PreSonus Studio One Pro 7

PreSonus Studio One Pro 7 as viewed in its default dark mode.

Studio One Pro 7 is a solid upgrade with something for almost everyone.

In their typically understated manner, PreSonus have declared that Studio One Pro 7 is the “One DAW for All”. It sounds ambitious, but with the new version I have before me, that claim is almost but not entirely unreasonable. Except that the tagline actually refers to the fact that PreSonus have killed off Studio One Prime and Artist, so now it’s all about Studio One Pro. With this adjustment comes a new pricing structure, giving you a perpetual licence and year of updates for $199. You can upgrade that every year for $149 or opt for the Studio One Pro+ subscription for $179 per annum, which gets you a lot of added extras and includes the perpetual licence. PreSonus are also trying to stick to a more predictable feature release schedule. Significant updates will come three or four times a year, rather than holding things back for a single major update every two years, as has been the case up until now.

For this review, I’m looking at the regular Studio One Pro 7 without any additional thrills or spills, but the first thing you notice is that it comes with many of them anyway. Pro 7 includes the Batch Converter, Presence XT Editor, Lead Architect and Deep Flight One, all of which were additional extras for version 6. So, it’s less money for more stuff. I like this update already.

The top new features in version 7 include AI‑powered stem separation, Splice integration, integrated Launcher, Global Transpose and a new mode for Impact, all of which I’ll dip into. But there are more things twinkling away in this shiny new version that are worth a look, not least of which is the unexpected CV Instrument casually hanging out in the Instruments folder.

AI‑powered Stem Separation

We all love to separate stems — well now you can do it in Studio One.

Stem separation is all the rage these days, and Studio One is not a DAW to be left behind for long. On the website, PreSonus say that the technology is still in its infancy, so further performance/quality improvements are planned. I confess to sharing their restrained level of scepticism. That is, until I came up with something to use it for, and now I’m having far too much fun. I have a lot of old songs knocking around drives that are no longer attached to multitrack projects, either because of carelessness, misadventure or because software is no longer available. Using stem separation, I can regain a certain amount of control, get back into the mix and breathe new life into these tunes.

The process is very simple. Drag your mixed music file onto a track, right‑click, and you’ll find Separate Stems under the Audio menu. It throws up a window where you can select which of the four stems you want to extract: Vocals, Drums, Bass and Other. There’s also a check box you can tick if you want to remix it directly back into a single file again. So, for instance, you can create a mix without vocals with a single click. That’s a neat little feature. Otherwise, the four stems are thrown into a folder underneath the original track, which has now been disabled.

Does it work? Yes and no. Yes, because this really is remarkable technology, the process is smooth and the results are largely clean and well separated. But also no, for more or less the same reasons. I found when removing vocals that there were often ghostly voices in reverb tails and sort of squashed artefacts in the mid frequencies where the singer used to be. When soloing the vocals, there’s often a lingering sense and sometimes a definite bleed of other instruments. I guess that is the stem separation conundrum; the results tend to be ‘not bad’ or ‘pretty good’ rather than drop‑dead fantastic. However, for reworking old mixes, isolating reasonably clean samples, and for working up new ideas from existing material, it has found itself to be useful.

I ran some comparisons with the stem separation in Image Line’s FL Studio. The results were largely similar, with FL Studio occasionally doing a slightly better job of isolating vocals, but they all suffer from the same separation artefacts. It can vary a lot depending on the source material, and it makes you wish there were some settings you could adjust to tweak the process in some way.

Tempo Map Detection

Tempo Map Detection adjusts the grid to a track rather than the track to a grid.

One particular stem separation scenario wraps in nicely with the new ability to generate a tempo map from a recorded performance. You can imagine receiving a mixed demo from someone, maybe voice and guitar or piano, and you’d like to flesh out a project around that performance.

Pulling the voice and accompaniment apart gives you much more room to develop the music around it. However, it probably wasn’t recorded to a click track, so the timing naturally ebbs and flows a bit. Fitting it into the Studio One grid can be a challenge, and while there are all sorts of tools, from groove extractions for quantising to time‑stretching transients to get things under control, it doesn’t always feel right. With Tempo Map Detection, you can make the grid follow the changing tempo of the performance rather than forcing the performance to fit the grid.

Under the Audio menu you’ll find an option to ‘extract to the tempo track’, and all the variations in tempo will appear as a wiggly line. You can now add patterns and loops and have them all follow the tempo of the original piece.

Splice Integration

Search With Sound is great for finding samples, but you need a Splice subscription to make the most of it.

Third‑party integrations tend to make me feel suspicious. More often than not, they are trying to sell me something. Some, like the TuneCore integration, save you a few clicks but require you to sign on with the distribution service. Others, like Melodyne, give you fantastic tools along with the suggestion that things could be even better if you upgraded. So, I was undecided how excited I should be about the integration into the browser of sample‑library powerhouse Splice. If you are already a subscriber, then this is all gravy, but if you’re not, then the question is, will it bring awesome things to your project, or is it a ruse to opt you into an unexpected subscription?

In between the Loops and Files tabs in the browser we now have ‘Splice’. Click on it, and you find a search box, some categories to browse and a big box with the words ‘Search With Sound’ on it. The idea is that you drag a clip or two, a chorus, verse or anything up to eight bars, into the box, and its AI algorithms will go off and retrieve a bunch of loops that fit with what you’re doing. It’s pretty much on the money every time. The loops are tempo‑matched and in the right key, ready to be dropped into your project — this is brilliant. It beats scrolling through old sample folders looking for something that might but usually won’t fit.

Initially it offers up around 50 possibilities taken from a spread of categories covering percussion, vocals, synths, instruments and effects. When you start drilling down into specifics, you discover that there are hundreds of thousands of samples in here that are (hopefully) going to make your track sound amazing. There are things you can do to tweak the key and time stretching. You can ‘like’ samples to build up a bunch of favourites, and you can see how this is going to pair up really well with the Clip Launcher that we’ll come to in a minute. Then, all you need to do is drag the sample into your project. And that’s when we discover the limitations.

You can’t use the majority of the content unless you have a subscription with Splice. If you attempt to drag a premium sample into your project, you get a pop‑up asking you to subscribe, and you don’t know if something is premium until you try to drag it. PreSonus tell us that there’s loads of free content; it’s just that there’s no way to filter it to just the free content when using the Search With Sound feature. If you’re doing regular searching or browsing, you can filter the results by clicking an ‘Included’ tag to remove any premium content. But, for some reason, that filter isn’t available through Search With Sound. In order to try this out, I’ve had to create a Splice account and start the seven‑day trial. After that, it’s $12.99 a month. Search With Sound is a fantastically useful feature, but without a subscription, it becomes almost impossible to find a sample you can use. Splice then becomes another folder of loops, and that’s not anywhere near as impressive.

Integrated Clip Launcher

Launching loops, clips and scenes is a major part of music production to which around half of the most popular DAWs sign up. Studio One has decided to lean into loop‑based production with The Launcher. It’s an ideal companion to the Splice integration but also gives you a brilliant way to reinterpret your music without having to export a DAW project to Bitwig. This feels like a good development that draws solid nods of approval rather than being a stunningly innovative move.

Launcher introduces a non‑linear clip‑based approach to audio.

The Launcher can sit alongside your arrangement, occupying the same space as a Scratch Pad, or you can lose the Arranger window and focus exclusively on the Launcher. It’s more in the style of Logic Pro than Ableton Live, where your tracks remain horizontal and your scenes are stacked vertically. The interplay is really smooth. You can pull across individual clips and drop them on to cells; you can pull in a whole chorus from the Arranger Track and it will rack it all up for you, automatically. If the clip is playing, the track in the arrangement is muted, and vice versa, so you only get one or other. However, you can have a mix of linear tracks and Launcher clip tracks all playing together, and it’s easy to swap them on the fly.

...you can have a mix of linear tracks and Launcher clip tracks all playing together, and it’s easy to swap them on the fly.

You can record directly into a cell, although it’s not particularly sophisticated. For instance, you can’t set the size of a clip; it just keeps expanding until you click Stop, which makes any jamming‑style loop layering a bit cumbersome. There is support for the PreSonus Atom pad controller for clip and scene launching, but I couldn’t find a way of getting that to work with something like the Novation Launchkey. However, I did find key command options for starting and stopping cells, which effectively meant you could set a cell recording and then set it to play with a key press. I also couldn’t find a way of recording automation on top of what I’d recorded. I can capture it at the time of recording or add it in the modulation lanes of the piano roll, but I can’t overdub it with a knob twiddle. However, if you are dragging an event in from the timeline, it will bring any existing automation with it.

One nice feature is the scene playlist. It reflects some of the Arranger Track functionality, where you can make a list of scenes and then play them back in any order you choose. The difference here is that the scene order doesn’t rearrange the arrangement, and you can specify how many times you want each scene to loop. This way, you can quickly and easily build whole songs.

If the Launcher is not really your thing, then there’s also a new looping feature in the regular timeline. In the right‑click context menu for any event, you can tick the Loop box to turn it into a draggable, repeatable loop. This is how Patterns have been working, where they repeat down the timeline rather than having to duplicate or copy/paste them. It now works with any type of event.

New Instruments

As I’ve said many times in every Studio One review since version 3, there are no new instruments. What about Lead Architect and Deep Flight One, I hear you ask? Yes, Lead Architect was introduced as an extra optional instrument with version 6.6 and Deep Flight One came along a bit under the radar, but both are essentially clever reskins of Presence XT. They have some great sounds, and I applaud the fact that they are now included for free, but the lack of development in the virtual instrument department is the one area where Studio One drags behind other DAWs.

...the lack of development in the virtual instrument department is the one area where Studio One drags behind other DAWs.

However, a couple of new instrument‑related things in version 7 are worth mentioning. Firstly, Presence XT now comes with the Editor built in for free, so you can build your own instruments, and that’s pretty great. Secondly, while functionally unchanged, Impact can now nest itself into the piano roll rather than being a floating instrument window. It certainly makes working with samples and building kits a lot easier. Thirdly, Studio One now supports the open‑source CLAP plug‑in format. And fourthly, there’s a CV Instrument.

The new CV Instrument let’s you generate control voltages and gates from a Studio One MIDI track. Useful!

I’ve not seen much mention of this in the marketing material or promotional videos, but sitting under the PreSonus Instrument tab is an unassuming little plug‑in called CV Instrument. The idea is that the CV Instrument can generate control voltages in response to MIDI notes, giving you the ability to sequence your external analogue or modular gear. Currently, it’s quite basic, with a single CV pitch out and a CV gate output. That’s all you need for sequencing or drum triggering, but it would even more exciting to see some modulation capability for using looped automation or some such.

CV Instrument can generate control voltages in response to MIDI notes, giving you the ability to sequence your external analogue or modular gear.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to calibrate properly and so I never managed to sequence anything very tunefully, but the potential is there, and it’s very likely that I’m doing it wrong or the audio interface I’m using isn’t DC‑coupled. It can be a bit complicated to configure, so there’s plenty of room for messing it up and the documentation is very factual rather than instructional. I will look into this a lot deeper in a Studio One workshop because, for modular musicians, this is a really exciting development. [Watch https://youtu.be/RqpGWs5XPfQ?t=381 - Ed.]

Odds & Ends

Version 6 brought in some major interface improvements, but with version 7 PreSonus appear to be largely happy with how it is. There’s some roundness to the edges of selection boxes, and they’ve been given a bit more density so they are easier to see in a large project.

There’s a new Global Transpose option, which is one of those features you sort of assumed was already in there, but now everything that has a defined key can be transposed together — that’s great.

User scales have been introduced to the piano roll, where you can define exactly what notes you want to use or display. It’s like PreSonus have expanded some of the cool things about drum pattern editing into the piano roll, and that’s a really interesting approach. It brings individual step counts and resolutions to notes so that your previously linear melody becomes a fabulous jumble of polyrhythmic note patterns. There’s also a rather neat Auto Zoom button that focuses in on the active notes.

It feels like there are some important new features in Studio One Pro 7, but that can largely depend on what sort of user you are.

Conclusion

It feels like there are some important new features in Studio One Pro 7, but that can largely depend on what sort of user you are. The stem separation is decent and quite good fun for everyone, but it’s one of those tools that’s looking for a way to be helpful even if it doesn’t know what that is yet. The Splice integration is amazing if you’re a subscriber, but unless that’s your thing, it has limited use. The Launcher, on the other hand, is a great development that every sort of user can find a reason to dip into. I also really appreciate the pricing change, the versatility of the payment options and the extra bits and pieces they’ve folded in as standard. The new release schedule should keep us on our toes and gives me hope that fledgling features like the Launcher and CV Instrument will see steady development and growth going forward. So, it’s not bursting with new things; there’s nothing new for the Song Mastering or Show Page, as far as I know, but it’s building on a solid foundation and a good understanding of how to appeal to a very wide range of users.