PreSonus Blog

Category Archives: Studio One


Free Studio One 3 Demo Song Featuring Matt Chamberlain Drums Now Available from @TheLoopLoft

Matt_ChamberlainDrums

[This just in from Ryan Gruss over at The LoopLoft. He’s put together a demo song for Studio One 3 featuring loops from Matt Chamberlain Drums Vol. 1 and is making it available to anyone who is interested for free!]

To take Studio One 3 for my first test drive, I wanted to see how quickly and easily I could create a drum mix and song arrangement with the multitrack loops from The Loop Loft’s Matt Chamberlain Drums Vol 1 collection. These drums were recorded at Matt’s personal studio located inside of the famed Sound City complex in Los Angeles and feature 15 channels of 96 kHz / 24 bit audio, so they were the perfect specimen for putting this new DAW through its paces.

Within ten minutes, I had a full “pop/rock” arrangement (intro, verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus/outro) inside of Studio One. I was able to quickly drag and drop the multitrack loops directly into the session, label the song sections with markers, bus the drum tracks (and create their own folder) and most importantly: create a great sounding drum mix.

My favorite new feature in Studio One 3 are the FX Chain presets for drums, which are great for speeding up my mixing workflow. Just by dragging and dropping them into a drum track, I instantly had a great starting point, complete with gating, EQ, and compression. I utilized all these drum presets across all of the close miked drums; kick, snare, toms etc., and tweaked as necessary.

So, now that I’ve created a quick drum mix and arrangement. I wanted to share it with all of the Studio One users out there to let them experiment with mixing and arranging tracks from one of the world’s best session drummers. Try rearranging the session. Dial in your own mixes, speed things up or slow them down—the loops will stay locked to the session tempo! Experience Matt Chamberlain’s power, feel and musicality for yourself!

Click here to download the Studio One 3 demo Song file described above. Submitting your e-mail gets you download access, as well as 40% off the Matt Chamberlain library!

 

Matt Chamberlain Studio One Drum Session

Ricki and the Flash Rocks with PreSonus, Part 4

Ricki_and_the_Flash_poster

[Continued from part 3…]

When we started rehearsals for Ricki and the Flash, we discovered that some things had to be changed. Part of what we faced was the reality of working with musicians who were used to the big stage in a club environment.

A brief review of our cast:

Drums and backing vocals: Joe Vitale. Joe has drummed for, among others, Joe Walsh (he co-wrote “Rocky Mountain Way” with Joe); Stills-Young Band; The Eagles; Crosby, Stills and Nash; and the re-formed Buffalo Springfield. Joe has written a book about his life as a musician called Backstage Pass.

Bass: Rick Rosas, aka Rick The Bass Player. Rick played most recently with Neil Young in Crazy Horse. He was also part of the Buffalo Springfield reunion. Rick passed away a few weeks after finishing the band scenes, and we miss him very much.

Keys: Bernie Worrell. Bernie was a member of Parliament/Funkadelic and joined Talking Heads for a number of albums. He’s in Jonathan Demme’s concert classic film Stop Making Sense and has played on countless sessions with artists as diverse as Keith Richards, Jack Bruce, Dee Lite, and Bootsy’s Rubber Band.

Lead guitar and backing vocals: Rick Springfield. Rick has been on the big stage since the late 1960s, first with Zoot, and then as a solo artist. For a time, Rick starred in the soap opera General Hospital, and he has many hit records, including “Speak to the Sky,” “Jessie’s Girl,” and “I’ve Done Everything for You.”

Rhythm guitar and lead vocals: Meryl Streep. One of the most well regarded actresses in the world, Meryl learned to play guitar for this movie. Meryl had never played in a band before but she has sung in many films, including Mama Mia and the recent Into the Woods, so she adapted quickly to the role of Ricki.

I have been “pushing faders” as a front-of-house (and sometimes monitor) engineer since 1979. I’ve mixed in wretched bars with “thrift-store” PA systems, and I’ve mixed bands at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. My background is live sound; working on a movie required some adjustment in my approach to mixing.

Music coordinator Mark Wolfson and Neil Citron, the music wrangler, have worked together for many years. Among other projects, they worked on the film That Thing You Do (also with Ricki director Jonathan Demme and producer Gary Goetzman). On this film, I worked with Mark and Neil to create an authentic club band feel.

One thing that we encountered from the get-go was a reluctance to show microphones on camera. This created some interesting challenges, as we had to find a way to capture the sound without showing any microphones beyond the vocal mics. Some solutions were simple: We could take a DI off of the bass, and we used triggers on the drums and then used drum samples that we sampled from Joe’s Drum Workshop kit. We hid the hi-hat and overhead mics as best we could.

Thanks to Audio-Technica, we had excellent condensers: an ATM 450 on the hi-hat and an ATM 4050 on the overheads. We were able to hide the ATM 650 dynamic on the Leslie high side and the ATM 250 dynamic on the Leslie low side.

The guitar amps presented a problem, though. We needed to capture an authentic sound without showing mics. Trying to mic the back of the amps proved unwieldy at best. It also didn’t sound so great.

Neil and I put our heads together and decided to call our friend Peter Janis at Radial Engineering. Peter sent us two JDX active speaker-simulator direct boxes. We were able to plug out of Meryl’s Fender 65 Deluxe reissue and Rick’s Fender Bassman 410. The Bassman reissue proved tricky because the speaker output has an RCA connector; we had to make two ¼”-to-RCA custom connectors. At the time, the JDX required an external supply, as well; now it’s available with the option to run on 48V phantom power.

We also used two of the new Audio-Technica AT 4080 active ribbon mics for room/ambience miking. These mics sound glorious, and they really helped Neil and Mark re-create the room sound when they did the mixing later.

With the system tuned, we were ready to watch five musician/actors become a band.

 

The StudioLive 32.4.2 AI for Studio Recording at PreSonus Headquarters

Eric Welch, House Engineer at PreSonus HQ, discusses some of the projects we’ve recorded here at home. He discusses his use of the Studiolive 32.4.2 AI, QMix, Studio One, and myriad other PreSonus technologies.

For more on the StudioLive 32.4.2AI, click here: http://www.presonus.com/products/StudioLive-AI-Series

For more on Studio One, click here: http://studioone.presonus.com/

Ricki and the Flash Rocks with PreSonus, Part 2

20140926_101733

The five musicians that make up the band Ricki and the Flash are all top shelf players. Their credits are the stuff of legends; you hear them on the radio every day. Of the five, only bass player Rick Rosas and drummer Joe Vitale had played together before, as the rhythm section of the reunion tour for the legendary Buffalo Springfield (no relation to Rick Springfield).

Bernie Worrell is a visionary funk keyboardist and a member of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. His credits include Parliament/Funkadelic and Talking Heads. Rick Springfield is a fantastic guitarist who also played Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital.

Meryl Streep, of course, is one of the most renowned actresses in the world.

To get them to be Ricki and the Flash, we set up in the World Famous Rodeo Bar in the Murray Hill district of Manhattan. The Rodeo Bar is a long, narrow room with a brick wall behind the band. We were in a small space, and they were very LOUD.

We set up the band in an authentic club configuration and laid out the monitors for them. We used three StudioLive™ 312AI cabinets for the vocalists and keyboard position and a StudioLive 315AI for the drum wedge.

When we first set up the wedges, we decided to just use them in the standard DSP configuration. The speakers use Dave Gunness’ TQ™ (Temporal Equalization) settings to correct for the acoustical issues that arise in a coaxial design. In addition, each box has DSP settings designed to assist the user in different acoustic situations. There are four settings on the back of the speaker, accessed by a small button. The settings are: Normal (full range for front-of-house), LBR Source (for low-bit-rate digital audio, such as MP3 playback), Floor Monitor (for stage wedge), and a custom User preset.

Neil Citron is a long-time studio engineer, guitarist, and all around great guy. He ran the Mothership for Steve Vai for 15 years and is a member of the Sapphire Group, a bunch of audiophiles in Los Angeles. Neil has incredible ears and was brought in to teach Meryl guitar, be the music director, and record the performances.

Neil and I set up the wedges, supervised by Mark Wolfson, and we ran some program material through them. We really liked the sound of the default Normal setting, so we left it. As soon as the band showed up, we quickly realized that the stage mix just wasn’t “there.” A quick button-push, and the boxes were in Stage Monitor mode; they sat perfectly in the mix, with no additional EQ required.

We used one StudioLive 312AI plus one StudioLive 18sAI subwoofer per side of the “house” PA. We put the top boxes on using the SP1BK subwoofer pole; this also allowed us to steer the top box to reduce reflections off of the brick walls.

Thanks to Brad Graham, Rapco generously provided us with microphone cable and snakes to wire the stage. We wired the guitars using Radial JDX DIs to get the sound of the amplifier, not the guitar. We used Radial JDIs on the bass and keys. Thanks to Roxanne Ricks of Audio-Technica, we had A-T mics on the Leslie and hi-hat. We also used the fantastic A-T ribbons for ambient room miking. We had triggers on the drum kit; more about that later.

Here were the basic challenges:

  • Make sure the musicians can hear each other and the singers can hear their voices.
  • Make sure the levels into the recordings were right.
  • Get a good balanced mix for the audience.
  • Make it feel like a real show, which it was.

I’ll get into the recording aspect in the next part.

I need to give major props to Gary Goetzman, the producer, who took five musicians who had not played together before (with the exception of the rhythm section) and turned them into a real band in two weeks. Everyone was at the top of their game, and the professionalism of the band and producer really shone through.

Ricki and the Flash Rocks with PreSonus, Part 1

 

Ricki and the Flash poster (1)Hello everyone, I’m Phil Garfinkel, the Special Projects Liaison for PreSonus® Audio Electronics. I’m writing about the shooting of a new movie, Ricki and the Flash, discussing the PreSonus products that we used and how we used them.

First, a little about the film: Ricki and the Flash stars Meryl Streep as Ricki, an aspiring rock star who leaves the Midwest to “make it” in California. Her band, The Flash, features the talents of Rick Springfield on guitar, Bernie Worrell on keyboards, Joe Vitale on drums, and Rick Rosas on bass.

We set up the band in an authentic club configuration, with plenty of PreSonus equipment to reinforce their sound. We recorded with Capture™ and used Studio One® to create reference recordings. I was on site as the PreSonus tech, mixing the live show.

Here is a quick overview of what we used from PreSonus:

 

The movie is directed by Jonathan Demme and produced by Gary Goetzman and Marc Platt, all Oscar winning veterans. Jonathan and Gary wanted the band to play, not just pretend to play along to tracks; I was brought in to mix front-of-house and monitors and to take a 32-track feed to capture the music as it happened.

We faced some unusual challenges. Thanks to teamwork and a mutual obsession for excellence (and some pretty great gear), Mark, Neil, and I worked through it to help Jonathan and Gary make an excellent soundtrack for the film.

Special thanks to Roxanne Ricks at Audio-Technica for helping us get high quality microphones and wireless systems, Peter Janis at Radial Engineering for getting us some fantastic Direct Boxes, and Brad Graham at Rapco-Horizon for helping with cable needs.

Thanks also to my cohorts in audio-land, Mark Wolfson and Neil Citron, who led the charge for this journey. Also Jeff Pullman, C.A.S, the film’s Production Sound Mixer, who worked with us.

Ricky and the Flash opens in theaters everywhere on August 7.

 

Click here for part 2!

Studio One 3 Launch: Los Angeles Studio Chat—Part 3 of 3

Studio One 3 Launched on May 20, 2015. Marketing Director Carl Jacobson sat down at Burbank, California’s Legend Studio with a panel of engineer, DJs, and producers including Sak Pase, AG, KATFYR, Chaka Blackmon, and DJ Faust to talk about why they’ve chosen Studio One over other DAWs.

Learn more about Studio One 3 and try the demo here: http://studioone.presonus.com/

Studio One 3 Launch: Los Angeles Studio Chat—Part 2 of 3

Studio One 3 Launched on May 20, 2015. Marketing Director Carl Jacobson sat down at Burbank, California’s Legend Studio with a panel of engineer, DJs, and producers including Sak Pase, AG, KATFYR, Chaka Blackmon, and DJ Faust to talk about why they’ve chosen Studio One over other DAWs.

Learn more about Studio One 3 and try the demo here: http://studioone.presonus.com/

PreSonus Studio Grand Add-on Now Available

Studio-Grand-Banner-FINAL-1
We just released the PreSonus Studio Grand, which you can get from shop.presonus.com by clicking here. This aggressively over-sampled piano features ten distinct velocity layers and eight round-robin samples for each of the piano’s 88 keys. The result is one of the most natural and human-sounding virtual pianos available to date, containing well over 7,000 samples. We’ve also included samples of the little details that make a true piano sound different than the “piano” setting on a store-bought consumer keyboard, including note-off key release samples, pedal action, and sustain pedal resonance. These are activated during performance via the complex scripting made possible by Presence XT. The samples were recorded to some of the finest analog equipment available, and converted to digital in sterling 24-bit quality.
We’ve also included two different miking configurations. Arnd Kaiser, General Manager of PreSonus Software, states: “The main difference between PreSonus Studio Grand and other pianos is the fact that we include two independent sample sets representing two different microphone configurations. These include a matched pair of German condenser mics in the player’s perspective and a pair of fine ribbon mics placed in the listener’s perspective. This way, the user can choose or combine mic sets just like recording a real piano in a studio.” We’ve also included 21 Instrument and FX presets to get you started.
The PreSonus Studio Grand is compatible with all versions of Studio One 3 (Prime, Artist and Professional). To be clear, this is the full-featured bigger brother to the piano instrument included in the Presence XT Core library for Studio One 3 Professional and the Presence XT – Keyboards Add-on—but at ten times the depth and size! Due to incredible attention to detail, it clocks in at 5.5GB—but in the digital age, disk space is the price we pay for quality. Incidentally, competing software pianos can run you nearly triple the cost of PreSonus Studio Grand.
The Presonus Studio Grand acoustic piano is a sampler instrument for Presence XT, and compatible with all versions of Studio One 3 (Prime, Artist and Professional).

Studio One 3 Launch: Los Angeles Studio Chat—Part 1 of 3

Studio One 3 Launched on May 20, 2015. Marketing Director Carl Jacobson sat down at Burbank, California’s Legend Studio with a panel of engineers, DJs, and producers including Sak Pase, AG, KATFYR, Chaka Blackmon, and DJ Faust to talk about why they’ve chosen Studio One over other DAWs.

Learn more about Studio One 3 and try the demo here: http://studioone.presonus.com/

 

.@KATFYR’s Latest Release, “Voltage,” Produced in Studio One, Available now on BeatPort

It's got a little kitty on it.

It’s got a little pixel kitty on it.

[This just in from KATFYR, who just released “Voltage“—produced entirely in Studio One! You can (and should) buy Voltage on BeatPort by clicking here. You can also listen to the track below, and check out the video interview to learn a few more details about his production tricks.]

My latest release, Voltage, was produced with Studio One 3 from start to finish. I got to take advantage of many of its newest features.

The new Arranger Track expedited the process of building the entire song structure. It enabled me to easily duplicate whole sections of the arrangement and move them around. The Scratch Pad enabled me to test how different sections interact with each other in order to find the best flow for the track.

I’ve also made good use of the new Effect Splitter feature, particularly in the bus channels for bass and synth sounds, where I was able to pinpoint certain frequencies and apply effects directly to those areas. It would nearly impossible to get the sounds I did using anything else!