Studio One 4 Editing
Studio One 4 is the latest and greatest incarnation of Presonus' powerful DAW - a whole production environment for making music. And at the heart of making music is working with digital audio. In this short video from the course Studio One 4 103: Recording and Editing Audio, Joshua Carney guides you through the process of importing audio and loops into Studio One. PreSonus Studio One 4 is extremely powerful when it comes to MIDI editing and recording. In this course, producer and trainer Joshua Carney covers all the MIDI tools and techniques you need to master to work efficiently with Studio One 4.
Mar 25, 2019 PreSonus Studio One 4 is an amazing DAW for recording audio. Join educator and audio engineer Joshua Carney in this course to master all audio recording and editing features included in Studio One! Skip to main content. That’s why Studio One just plain sounds better. The reason why Studio One resonates with musicians is simple: PreSonus listens. Many new features in Version 4 are the direct result of user feedback, including AAF import/export so users can bring song data from their old DAW into Studio One.
Screen 1: A simple ripple delete edit. At the top is the original material. In the middle, the first event has been deleted using standard editing. All that has changed is that the event has been removed. At the bottom, the first event has been deleted with ripple editing active. Note that all of the following events have been moved forward in time by the duration of the deleted event.
We explore the powerful new ripple editing feature in Studio One 4.
Last month I wrote about techniques for handling narration in Studio One, but I did not mention a tool that has obvious applications in this role: the new ripple edit feature in Studio One 4. Ripple editing is also commonly used when creating sound for picture, but Studio One’s lack of support for audio post applications means its ripple editing features will more likely be useful in composing, as well as in editing raw spoken word recordings or any recordings requiring culling.
Closing The Gaps
With standard editing, making a selection and cutting or deleting it leaves open space where that material used to be. Purity ring shrines download free. Extending the end of an event when there is another event immediately following it results in the stretched event overlapping the following event. Ripple editing avoids both of these results by moving the following material in response to the edit: deleting material causes the material after it to move earlier in time to fill the gap, while extending an event causes the material following to slide later in time by the same amount. This is not always the editing model you need, but when it is, it can save a huge amount of manual work.
Let’s go back to narration, last month’s focus, as an example. Say we are working on a single track of narration, which was recorded continuously. Even a good reader is likely to have a few stumbles, or decide to re-read a few words, and there are any number of events that create unwanted material: throat clearing, coughing, making comments to the engineer or director, rustling paper, movement in a seat, drinking water or tea, and so on. Removing such garbage bits using standard editing leaves gaps between the remaining narration events, which need to be closed up manually.
Ripple editing, by contrast, automatically tightens the track up as you get rid of each noise. This is helpful when editing a 30-second spot, but completely essential when editing, say, an audio book, where one file may represent pages of text. In the end, you probably will have to move some events around individually to get the flow right, but it is much less work without gaps everywhere throughout.
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Ripple Slips
The Ripple Edit button in the toolbar.This simple example of ripple editing turns out to be as easy to execute as one would hope. Click the Ripple Edit button in the toolbar to engage ripple edit mode, then select and delete material as desired. All the material following the edit on the tracks moves along in time to compensate. Move on to the next unwanted bit and repeat.
Material can be inserted just as easily: put the material to be inserted on the clipboard by copying or cutting it, place the cursor where you want the material inserted, and paste. The new material is inserted at the cursor and all the material following is slid later in time by the duration of the inserted material.
Note that you must actually paste the new material for this to work: even with ripple editing enabled, dragging and dropping material at the desired location does not result in a ripple edit. Other methods that do not produce rippling include nudging, the Move to Cursor and Move to Origin commands in the Edit menu, and the Quantize on Track command. Attempting to use these commands with ripple editing enabled can produce unpredictable results, and undoing the edit may not return the affected events to their previous locations. I did a few experiments where I performed a command, then undid and redid it multiple times. The results got pretty crazy. (Hopefully, nudging and the Move to Cursor command, at the very least, might get integrated with ripple editing in a future update.)
On the other hand, when ripple editing is active, the Duplicate command does perform a ripple edit, moving succeeding material later to accommodate the duplicated event. Thus, Duplicate acts as an insert with rippling.
The Insert Silence and Delete Time commands inherently produce ripple edits, whether or not ripple editing is enabled. One other ripple-ish function to mention is arranger sections. Click on a section in the arranger track, copy it, place the cursor at an insertion point and paste, and Studio One inserts the section and ripples everything after, whether or not ripple editing is enabled. However, if you select that same section and delete, it merely deletes the section from the arranger track; the data in the audio and instrument tracks are unaffected.
Screen 2: Working across multiple tracks. At the top is the ‘before’: three unmodified tracks. Just below that, a selection was made just in front of the second event in the bottom track and extended acrossall three tracks, then Insert Silence was invoked, creating a break in the event on the top track. In the third example, a selection was made across all tracks before the first event and Insert Silence invoked. The edit on the bottom was made by turning ripple editing on, selecting the first event on each track, and dragging. As you can see, the results on the bottom two examples are identical.
Ripple editing does not require inserting or deleting material; selecting and dragging material with ripple editing active works fine. The difference between dragging and, for instance, the Insert Silence command, is that Insert Silence creates an edit and inserts silence right at the edit point across all selected tracks, while ripple editing by dragging can be performed on selected events across multiple tracks, even when they do not share the same start time.
Ripple editing never affects material earlier than the edit point. For example, if you edit the leading edge of an event, rather than altering the material before the edit point, Studio One slides the material after it later to make room for the new material exposed at the front of the event.
Music & Movement
Ripple editing is useful for more than spoken word, of course. When I am writing music, one thing I do is put Studio One in record and noodle around or try out multiple ideas, either against a looping beat or bass line, or just solo. I can then use ripple editing to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Screen 3a: Ripple editing multiple tracks with snap. At the top we see three beats of vocal (VO) pickup, then bass and guitar enter, bass right on the beat, guitar a little later.When ripple editing musical material, it can be valuable to enable snapping to the grid, to ensure that edited material stays locked to the beat. For this to work properly, at least some of the events getting moved need to start on a grid value.
In Screen 3a, a verse starts with a three-beat vocal pickup before the band enters on the downbeat. We want to add two more bars before the bridge for a few vocal whoops and shouts of ‘Hey!’ The drums are steady throughout and don’t need to be moved, but vocals, bass and guitar do. Of these, the vocals might not fall exactly on the beat, and the guitar might have some bends or other figures that make it a less-than-reliable rhythm reference. Plus, neither the guitar nor vocal events start right on a beat. But the bass is solid on the beat, so we use that as our reference. Type ‘N’ to turn snap on, set the Quantize value to a whole note and engage ripple edit. Shift-click the first events you want to move on the vocal, guitar and bass tracks.
Screen 3b: Here, we have ripple edited by selecting on all three tracks and dragging the guitar event by two bars. Note that the guitar event now starts on the beat, but the bass is a little early.You might think that you could drag any of the selected events and that all of the selected events and following events on those tracks would move exactly one bar. But look at the example in Screen 3b and you will see what happens when we drag an event that did not originally start on a downbeat — in this case, the selected guitar track event. After dragging, the start of that event lines up to the next grid line, which is a downbeat. The bass and vocal tracks have been moved, but not by exactly one bar. This is why the fact these tracks are not reliable rhythm references is important.
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Screen 3c: And in this example, we’ve done the same thing but dragged the bass event instead and all is well.However, if we drag the event on the bass track, which does start on a downbeat, then everything moves one bar and is placed correctly (Screen 3c). The moral of this story is: when ripple editing with snap enabled, choose carefully which event you actually drag.
The ripple edit feature is Studio One’s single biggest tool for this kind of editing, but it turns out quite a few other features provide similar or related functionality. Some kinds of work only very occasionally call for ripple editing, but when it is needed, it can provide significant impact.
on Jul 02, 2014 in Presonus Studio One 0 comments
Studio One has some real handy ways in which to edit and manipulate your audio. These methods can be useful in speeding up your workflow and in creating new audio ideas. Let’s take a look at some helpful audio tips that will improve your Studio One production techniques.
Tip 1 - Using the Volume Handles
On each audio event you’ll notice a black horizontal line. This is the volume handle for that audio region. You can make quick volume adjustments by tweaking these handles. Grab this handle and lower it to decrease the volume on that particular audio event. This comes in handy for vocal volume level editing. Take your vocal track and cut up the audio region into manageable sections. Wherever you hear a break of silence in the vocalist’s voice make a cut there. Then select each audio event and go in and tweak the volume handles so that you get a clean volume level amongst all the regions. You see the waveform change as you adjust the volume handle, so it gives you visual feedback as well on the audio waveform shape.
Tip 2 - Managing Your Audio with Folders
When your songs start getting bigger and bigger and you have quite a few tracks, a good way to manage these tracks is to use folders. Let’s say you have eight drum tracks. Select the first track, hold down Shift and select the last track.This will select all the tracks in between. Then right-click on one of the tracks and choose Pack Folder in from the pop-up contextual window.
Rename the Folder to Drums. You can simply click the folder icon to expand or collapse the tracks in the folder, and you can also mute and solo this folder. Great way to isolate elements in the mix.
Tip 3 - Grouping Audio Tracks
Another way to manage your tracks is to group similar tracks together. This way if you want to edit the volume, the other grouped tracks will be edited simultaneously. A good example is grouping guitar tracks together. Select the tracks you want to group, then right-click on one of the tracks and choose Group Selected Tracks from the submenu, or use the shortcut Command-G (Mac) or Control-G (PC).
Now move the volume fader on one of the tracks, and the volume on the other grouped tracks will change as well. If you want to make changes to one track but not the rest in the group, then hold down Option (Mac) or Alt (PC), make the necessary changes and then release the key for it to go back to the grouping.
Tip 4 - Hide and Show Tracks from the Track List
Another way to manage your audio tracks is to use the show/hide function to show and hide tracks in the Arrange area. Let’s say you’ve got quite a big project of 30 tracks, but only want to see the guitar tracks you're working with, then open the Track List panel. This is the horizontal line icon next to the Inspector Icon above your tracks.
And then click on the white circle to hide the track. See how this can neaten up your arrange view. Click it again to show the tracks. You can also quickly swipe up or down across these circles to show/hide multiple tracks.
Tip 5 - Adding Crossfades
It's very easy to add crossfades between two audio events. Let’s see how this is done. Take one of your audio events and slide it over another audio event so that they overlap, Select the one audio event and then hold down Shift while you select the other so that both audio events are selected. Now simply press X and a crossfade is created between the two audio events. You can see from the waveforms displays in the audio events that the two crossfade between each other. How easy it that! You can go in and fine-tune the fade-in and fade-out points by going to the Inspector, and then down to Event FX. Here you can fine-tune the fade points. Either type in an amount or drag up and down on the box to change the fade times.
Tip 6 - Creating Automating Lanes
When you get into your audio mixing, you're going to want to start automating parameters on your channel strip and plug-ins to add some interest. For example, you may want to create dynamic changes to the volume and pan, or automation to your effects like reverb increases to create reverb swells. With Studio One you can create automation lanes. Let's say you want to automate the volume of the channel strip. Select a track, then open the Track Inspector and click on the volume fader. Now in the top left of the transport panel you’ll see the Volume name and its current amount. Next to the volume is a hand icon.
Click and hold on this hand icon and drag under your track to create an automation lane for the volume. You can create automation node points by clicking on areas in the automation lane and then drag these around, or you can use the pen tool to draw in these nodes.
What if you want to automate a parameter on a plug-in? Then do the same thing. Open the plug-in, select the parameter, and its name will show up. Select and drag the hand icon under that name to the track list, and there you go. It’s that easy. Remember to rename your automation lanes so that they make sense to you.
You could even create folders and put this track and its associated automation lanes in the same folder. That way all your automation for that track is neatly packed into a folder, and you can expand that folder when needed when you want to edit the automation.
Or you could even hide these automation lanes when you don’t need to see them by going to track list and hiding them like explained earlier.
Conclusion
That’s how you can improve how you work with your audio events and audio tracks in Studio One. Try this out and see how they can really improve your workflow and song project management, especially when you're working in big songs with lots of different types of tracks. Group similar tracks together, bundle them in folders, and show and hide tracks when needed. And really get in there with your audio automation and build up some interesting dynamic productions. For more Studio One tips and tricks check out the following tutorials: