Free’s a great price, right?

Buy our Studio One Professional 2 DAW for $399 and get a free HP4 headphone amp with 4 screaming-loud 150mW outputs. Offer good September only. Click here to download the form!

[ZOMG, we just got a great e-mail from The folks at PAR, letting us know that we were nominated so GET OVER THERE AND VOTE, #TeamPreSonus!]

Congratulations! PreSonus’ Studio One 2 and StudioLive 16.0.2 have been nominated for 2012 PAR Excellence Awards in the Digital Audio Workstations and Small Live Controllers/Mixers/Worksurfaces (Under $2,500) categories, respectively. August 2012 marks the PAR Excellence Awards’ re-introduction as a reader-voted program, presented by the Editors and Contributors of Pro Audio Review (PAR) magazine. 

Online voting on the list of nominees by PAR print and digital readers (subscribers only) will be open from the mail date of the August issue through Friday, November 16, 2012. PAR Excellence winners will be announced in the December issue of Pro Audio Review and simultaneously online at prosoundnetwork.com, PAR’s shared website with sister publication, Pro Sound News.

Nominations for the 2012 PAR Excellence Awards were developed through the brain trust of PAR Editors and Contributors. Nominations were based on the “I want to own this” principle; gear selected should have a proven field track record, performed well via PAR’s “real world” review process, or — in the case of recently released products — have shown particular promise through demonstrations, beta-testing and among early adopters.

ProSound Network recently took a detailed look at Studio One 2, and their review is quite flattering—and thorough! They really covered the Studio One bases here, detailing everything from Melodyne integration to Folder Tracks, and the latest reason to celebrate Studio One: Nimbit!

But of course they had nice things to say, or we wouldn’t be linking to it from our blog here. But my favorite bit of the entire review reads so:

“This easy to use, powerful, efficient DAW sounds amazing and provides everything you need to record, mix and master your music. If you don’t need surround or notation support, (and many of us don’t) there’s no reason not to give the free version a test drive and see if Studio One might be the right fit for you.”

Click here to read the entire review.

No, YOU try to come up with a better title.

Rick Balentine is a composer in Los Angeles. Rick has most recently been charged with composing for a new Steven Seagal TV Series, “True Justice.”  When he heard that Steven himself would dust off the ol’ Aikido if the show’s tunes weren’t up to snuff, Balentine chose Studio One Professional 2 and got the job done in the time it took Bruce Lee to throw this punch.

Soundcloud
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We recently had the chance to hang out for a while at Flux Studios for a little get-together where we could celebrate Studio One Professional 2. Here I was, all ready to write a great blog about it, and SonicScoop totally beat me to the punch. So, here’s a teaser, but then you should go read what they have to say about it.  From the SonicScoop blog:

“A remarkably intuitive and fast-moving DAW, Studio One 2 was at the center of live recording sessions held in FLUX’s inspiring Dangerous live room. Producer Fab Dupont manned the controls and artistJay Stolar laid down live tracks, which would later be the subject of a Q&A on the software.”

More after the jump!

Out of the industrial-strength kindness of Ivan “Vigilante” Muñoz’ heart comes the below unsolicited slice of Studio One  praise.  While I never get tired of reading e-mails from folks who like our products, I have to confess that this image Ivan submitted is kind of a nice change of pace. Take a look:

Worth noting is that, to the best of my knowledge, no one’s ever sent Ivan one of our style guides, and I’m not sure where he got such nice, clean copies of our logos… but look at this thing, it’s like Ivan went to PreSonus design college. It’s grungy, high-contrast, features prominent product placement…  Dude kinda nailed it.

HEY BANDS: Are you looking to get endorsement relationships with the brands you love? Maybe you already have one? Take note—taking the initiative to produce stuff like what Ivan’s done above is a great way to keep those relationships strong.

Just sayin’, it’s not all free mixers and lollipops. Thanks, Ivan!

Part V: Video!

I’d like to talk a little bit about writing music for video in Studio One. I had to do a multimedia project at my university as an exam, so I made a short trailer-type video by using trailer from Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed” video game, and I decided to score my own music for it using my orchestral template.

The process is pretty simple actually. All you need to do is import a video file in Studio One Video Player and it will automatically play whenever you click Play on the transport controls. (Studio One doesn’t have video tracks, by the way.) If you want to add marker positions for your video, you have to scroll through the video and place markers on the marker track when the appropriate scene shows in your video. I like to keep my transport bar count set to bars instead of frames, because when I am writing music for video I need to sync my music to it and still follow the proper musical­ beat.

I always take a look at the video cue a couple of times and think about what kind of music I am going to write for it. Then I start placing markers and name them to describe the scene that the video player is about to show.

Video Scoring

Placing markers is pretty much the same as in other DAWs. Find the place where you need to put marker, and click the “+” button on the left of the marker track, and you will see the marker tagged with a number on the marker track.You can rename the marker by double-clicking on it and typing in a name in the pop-up window.

Sometimes the time signature doesn’t fit the video, and you want the important scenes to change in a musically relevant manner, by following the time signature. Place a marker on that scene and right click above it and choose “set time signature.” The pop-up window will show and you can input your desired time signature. This is useful when syncing music to change right with the scene. For example: if your time signature is set to 4/4 and the scene is not changing exactly on the metronome’s beat, you will need to add or remove a couple of beats to perfect the timing. Here’s how the finished marker track looks after adding markers and time signature changes to the video:

Marker Track

Once you’ve done that, you are ready for some serious professional scoring.

I had a lot of fun with this project, and I am definitely seeing myself using PreSonus Studio One as my main DAW of choice from now on. Need I say that I’ve un-installed my other DAW I was using all these years? The guys from PreSonus are doing a great job with this and with some patches and new versions, StudioOne has a bright future in becoming the industry’s top DAW out there.

And feel free to visit my Youtube Channel. You can also listen to some of my tracks at Reverbnation and visit me on IMDb.

[Update! For your convenience, here’s the rest of the blogs in this series:

1. Part One: Intro and DAW setup
2. Part Two: Panning and placement of instruments
3. Part Three: EQ
4. Part Four: Reverb
5. Part Five: Video

Hi Ryan!

PART 4: Reverb!
Now, the most difficult and most-discussed theme on orchestral composition forums is applying reverbs. This is the most important part of the orchestral mixing process as far as I’m concerned. I’ve watched and listened to loads of tutorials and lectures on reverbs for orchestra—which one is better? Why?. There is a lot of controversy on impulse response reverbs vs. algorythmic reverbs. Whatever you pick, the most important thing is that it sounds good to you. My main reverb is Altiverb and sometimes I use Lexicon PCM Native. Here’s how I apply them to my orchestra sections:

Every section has its own reverb that processes it. I like to use Altiverb’s IRs of stages like Todd-AO or FOX Scoring Stage. I like the fact that it has three different mic positions that were used to capture the impulse responses, so I can use them on individual close-miked sections of the orchestra. There are three IR patches of wide mic setups that I use. The closest one is for strings, the middle one is for brass and woodwinds, and the farthest one is for percussion and choir. I apply very little reverb on close mic sections just to give them air, and I apply more of it to stage mic sections to give them room.

Close Reverb

Here’s an example of proper reverb settings using Lexicon PCM Native:
I use two instances of Lexicon. The first one is for close mic setup with a very small pre-delay and short reverb time. I use only 50% of the mix.

Lexicon Close

The second instance emulates stage and far-miked setups, which requires a sizeable pre-delay and long reverb time. Its mix is set to 100%.

Lexicon Far

If I have a solo vocalist in my session, I usually use any vocal plate preset for it.
This covers the reverb for the orchestra. Next up we’ll look at using the Studio One Video Player for scoring.

[Update! For your convenience, here’s the rest of the blogs in this series:

1. Part One: Intro and DAW setup
2. Part Two: Panning and placement of instruments
3. Part Three: EQ
4. Part Four: Reverb
5. Part Five: Video

Despite his depiction here, Luke is bad at keeping Studio One 2 a secret.

My hunch is the online-page-turning-reader thing that Mushroom Magazine is using won’t embed in our blog, so here’s a link to all the flattery that PreSonus artist and producer wunderkind Luke Mourinet has to say.

Grammy-nommed Luke presented at MusikMesse a number of times for us this year, and his presentations were among the most well-received.