Fender Studio Pro 8.1

Need some inspiration? Studio Pro’s Moises AI integration means you can now generate tracks in your DAW using a text prompt.

The latest version of Studio Pro introduces some serious AI firepower, thanks to a collaboration with Moises.

I don’t think anyone will be that surprised to see AI turning up as an integrated feature in a DAW. There’s been a looming inevitability about it. The power to aid you in completing a task, to separate music into component parts, and to fill in the gaps in your own music production skills seems to be the kind of power we’d like to wield within our projects, and AI is here to enable that. RipX DAW and ACE Studio already market themselves as AI‑enabled DAWs, and now Fender have confidently named and claimed AI as a welcome partner in your music‑making, on the assumption that this is what Studio Pro users want.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that this assumption is very much up for debate, and is causing much concern in the creative industries. There’s also a very real environmental impact. But for this review I’m going to put these factors aside and assume that Fender are right. So, let’s see what Studio Pro 8.1 has to offer.

Studio Assistant

AI has been woven into Studio Pro in a couple of different ways. Firstly, there’s now a natural‑language Studio Assistant, designed to scour all the Studio Pro documentation and online resources to answer any query you may have about using Studio Pro with friendly confidence. Secondly, Fender have teamed up with AI music platform Moises to integrate a Moises panel into the Browser, in a very similar way to what they did with Splice in version 7, and Tonalic in version 8. Moises offers AI‑powered stem separation, voice conversion and stem generation.

I’ve been writing workshops for Sound On Sound on Studio Pro/Studio One for many years, and I always keep the documentation close to hand to ensure I’m not talking nonsense. The manual is comprehensive, but has a frustratingly poor search function and can dominate the screen. So, having the AI equivalent of Microsoft Word’s Clippy asking me if I appear to be making some music sounds very promising.

The Studio Assistant is stirred into action via a little sparkly plectrum icon up in the top right and opens a panel alongside the Browser by giving it a shove to the left. In the empty chat box, I made the mistake of initially asking “How does this work?” and got a quite curt reply about the metaphysical nature of the word “this”. What’s important, it seems, is that you keep your questions specific to Studio Pro and don’t try to engage it in a conversation about the best lasagne recipe.

The new Studio Assistant can answer your questions about using Studio Pro, as well as about music production tools in general.

Give it a reasonable request, and it rewards you with a good amount of detail about the thing you are trying to do. You can pop it into a floating window and ask it questions while you’re working on the task at hand, and it will calmly feed you helpful information. This is really rather brilliant.

The Studio Assistant does more than regurgitate documentation; it’s also ready to help you make better music. You can ask it about mixing technique, how to alter the tone, how to add further processing to an instrument, the purpose of compression, and really whatever you can think of. However, there doesn’t appear to be any meaningful connection to your project. When I ask it to make suggestions on how I can improve my mix, it gives me tips on EQ, compression, and reverb without anything more than general guidance on where I could use them. It would also insist that the selected track’s volume was at negative infinity, which it wasn’t, and keep going on about how I needed to turn it up to hear anything, which it already was. But quirks aside, the more specific you are, the more it drills down to showing how to use a plug‑in or part of Studio Pro to do what you need. Its effectiveness, as we’ve come to understand with AI, is all down to how you ask your question.

Currently, the AI Studio Assistant is in beta, does occasionally utter garbled nonsense, and is bizarrely only available to Studio Pro+ subscribers. This feels like a universally positive use of AI in a music production context and should, surely, be a standard feature for every user.

Loud Moises

The Moises‑powered stem separation is much more advanced than the existing local separation process. You get up to 20 instrument options (compared to four), and the quality of the Hi‑Fi algorithm is remarkable.

The marketing blurb says that the partnership between Moises and Fender marks a new era in music‑making by bringing Moises’ online AI Studio into Studio One. From the point of view of Fender’s Chief Product Officer, Max Gutnik: “Our integration with Moises gives musicians powerful new ways to learn songs, practice, experiment and create. AI isn’t the destination. Making music is. When technology gets out of the way and helps musicians accomplish more, it’s serving the art. That’s what we aspire to do.” Moises are keen to stress that they disagree with the indiscriminate training of AI on materials scraped from the Internet without permission. All of their models, they claim, are trained only on licensed material, and artists get paid for their work.

Moises is available in three different tiers. These are a ‘free’ tier (or ‘not having to pay extra’ tier), a Premium tier for £2.91 a month (paid annually), and a Pro tier for £14.58 a month (paid annually). You start off on a 14‑day trial of the Pro tier so they can get you hooked on all the bells and whistles. It should be noted that the Moises integration only brings over part of what Moises can offer; if what you want isn’t part of this “novel suite of...