As are probably many of you, I’m constantly improving my workflows and adjusting my templates. So far this has been a burdensome process, particularly in Cubase which offers practically nothing to manage templates, not even a browse function to select the template you’d like to update. It’s sad.
Then I read one of Robin Hoffmann’s insightful posts on Patreon – if you’re not a subscriber, I highly recommend to become one – which was about his composing template. Actually the post was not about his choice of DAW, but what I saw in the video suddenly reminded me how uninspiring my then-DAW-of-choise, Steinberg Cubase, was. I decided to learn more about the app in the video, Presonus Studio One, which – shame on me – I had never heard of.
I watched some videos and read through the specifications and then I decided to use a crossgrade offer to dive into it. To cut a long story short: Since that moment I haven’t started my old Cubase a single time!
Studio One has a modern UI, coherent drag&drop features, you can customize about anything, you can import elements of songs into other songs, you can turn a song into a template, you can manage templates, you can add sketches to a song and many more. But what I like most about it is that the windows are where they’re supposed to be. There’s no cluttered desktop with dozens layers of Kontakt and EQ plug-ins. It’s all tidy and clean and the way Studio One links tracks with plug-in instruments and channels is much more intuitive and usable than the Cubase approach. To my surprise Studio One even features decent video capabilities. It doesn’t have the thumbnail cache which is a nice feature in Cubase, but apart from that I don’t miss a thing, not even the export to video function that Steinberg had deprived upgraders of. Another thing I like about Studio One is the show/hide-track function. It’s another thing that streamlines my interface. I could go one because, believe me, it’s a long list.
This way I used the weeks of lockdown to my advantage, diving deep into Studio One features, preparing keyboard shortcuts and macros and coming up with a template on my own, based on Robin’s hints which I’m not going to repeat here. If you like to know more about his template (and I tell you, you do!), subscribe to him on Patreon.
And doublecheck your DAW if it’s still up to the task!