Integrating Lyrics In Studio One Projects

Lyrics can be typed directly into the Global Lyric track.

Your Studio One productions can now have integrated lyrics.

We have an interesting integrated lyric engine with the shiny new version 6 of Studio One. It’s peppered all over the place, finding itself in its own track, in a lane under other tracks, attached to notes in a score and running karaoke on the Show Page. As I mentioned in my review of Studio One 6 last month, it’s not a unique feature, but the way it threads itself about the DAW is really well thought out. So, for this workshop, we’re going to look at how you can add lyrics to your songs in Studio One.

Global Lyric Track

The best place to start is with the Global Lyric track. This resides at the top of the arrange window where you also find the Chord track, Markers, Tempo track and so on. Within this narrow band of space, you can double‑click, whereupon a box appears into which you can type a line of text. All that matters is the starting place, which will probably be the start of the bar where you’d start singing. Pressing Return closes the box and opens a new one for a new line at the next bar. Tab does the same but without starting a new line in the Lyric Display.

The words you’ve entered are held in a box which you can move about on the timeline. You can add boxes for every line or every word if you wish, although that can get a bit unwieldy. The best practice here is to use it to roughly sketch the words alongside the arrangement. Your level of zoom will have an impact here, as it does on other tracks, where word boxes will overlay each other. There’s no problem with that other than not being able to see all the words when zoomed out. There’s a certain amount of connection between the boxes. If you move one down the timeline past another box it will move along with it. So while you can change the position of a line, you can’t actually rearrange their order on the Lyric track. If you try to bring a line in from a later point, Studio One won’t let you drop it in front of another lyric.

One cool lyric‑arranging tip is that you can position the song pointer where you want the lyric to start and hit Alt+Return to send the selected lyric to that spot. It then auto‑selects the next line. So you can play the song through and sit there hitting Alt+Return to tidy up the placement of every lyric.

Lastly, you can drag lyrics in from the browser in the form of text or MIDI files. They appear as a string of lyric blocks, separated by bars, one for each line in the text file. You can drop them in and then use the Alt+Return function to put everything where it needs to be.

Alternatively, lyrics can be dragged and dropped from the Studio One browser in the form of text or MIDI...