Why Studio One Pro

Of all the Digital Audio Workstations that are out there — Cubase, Logic, etc. — I love Logic Pro the most; it’s powerful, flexible, and extremely easy to use. But since I’ve migrated my music production over to my PC, I’ve discovered a NEW piece of software, called Studio One Professional. It’s also very powerful — though you wouldn’t know it when you first boot it up. And it has some REALLY neat features that even Logic has. For instance: The Chord Track. It enables you to enharmonic composing. In other words — change the chords, and the MIDI key changes appropriately. Or, even the pitch or time stretch (yes, they’re separate things!) changes. It has plentiful features that a lot of your high-end DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), do not have. The ability for instance to assign a MIDI track to play back on multiple instruments at once, and to embed plugins within an instrument. The ability to not distinguish between MIDI file types, audio files, etcetera. It also has the ability to directly freeze MIDI tracks to audio, and then reconvert the audio tracks into MIDI tracks! It’s an amazing little package, and it costs less than many of the more advanced DAWS in its category. I’ve found Cubase to be cumbersome; Digital Performer to be just flat-out confusing; but Studio One Professional is simple, quick, and to the point. And oh yeah—did I mention that the whole program is powered by drag and drop? That’s right; you hardly ever have to do anything with a key combination or some special trick (although you can do shortcut keys — which you can customize — or even macros! Haven’t figured all that out yet. You can drag instruments onto tracks, drag around notes in the Score View (for which it uses Presonus’ own Notation program, Notion), and it lets you assign and outside Wave Editor, like Adobe Audition. It really is a fantastic little program. Here, check it out for yourself over at PreSonus. You won’t be disappointed!