select tracks for different recording you can do different things here we have our browser where we can access our VST instruments we can access our effects our loops files from our computer and the cloud and the pool the pool is basically a repository for all of the audio that we've recorded or brought in to our song and then as I mentioned we're going to see the start song and project wherever we are if we wanted to come back to that start page we could just click there if we want to come back to our song we'd go there if we have multiple songs open it at a time then we can use this down arrow to choose from those songs up at the top we have a variety of tools by default we're gonna have the smart arrow tool that's active this is our range tool a knife or split tool for cutting up our audio and video events we'll see that on eraser tool this is a paint tool and if we click on that down arrow we can see there's a variety of different modes for the paint tool I'm just these tie into the number keys on your quarter keyboard so at the top if I press 1 we have the smart arrow tool 2 is the range tool 3 the split tool for erase and so on all the way through to 8 our listen tool this is a Bend tool for kind of manipulating the time of our audio next to that we can access some various features of Studio One that we may or may not get to in this tutorial the cue is to access a more in-depth quantize panel but this one is going to give you the quickest access to quantizing and we are going to talk about what quantize is in just a moment and then let's come down to the bottom the transport transport controls most important that you're going to need to know is that we have a stop button a play button we can enter into record by clicking that or using the asterisks on your number keyboard or you can assign whatever key you'd like as I showed in the beginning of this tutorial we have performance so at the top this one is going to show our CPU usage the bottom one is going to show our disk usage this midi here is going to show activity coming in if I press the pads on my controller you can see these light up that's going to show you activity happening with the MIDI and this could be a good place to look if you're having trouble getting your external controller to trigger the instruments first look here if these are not lighting up when you're pressing your keys then the MIDI is not reaching studio one and you'll want to take a look at your cables and the settings on your external controller the most important one when I press my pads you can see both arrows are lighting up the first one is the most important because that's the input coming in the atom can receive MIDI going out of studio one to kind of light the pads up when I'm playing back but that's not critical for recording so don't just work focus on the first one there you should see activity there when you use your external controller okay here we can see where our song position cursor is we're on bar 3 if I press the decimal symbol on the numeric keypad I return that cursor back to the beginning of the song and you can see that that changes to show we are on bar 1 here we can turn loop on the loop function on and we'll cover that in a little bit here this is the volume the of the master out these are meters that are going to show the master out you can see if you're clipping here there's a box here if it turns red than you know you're clipping and you don't want to bounce down your song if you've got clipping going on here now at the bottom these you may be using these a lot probably we can access our browser by clicking there the mix console let me close out the browser by clicking there and the editor by clicking here now these are all tied into function keys which I prefer to use the less I have to grab my mouse the quicker I can work one and stay in the zone when I'm working on a song so f2 is going to give you the Edit window f3 is going to be the mix console f4 is going to give you the inspector we're just going to give you detailed information about tracks once we get some of those in there and f5 will bring up the browser now let's move on to the browser because this is kind of where everything begins particularly if we're going to be working with VST instruments if you're recording live instruments then creating tracks is really going to be the first place you begin so let's actually take a look at that I'm gonna f5 to close out the browser so say you want to just go ahead and get started right away and all you want to do you don't care about all of this other stuff you just want to record your vocal and a guitar and you've got two mics so you're gonna need two tracks so what I would do is press T on the QWERTY keyboard we have the add tracks dialog here now we can name our tracks we can choose the type and we want audio because we're gonna record our vocal and guitar the count we can choose two if we want to add two but that's gonna affect how those are named and I want to name them individually to start with so I'm gonna just put one let's start with one track let's just call this vocal for our vocal track and it's going to automatically be assigned a color the track if you prefer to assign your own just uncheck here and choose a different color maybe I'll choose this there and the format is mono which is good pretty much whatever you do record life is going to be in mono and for beginners I wouldn't worry about this down here you can choose a particular input from your audio interface here since I'm on Windows audio it shows up as input l input are left and right and at this point let's just go ahead and click OK now here we have a track ready to record our vocal so let's we'll add one more for our guitar I'll call this guitar it's set to audio we have a count of 1 let's set this to a different color it's on mono which is good input L maybe we'll want to use a second mic if we're going to be recording them at the same time so we'll put that on input R I'll choose ok so now we have our two tracks you can think of these as containers for our audio as we start recording you're gonna see your audio here you'll see a waveform to represent the sound that's being recorded now these are a little bit small if you're only going to record vocals and guitar you'll probably want to see these a bit larger so what you can do is hover at the border and you have these double arrows where you can drag and make that larger you could also come down to the bottom where it says normal you could choose large you can also use shortcut keys by holding Shift + E to make these larger holding shift and W is going to make them smaller so Shift + E I'll make these a little bit larger so we've got our tracks set up for recording now the next most important thing you're going to want to do is be sure that they're armed for recording so you can armed for recording by clicking on this white circle and I'm going to deactivate the speaker so I won't get feedback or actually rather hear myself double in the headphones that I'm using so in order to record the audio these have to be read it means that they're ready to record the incoming audio from your device input left and input right that we chose when we were setting up the track if you'd like to change these at any point you can come here and choose input right you could choose input left so you can always change your inputs if you'd like to do that here now the purpose of these monitor buttons is some people would like to record with say a little bit of reverb on their vocal to help them get in the mood and the monitor button is going to allow you to hear yourself with that reverb on it so if that's the situation that you're in and you prefer to have a bit of reverb or some other effect and hear that back while you're recording you'll want to be sure that monitoring is enabled otherwise you're not going to hear yourself if you have headphones on you could just not wear headphones and record directly into the mic and you'll see the waveform but at this point you should be able to record your guitar and vocal you'll want to be sure that you have the meter here is not clipping so you may want to play or sing the loudest part passage of your song be sure that you're not getting a red clip here so I'm trying to make a clip but I'm not able to so the only thing that you'd have to do right now is press the record button here studio 1 goes into recording and then you can see it is capturing the audio and this is the waveform that's showing up I'm gonna go ahead and stop now of course your waveforms are gonna look different because one's gonna be a vocal one's gonna be a guitar but because I'm using the Windows audio you'll have to just bear with me these are going to show up kind of the same for my vocals okay now that we have our vocal and guitar recorded I can hit this arrow here to come back to the beginning of the track or you could use the decimal symbol on the numeric keypad if you have one I'm gonna use the spacebar so go ahead and let's play these back studio one goes into recording and then you can see it is capturing the audio okay so it's as simple as that as far as if you're recording a basic setup like that you've got it done now at this point you may want to do some mixing you may want to apply some other effects and we're gonna take a look at that but I do want to kind of backtrack just for a moment to show you so that this will make more sense for input l and input R if I come to song song setup and then here to the right audio input output setup now you can see I've got the windows audio and these are kind of named that by default if you want to set up your device so that it makes more sense to you you can always double click here and then call this mic 1 double click on the bottom one call this mic 2 at the top you could call this stereo in and that's just using mic 1 in my two but they're both combined and you can see the meters for the activity here so you can rename them and they will make more sense and if it's going to be a setup that you using all the time you can use the make default and you don't have to you know worry about setting up your inputs and outputs or anything like that on a regular basis but the names will always be retained whenever you create a new song these names will be there and that will just these just make more sense than input L and input R so if you're in a put interface is a 2 input and it's got two mic inputs this will just represent those so I'm going to choose okay and then now you can see that this is updated Mike one in my two that that makes much more sense right and then here you can see and I hope this makes more sense now that these have been renamed and you know how you can get that done one other thing that I'd like to mention is if I f3 to open up the mix console we can see these are called channels within the mix console and these are tracks so the tracks actually contain our audio the channels just route our audio to the master output and then it's here where we can add effects to the recordings that we've done or we can add them like a reverb if we want to hear that while we're recording but what initially brought me here was I wanted to show that to the left here we have inputs you can see monitor the levels of your audio interface here and you can be sure that you're coming in at a good level this actually may even be a bit too hot I would say in the digital world you don't have to worry about having the loudest signals as you did in the analog we don't have to worry about noise as much so for me if it's falling somewhere between 24 and 12 here then I feel like that's a good signal for me at the top we can adjust gain and phasing but as a beginner you're probably not going to want to worry about that but by clicking on the inputs here we can access that to see the levels and so one of the important things about the mix console and why you'd want to make use of it is if you're say guitar is too quiet or your vocal is too loud then you can make the adjustments here and then balance between the two but for now let's f3 to close off a mix console and come back to our arrange view and I'm going to click hold and drag to delete these out and now we're gonna take a look at well what if you want to record your vocal with that with an effect like reverb on it one thing that we can do is press f4 to open up the inspector and as I mentioned earlier this is going to give you more detailed information about the particular track that you have selected so I've got the vocal track selected we can see vocal here this is different aspects of the track and we can even see a channel here for that track which is the same thing as the channel in the mix console if I select the guitar we can see the color changes and we have guitar at the top but we'd like to add some reverb and hear that back while we're recording our vocal so here at the bottom we have inserts you would click on that plus symbol and let's just come to the personas if you're just beginning you probably don't have third-party effects so the ones that are included with personas are just fine I'm gonna choose the room reverb okay unless this is a reverb effect device a plug-in and it is basically going to add reverb to your recorded audio or to the audio that's coming in both it does the same thing okay now you probably want something subtle if you're recording your vocal so but I'm actually gonna choose something a bit more extreme just so it will be apparent what this is doing but we've got this room reverb on our vocal tract you can see it listed here you can always power it on and off by clicking this button or by clicking this button here but if I were to click on the monitor button and hear myself back there would now be a reverb attached to it I'm gonna go ahead and activate it hopefully this is not gonna mess me up but you can hear the reverb I think you should be I think it recording this can capture but it's hard to talk with the delay and that's where the latency issue comes in that I was talking about I hope that that delay is making it in probably isn't but if I control comma and then come to the audio setup the windows audio the latency is showing here and if I come to the control panel you can see latency in milliseconds if you're using if I were using the focus right this would be way down lower and I wouldn't have the delay which makes it impossible to record anything anyway I'll cancel out and I'm going to f4 to close out the inspector you can always press the I here to access it and I'm gonna close out the reverb we don't need that open to be active it's just going to be active and then let's start from the beginning I'm going to enter into record and then now the reverb is going to be recorded on this vocal track I'll go ahead and stop let's come back to the beginning of our song and I'm gonna mute the guitar because we just want to hear the reverb on the vocal okay so you can hear that very obviously and it actually hasn't been recorded or printed on to the audio it's it's working in real-time which does take up processing power depending on the Machine you are if you have a lot of effects that are running in real time you may want to bounce those down to audio and we'll get to that but let's come back to the inspector and if I turn off the room reverb and play that back you can hear that it's off so you're not stuck with a reverb on your vocal if you want to use it in this manner you can just use it to as I said to help kind of get you in the mood while you're recording your vocals and make you feel more relaxed I'm gonna click the eye to close out the inspector and just be aware that if we come to the mix console and open up the inputs panel again these represent the inputs from our audio device right but if I click on the plus symbol and then add the room reverb it's got to be right in front of me okay these are in alphabetical order get it together alright if you were to put it on the insert here then it's going to be recorded and mixed in with this waveform you're not going to be able to get rid of it so typically on you're not gonna want to add anything here some people like to record with compression or things like that but as a beginner you don't want to particularly add effects to your inserts here because it's going to be stuck on the audio you won't be able to get rid of it so anytime you'd like to remove an effect we can right-click on it and remove okay and that applies to the inspector as well clicking once is going to show you some brief of an overview of some controls there but if I right click we can remove and the reverb is gone there I'm gonna click on the eye to close out our inspector and I also just want to briefly cover before we move on that you can add effects from the browser as well so if we click on browse and at the bottom we have an effects tab if I click on that then we can see all of our effects here the personas and then we have these thumbnail images and if we come down to the bottom we can see this is our room reverb and so the other way that we can add this is by clicking and dragging it on to the track and this can be an even simpler way to get that done I'll close it out I'll close off the browser and if we take a look at the inspector here you can see the room reverb is there just as if we added it from the plus symbol okay and there is one other area that we can add effects and that would be in the mix console so if I click on the mix button let's close out that inputs here is our vocal now depending on the view that you have chosen for the mix console these buttons here we have a small enlarge and narrow and normal if I put this on small well first let's look at this here we can see the room reverb up top this is similar to the view in the inspector okay so we can click on the plus symbol and access effects here so if I put a course on there here's our course device and then now that's been added as another effect along with our reverb by clicking on the this border we can expand out the mix console even larger and see more of what's going on if we'd like to power down either one as we saw in the inspector we can do that as well we can click on the down arrow to remove we can also right-click and remove if you've got a group of effects and you just like to turn them all off but not remove them you can click on the power button up above and that's going to power all of the effects off now let's pull this back down to be more as it was there's one other place that they can be added and this has to do with the mix console being in a small mode so when we click on these arrows facing each other we go into the small mode kind of the purpose of this is we can see more of what's going on in our arrange view and then once we come to the small mode we have these buttons that show up and this is going to allow us to access the inserts panel and then we can see even more clearly our inserts and sends here we've got the same plus button that we've seen in the inspector and we can add effects like so I'm going to click to add one more just to show that you don't need to we can double click on these to open up the individual effects but while this is open up top here we can also just click to see the flanger the room reverb our fat channel they can also be accessed up above here and just remember we can power them on and off here as well the individual ones we can also click on the down arrow to remove here ok and you can see that that's gone from our mix console the fat channel will remove that it's gone here ok so just remember these buttons are gonna pop up if you happen to be in small mode just remember that there when I go back to a large mode you can see they're gone because our inserts and sins are now up above our channel ok so at this point I think we should probably wrap up as far as recording live instruments live vocals that should be a basic introduction to get you going after you know you can watch this a couple of times this portion of the video and by following along you should be able to get yourself set up and recording in 30 minutes or so so now let's move on to working with VST instruments and MIDI okay so now that we have a grasp on how we can go about recording live instruments and vocals how can we go about working with the VST instruments and MIDI that's what we're gonna take a look at in this portion of the video so what I'm going to do is press f6 to be taken directly to the instruments tab within the browser and it's here that you're going to find all of the personas VST instruments as well as any third party that you install but we're just going to focus on the personas ones here so I'm gonna click and expand that out now one of the first things that we'll probably want to do is lay down some drums so impact it's gonna be perfect for that and any instrument that we'd like to work with we would simply click hold and drag from the browser into our arrange view and now we have our impact loaded up so let's close down the browser and this is going to be empty by default we don't have any kits loaded so if I trigger with my controller we could see the pads light up but there's no sound produced because MIDI does not produce information or sow MIDI does not produce audio it only triggers audio within the DAW so and I think that's one thing that may be confusing for some folks and I'm gonna pull this to the side and let's open up this MIDI monitor when I press a pad on my controller this is the information that it's sending out it's not audio it's information like note on so note C note on note off so so MIDI essentially tells Studio One what to do it says which note to play or which pad how long when to release how hard or soft it should be played the velocity so just think of MIDI in that way it doesn't have any audio at all so we'll close off that MIDI monitor and we need to get a kit loaded so we can have some sound we can access the different kits up above here where it says default click on that down arrow then we can choose any kit that we'd like I'm gonna choose this cosmic chill that's then loaded up now when I use my controller [Music] we can hear the samples being played back based on the MIDI information that's coming in from my controller now there are several different ways that you can go about laying your drums down within studio one or most DAWs you can play them live using your controller you can set up a loop and just have it loop back and you can record one sound at a time or you can play the pads multiple sounds at a time you can draw the notes in in the drum editor or you can use the new patterns feature that was included in the four point-five update I believe so first we'll look at recording them live which is the method that I actually would recommend and prefer to use actually I use a mix of recording some of the bass drums bass I mean bas II like setting the foundation the kick the snare a couple of the hats maybe and then I'll add in some percussion elements manually so I tend to use a mix of the two but we're gonna first take a look at recording them live we've got our sounds loaded into impact so I actually don't need to see this right now and our tempo is at 120 if you remember that if we'd like to work with a different tempo we can click once and just manually enter in a value we can also click on the temple repeatedly if we have say a rhythm in our head we can 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so we can click on that instead of tempo say if we had that speed set in our head and then now this is our click track to make that active this button here so when that's blue our click track is going to be active if I press the spacebar then we can hear that that kind of rhythm that I was tapping in with the tempo and that's 162 so one thing that you could do is play it back and then trigger the sounds with your controller to come up with a beat that you would like to so and actually I'm going to change the kit on that so let's any time you'd like to access your VST instruments on the instrument track you can click this icon here you can also use shift f11 on your QWERTY keyboard on the atom actually have a show/hide that I can press to bring that up if I'd like but I'm gonna change this kit to maybe this one here yeah that this is a little bit less spaced out so again I'll close that out let's return to the beginning of the track by pressing the decimal symbol on my numeric keypad I'm going to press the spacebar to begin playback and just play around with some ideas really quickly okay so we'll just keep it very simple and if you remember I'm using the windows audio which is going to have some latency here and that's one of the important reasons why you'll want to use an audio interface because when I'm triggering the pads from when I'm when I'm hearing the click track and kind of trying to keep up with that click track there's going to be some latency so am I playing is going to be a little bit off and actually I'm gonna use the input quantize this IQ up at the top if we activate that then Studio One is going to automatically quantize the MIDI notes that are being played to the tempo and the grid whatever you have this set to and I'm going to set this to sixteenth notes and since this is for beginners if you're not familiar with quantize essentially what it does is it kind of locks the notes and what you're playing to the grid so that the timing is going to be create correct and I normally don't use quantize on my drums depending on what sort of music you're doing you may or may not want to use it but since I'm working with the windows audio and I have some latency going on I'm gonna give this a shot and see if this help correct the timing issues that I'm sure I'm going to experience here okay so now I'm going to enter into record and see if I can get this lay down live [Music] press the spacebar to stop and then now we have something similar to what we saw with the audio where we have this event which is a MIDI event whereas the audio is stored in an audio event and we can see that MIDI information here and this is the note on a note off information that we took a look at in the MIDI monitor here and if I double click on this we open up the editor then we can see the individual MIDI notes and we can move these to wherever we like and actually I know that that note was a bit off because usually the snare from what the pattern I was playing with the controller they're gonna want to fall on to point three three point three four point three and so on so you can see these are off so the input quantize setting was not really the right one so I probably would want to experiment with something different but let's go ahead and play it back this is going to sound kind of bad but and so instead of manually adjusting these so the timing is right what I'm going to do is just press control a to select all of those MIDI notes I'm gonna change the quantize to the nearest quarter note I think is what I want to do I'll press Q you can see that those moved it may have made it worse or better let's give it a shot I don't think I want to add another kick there so we can add the notes here within the editor by pressing f2 we open up the editor or double clicking as I did on the MIDI event we can also click the edit as long as we have something selected so that's another way we can as I was mentioning with programming them in manually by double clicking you can add these in okay so you can see that I'm just gonna select those and delete those out for now and I'm gonna f2 to close out the editor and let's come to the left edge of this MIDI part and bring that in because we don't have any MIDI information there we only need this portion and I'd also like to make this into a loop so I can continue to build it out so a simple way to set your loop markers well first of all they're kind of hidden when you first create your song but if you hover here we have these double arrows and that way you can adjust their position these are where they're positioned at so that they're at the beginning of bar one if I click hold and drag then I can set them to be wherever I'd like and then in the transport bar we have this loop to activate a simple way to set it to a particular MIDI part if you'd like or audio event would be to highlight that event be sure that it's selected and pressed P on the QWERTY keyboard then our loop is going to be here and when I playback it's just going to keep cycling over and over and then you can hear back your basic kick and snare and then while it's playing back you can play around with different ideas different percussion elements and then once you've found what you like just enter into record and then record that part so if I play this back [Music] [Music] so we're just going to record that we're creating the worst beat ever but that's alright I'll exit record and as you can hear there some timing issues because again I'm using Windows audio with latency and if you're working stuck on Windows audio you know one thing that I could have done is control comma to bring up the options menu and on the audio setup here if I'd like the timing to be a little bit better I can come to the control panel for Windows and take this down a bit and that's going to tax your processor more but the sounds will be triggered more in time with what you're doing okay and I'm actually going to take that back up because otherwise I'm going to start getting that that's spiking there so let's come back up to also you could use exclusive mode which should take care of that spiking but exclusive mode will in that way I can't capture the audio from Studio One because it's it's not going to allow it to be captured by my screen capture software alright so we've got that down to 30 instead of 40 we're not spiking there so okay now let's play this back and hear that timing that's off on the hats if you press one on the numeric keypad that's going to take you to the beginning of your loop section if you press two that takes you back to the end so those are some useful shortcuts when you're working in this manner let's play it back and hear how it sounds [Music] okay so it's kind of ahead you can see that they're just away from the quarter note subdivisions so what I'm going to do is just select all of these and I'm going to press Q to quantize quantize those now they're more inline there's one that's kind of coming off so I'm gonna there we go actually I don't think I even want that one in there now I'll press one to become to come to the beginning of the loop let's play back using the spacebar that's a bit early so we can move that now if you notice this jumping it's because it's set to follow here we can disable that function that jumping normally that could be useful sometimes it could be a pain if you don't want it to do that just disable the auto scroll there or press F on your QWERTY keyboard but this last open hat was off I'll press one to come back to the beginning and now we should be set I'm gonna press F so that it follows along again that one's off okay so I just corrected that one and if you notice these are snapping because our snap is on with this here if you press in on the QWERTY keyboard it will turn it off or you could just click so when it's active these your mini notes are gonna snap to what you have the setting - here it's on quarter notes if we were to change that to eighth notes then it's going to snap to the eighth notes and then if we turn it off you can move it freely wherever you'd like and if I manually enter notes I will do it with the snap off because I don't want everything to be so rigid that's just my own personal taste you can experiment with that and see what your preference is but I just feel like when everything is not so strictly quantized there's more life in the beat and that fits my style of music and what I'm creating if you're doing something like EDM or techno then you may want that tight pattern and in that case you can leave the snap on but at this point I'm going to go ahead and leave it off and I'm not even going to put that directly on this grid line here okay so we've got a basic two kind of sucky beat that we've done you've seen how you can do that by recording it live you've also seen how you can add them in and remove them another method that you can use to create your drum patterns is by using pattern so if I set the song position cursor here at bar 13 I'm going to can control shift P and then this creates a pattern which is a 1 bar long and it looks exactly the same as this but when we double click on this MIDI part then we're taken to the drum editor because we're working with impact when we double click on a pattern that's going to open the pattern editor and then here this is going to be similar to something like FL Studio the pattern there we've got 16 different steps and then with this you can program your drums in by the step method so if I we've got our bass drum if I just add these in where's our snare and then while let's be sure that this is highlighted I'll press P to set our loop there and let's play that back okay this is our hat we can click-and-drag those in we can change the resolution here so if we want to do just eight okay and then just click hold and drag to get rid of them if we set these to quarter okay so you got individual resolution controls for the different sounds here and you've got global resolution controls up above so we can even change the steps from 16 to say 32 doubling that and increase the length of our pattern and I'm going to change that back to 16 now if we have this I which is the inspector for the pattern at the pattern inspector it's similar to the inspector in the arrange view but whereas this is going to give you information about the particular track that you're working with as we saw in the beginning of this tutorial this one here is going to allow you to create variations and so if I save this variation one I'd like to add some hats but I want to keep this more basic one also the center will allow you to duplicate so we have variation two and I'm actually going to change the hats back to the quarter note resolution draw those in so now we have our variation one that doesn't have the hats the variation two does have the hats so what does that mean in our song up above while this is highlighted if I click once I'll press D to duplicate set pattern then I'm going to drag the loop marker towards the end of that and at the bottom here we can choose which pattern we want to playback variation to is there this one will change that to vary one so now when we play this back I'll press one to become come to the beginning of our loop spacebar to play back okay so this is how you can go out and build your drum track out and create different variations and then you can just simply choose whichever one you want to play by clicking here so I could even add a completely new variation here where's our snare I'm going to select this press D to duplicate that out let's move this out and let's make this one the variation three which it is that's two and then we want this one to be one and that is one so let's play that back okay so you can see how that works and how you can go ahead and build these out and that is working with the patterns and if you see here you have a list of all of the different pads that are included within the impact so let's go ahead and open up the impact and let's pull that to the right a bit so you can see this first one here bass drum one matches their bass drum two bass drum three and so on now if you had created a kit by yourself you could always use the wrench icon here double click and rename press enter and this has changed the name here in our patterns editor and also on the pad itself here still the same sound but we can rename these to be whatever we'd like let's close out the impact and the editor so let's come back to our original recording of the drums I'm gonna just click hold and drag to select those and press delete click wants to select this I'll press P to set our loop there and just know that I've got a very in-depth tutorial on impact so just be sure to check that out if you want to know more but just quickly know that you can adjust the pitch of your sounds there you can transpose in semitones we can add a filter if we'd like and you've got a variety of filters to choose from here we've got envelopes for the pitch envelopes for the filter we've got our amp we can choose the gain we can pan and we've got an envelope for our gain and velocity control also if you would like to add your own sounds you can simply click hold and drag from the browser so if I come to the file section this we can see our system directory here so if I come to the desktop my sounds are in the quanta folder sounds and samples and we can even once we've located where we have our sounds if you have a folder with sounds that you've downloaded from online we can click right click and choose new tab from here then that's going to take you directly there so if I come to files this is where I navigated to that folder ok so now when I come to the browser I want to get to my sounds I'll come to files click directly on sounds and samples and then here I have all of the folders with sounds in that sounds and samples folder alright so here we've got drum sounds we can audition by using the play button it's going to loop while we have that if we take that off it won't loop this here is going to make the loop playback or the sound playback at the song tempo so you can audition and hear how they're going to sound in your song real time now drum sounds that's not really gonna work with because they're just one chops but if you were working with loops it will pitch up or down so you can listen back an audition to the same tempo that your song is in 162 but if you wanted to add your own sounds say we wanted to add this kick we could just simply click hold and drag it to our pad so if we wanted to add that one just click hold and drag and so now we've got those new sounds added into our impact and you can go to the default which will clear the paths and then just load every one up that you'd like yourself and make use of all of the banks that you'd like okay now let's go ahead and take a look at a different instrument I'll come to the Browse and the instrument tab let's bring in a Maitai here and pull that there and close out our browser we can choose different sounds for the mai tai by clicking here just as we did in the impact so if I come to the lead folder let's select this guy here and I'm going to use my controller to trigger [Music] ok let's say we wanted to add that to our basic beat that we have going on here I'll come back to the beginning of the song [Music] and as we did with the drums we can always play back and this is going to loop and you can experiment with different melodies this is actually how I work with my melodies in studio one I don't use any other sort of device I'll just play it back and try out different melodies and see which sounds best to my ear so since the drums kind of suck I'm not going to try to come up with a nice melody but you'll just see you'll get the idea [Music] okay so I started kind of late there when I was trying to enter into a record but we can easily fix that you can do another pass through just simply select the device the MIDI part and delete it I'll control Z to bring that back but as we saw with the drums we can simply double click to open up the editor and we can manipulate these notes as we manipulated the drum notes so if I come to the edge here we have the double arrows I can drag that out these will also snap if you have snap on right now it's off I'll turn that on quantize is set to eighth notes we've got our eighth note subdivisions so now when I drag you can see that snapping by eighth note okay but that has been corrected so when I play back [Music] and actually I like that new sound that I brought in on the open hi-hat it's not as cheesy sounding but anyway these notes can also be added in as we did with the drum sound so if I double click and then add that we can drag that out [Music] but the synth is in monophonic mode right now so we're only gonna hear one but just know that you can come in and add notes to your heart's content and drag those to the length that you'd like to be let's actually take the synth out of monophonic mode so we'll access it by clicking here then we can see voices is set to one let's take it off of mono now we can play eight voices we can always change that just by clicking and putting a value so we should now hear those extra notes that we added in whether they sound good or not as something else [Music] okay so now you can see how you can go about just selecting a MIDI part pressing D to duplicate I'm going to press W to zoom out a bit so we can continue to press D then we can come in make some variations to our recording or we can record them live we can do the same with our might I I'll press D on the quarter keyboard to duplicate these out we could also just take the loop off and record a whole passage if you're a good keyboard player unlike myself but at any point you can come into any one of these and then make adjustments to the notes I'll f2 to close out that editor and we could continue on with this process by coming to the browser we could choose say the presence here and once you click it expands out the presets so if I wanted to say add a piano we could choose the pop grande drag that in let's go close the browser and come to the beginning of our song [Music] I'm gonna play back [Music] [Applause] [Music] I'll enter into record [Music] stop playback ok so now we have a little piano melody or whatever you'd like to call it I'm gonna turn the reverb on on that to make it just sound a little bit better so let's play that back and hear how it sounds [Music] taken to the synth down and level here in our mix console we can bring up our instrument by clicking here check the reverb up [Music] [Music] okay so you get the idea how you can go about building this out again we could press D while this is selected and send keep recreating that or if you're a good player you can just take the loop off up above and record an entire passage and have more movement with the piano part while keeping these a little bit more basic and repetitive if that's the sort of style that you're going for okay so at this point we've taken a look at how we can go about recording live instruments and vocals we've taken a look at creating drum parts by playing them live and we've also seen how we can program those in either using the drum editor or the patterns we've laid down a synth part we've included some piano we've seen how we can duplicate these parts and keep adding on and just know that the effects are going to work the same way with our virtual the VST s as as it did with the audio so if I open up the Maitai and turn off the reverb here and I'll close that back out let's come to the Browse and the effects and expand out our personas where is the room reverb we can click hold and drag that on to our instrument track that has the piano and let's put this on something that's going to be very obvious the Cathedral so now when I play back [Music] I kind of loved right there and we could always fix that too by a double clicking you can see this is kind of where that error is but you can always rerecord which is what I'd recommend or you can adjust the notes here to correct I'll f2 and close out that editor but you can see we can simply drag and add effects to our MIDI devices as well and these will be processed in real time if you would like to render down a track to audio just select the one that you'd like to render down take the piano here right click and here we have an option to transform to audio track so if I select that we have a few options we can render the inserts and that's would be the reverb that I added so I do want to keep that this is going to allow us to come back to the state that it's in now where we have the MIDI if you leave this checked this will remove the instrument and save the power or power draw on the processor or processor use but as long as you leave this checked you'll be able to bring it back auto tell we put some reverb on the piano so let's go ahead and include a bit of time at the end to include the trail off of our audio I don't think we need 30 seconds so let's just do 10 and then we'll click OK studio once done it's done it has done its thing and this doesn't look entirely right so it's because it's rendering down the separate MIDI parts each instead of one so let me control Z and I bulette s'right click and I want to group these so under events we should see merge events we could also press G on the QWERTY keyboard now these are all as one so when I transform two audio track those are all set and I still did something wrong but you can see this is how you can convert it to audio we now have an audio waveform and you can see the original MIDI data here letting you know that you can transform it back to its original state transform to instrument track loop is what that will do let me just play this back [Music] [Music] okay so that's how you can go about now the the piano VST is gone now and that's gonna save processing power but as I mentioned we can always bring that back by transform to instrument track and then now we're back to as we were okay and so I did something wrong when I was grouping these you can tell by this highlighted Center area but we're not going to worry about that from now you get the idea and I'm gonna begin to wrap up here this hasn't gotten incredibly long but you can always watch this in pieces and parts but my goal was to take you from the beginning of not knowing what the hell to do to at least being able to record multiple tracks and and even create a song you know that you can render down as an audio file and before I forget the way that you would do that is you want to set your loop markers to the portion of the song or the song that you want to render down this is our song if you'll call it that up at the top under a song we have export mix down you'll click there here is the location where it will be saved at so if you wanted to say that to your desktop you could choose desktop so like that that's where it will go you can name it first song is what we had called it published you can choose whether you want it to go to your SoundCloud or send it to notion the format is down below if you want to do WAV 16-bit 44.1 would be CD quality you could also do mp3 file and you can choose the bitrate 64 would be pretty crappy 256 and above would be better so between loop is the export range and that's why we set our loop to cover all of those parts and then you would just click OK and it's going to render that down I'm gonna go ahead and cancel for the purposes of this video though now there's still a whole lot more to talk about with Studio One but you should like I said be able to create a basic song you should be able to apply effects you've seen how you can adjust the volume levels between the instruments to get a better match for what you'd like to hear and the last couple things that I'll talk about are up at the top we have some tools this split tool is going to allow you to cut different MIDI parts if I come back to the arrow tool and double-click actually I want to double click on the this here now when we're in the editor the split tool is here we can use that to cut our notes we have on a race tool and we can use that to erase notes if we're working in their range view we can use the erase tool to erase parts we've got a mute tool so we can mute parts mute and unmute we have the bent Bend tool which is beyond the scope of this tutorial we have a listen tool so where while this is active wherever I click it will begin playing back the particular track that you are clicking on so if you just want to hear the drums playing from here if you want to hear the piano playing from here okay that's the listen tool we've got a paint tool which is going to be a bit more useful let's say in the editor so let's double click the tools for the editor are here when you're in the range view you want to use up here but if we change to the paint tool we can draw in like so before we were using the arrow tool to double click and when you double click it's going to add them in to whatever you have the quantized value set to so if I change that to you have note it's gonna draw in a half note we can always click hold and drag to select notes and press Delete to remove any that we don't want along with double-clicking to remove them as well at the very bottom we have velocity information for the individual notes and if we click we can determine how loud or soft they're gonna play back so if we've recorded a passage that we're really in love with but there's one note that's just too loud then you can just come here and take it down okay so I really think we're gonna wrap up here this is incredibly long but I hope it's been useful or going to be useful for you guys we'll call it quits here if you made it all the way through that's impressive but if you're gonna break it up into parts that's also awesome too so if there's any questions that you have go ahead and leave a comment below I will get back to you with an answer and thanks for sticking through and checking out the video take care guys

Channel: Quanta

Views: 130,972

Keywords: presonus studio one 4.6, learn studio one 4.6, beginner studio one 4.6, studio one 4.6 tutorial, studio one 4.6 for noobies, studio one 4.6 for noobs

Id: bQ7-52Ty64A

Length: 87min 8sec (5228 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019