The Launcher, with the Playlist shown to the right.
We put Studio One’s new clip launcher through its paces.
With the release of Studio One 7, PreSonus introduced an entire clip‑launching engine. It has more of a Logic Pro vibe than an Ableton Live vibe, and brings an enormous amount of versatility to your timeline. It’s early days, and the functions are relatively simple, so I thought before it gets too complex, we should break it apart and have a look at what makes it tick.
Let’s start by getting an overview of what it can and can’t do using the ‘DJ Jazzy Jeff — Get Some Air’ demo song that is freely available to download and mess about with in Studio One.
When you open up the project, you are faced with the tracks and clips spread around the existing timeline that we all recognise. The Arranger track is active and populated with intro, verse, chorus and so on. It’s all ready to go and sounds fantastic. A version of the song is also available in the new Launcher. To open the Launcher, click on the Launcher button in the toolbar; it looks like a 3x3 drum pad. It’s also bound to the B key on your keyboard, and you can find it under the View menu.
Basic Overview
The Launcher appears in a very similar way to a Scratch Pad, and overlays itself across half the timeline. What you’re looking at is a grid‑based representation of the same project. Each column is called a Scene, and you’ll notice that the Scenes are taken directly from the Arranger track. You can replicate a project in the Launcher by dragging your verse/chorus Arranger sections directly onto it. This action brings all the clips with it ready to play.
Another thing to notice is that all the scenes in the Launcher are visually the same size, although the number of bars within a scene can vary from scene to scene and clip to clip. It’s just that the Launcher is not following the timeline.
The Launcher and the timeline are sort of connected, but not always, while absolutely being so... In that you can use them independently or in combination, but the timeline ultimately has control (most of the time). This will make more sense in a minute, but let’s look at the interaction between the two.
When you first open the Launcher, the arrangement will still be in focus, and it’ll be the arrangement you hear when you hit Play. To activate the Launcher, hit the Toggle Cell Playback Active button.
When you first turn the Launcher on, the arrangement still has the focus, and if you hit Play on the transport, it’s the arrangement that plays. To flip it over to the Launcher you need to engage the Toggle Cell Playback Active button, which is the little grey sideways arrowhead just to the left of the Intro scene header at the top of the Launcher. When you click it, the focus is thrown across to the Launcher, but nothing actually plays back because we haven’t yet launched a Scene. Click the toggle again, and the arrangement will resume playback. However, it doesn’t resume from where it was; rather, it resumes from where it’s got to, because the timeline continues to play regardless of what’s in focus.
So, in the Launcher, click on the Play button in the Chorus scene header, and the Chorus will play and loop around. Back in the arrangement, the Timeline is still moving. If you click the toggle button now the arrangement will resume playback from wherever it currently is. It’s an interesting way of auditioning part of a song during playback.
Dragging content into the Launcher automatically creates a row of cells and an audio track for it.
Now, so far, we’ve flipped from Launcher to Arranger and back again, but each track has its own toggle, which is where things get really interesting. In the Arranger, set up a loop around the verse section, enable Looped Playback, and set it playing. Over in the Launcher, set the chorus playing, and it will steal the entire focus so that the arrangement is greyed out, but the song pointer is still travelling. You should be able to see the track toggle arrows to the left of the cells in the Launcher. Assuming you’re at the top of the project, try hitting the toggle button on the kick and snare tracks. The playback for those tracks flips to the arrangement, and you are now hearing the kick and snare from the verse. Hit the toggle again, and it’s back to the chorus. If you scroll down to the vocal tracks you can drop the verse rap track into the looped Launcher chorus.
The interaction between the Launcher and timeline throws up all sorts of interesting ideas and ways of working on your music that simply weren’t there before.
The interaction between the Launcher and timeline throws up all sorts of interesting ideas and ways of working on your music that simply weren’t there before. However, it’s not without its quirks. Try this: turn off the looped playback on the transport and let the song play. Toggle over to the Launcher and spend a couple of minutes launching different scenes. What happens? You’ll find that after about two minutes, everything very smoothly fades to silence. That’s because in the arrangement, the main volume control has some automation to fade out the song, and as the Timeline is still playing, the fade still happens. That’s just something to be aware of.
You can mix and match Launcher and arrangement playback on a per‑track basis. Here, the kick and snare are playing according to their content on the timeline, while the other tracks are being triggered by the Launcher.
Getting Into The Clips
Let’s now put the arrangement/Launcher relationship to one side and focus on using clips, loops and samples in the Launcher. I should note that the Launcher can also handle MIDI and patterns, but for this workshop we’re going to focus on samples. Start with a nice, fresh, empty project.
Open the Browser, click on Loops and down the bottom you should find a folder called Construction Kits. Inside there is a whole bunch of audio loop files designed for the Launcher: Let’s dig in.
If you want to work only using the Launcher, hit the Launcher Exclusive button to the right of the time ruler.In our empty project, hit the Launcher button to open what will be an unimpressively blank Launcher. In this instance, we want to work only with the Launcher, so click on the little Launcher Exclusive haystack icon next to the side arrowhead toggle button, and the Launcher will fill the whole space. By default, you get eight empty scenes to fill, but you can add as many as you like.
I’m going to start in the ‘Disco 112BPM Bm’ folder and drag the ‘drums full DISCO’ loop into the first scene. Studio One generates an audio track and a row of cells to accommodate it, and, as we’d expect, the loop conforms to the project tempo. Hit Play on the Scene, or on the cell, and you get two bars of looping disco drums — fabulous. Let’s drag in ‘bass 1 DISCO’ underneath. Click the Scene’s Play button and they play together perfectly.
The two loops are different lengths, and so are looping at different points. There’s no overall setting for the length of a scene; each cell’s length and loop points are independent. The looping is dealt with in the Editor for that cell. So, for instance, we could remove the ‘pew pew pew’ disco tom sound from the end of the drum loop by making the loop smaller, without any effect on the bass loop. Double‑click the cell to open the audio editor, move the loop point, and it’s done.
Now, underneath, drop in the ‘guitar’, ‘synth chords’, ‘synth seq’ and ‘fx riser’ loops, and you’ll have a nice disco thing going on. Note that by default, the cells are quantised to one bar, so if you click on their Play button, they will start on the next bar. Or if you click the Scene Play button they will all restart on the next bar.
We can quickly create variations or arrangements using the scenes. There are a number of ways you can do this. You can drag the loops in from the browser, you can copy/paste from cell to cell, you can select one or more cells and press D to duplicate to the next Scene, or you can click in the header of a new Scene and select ‘Add Scene from playing (or selected) Scenes’. You can also hold Ctrl and drag the Scene header next to itself to insert a Scene, but then it names it ‘Scene 9’, which is a bit weird, but they all get us to the same place.
As an example of what Scenes can do, duplicate your cells into six Scenes and then do the following:
- Scene 1: Delete all except the bass.
- Scene 2: Delete all except the bass and guitar.
- Scene 3: Do the same but leave the riser.
- Scene 4: Delete the riser but add drums and synth chords.
- Scene 5: Keep everything but the riser.
- Scene 6: Keep just the drums, bass and guitar.
As you move from scene to scene in order, you get a nice little build‑up, a chorus and a drop. You can rename the scenes to match what they are if you wish. Let’s do a few tweaks.
Drag the ‘drums fill’ loop into the first cell of Scene 3. It could go on its own track, but it doesn’t need to. If you play the scene you’ll hear the fill come in far too early. Double‑click the cell to open the Editor and move the audio so it starts at bar 2. That’s better, but it doesn’t line up with the riser. So, in the Editor, increase the loop to four bars and move the sample to start at bar 4. Do a similar thing with the ‘drums crash rev’. Drop it into Scene 4 on the riser track. Open the Editor, expand the loop to eight bars, and drag the sample to start on bar 7. For Scene 5, let’s put the ‘pew pew’ back in, so double‑click the drum bar and expand the loop back to two bars. One more: double‑click the ‘synth seq’ cell and expand the loop to eight bars. Copy/paste the sample to fill all the bars. Right‑click the cell and set Play Mode to One Shot. Now, when you play Scene 5, the sequenced synth will drop out after eight bars. You can then click its Play button to bring it back in.
Each cell’s loop in/out points can be set independently. Double‑clicking a cell opens its Editor, where you can change the loop’s length and start/end points.
Playlists
Now that we have some scenes, we can create an arrangement using a Playlist function, which essentially chains scenes together into a song.
In the top right‑hand corner of the Launcher is a little Playlist icon that looks like a tiny block on a spring. This opens a panel to the side that lists our Scenes and a few global settings. If you’ve ever used the Arranger track list in the main Studio One window to launch different Arranger sections, then this is very similar. You can double‑click a Scene in the list to launch playback, but we’re here to make a Playlist. So, in the Scenes list, select Scenes 1‑6 and click the up arrow to send them into the Playlist. Each scene in the Playlist has a number to the right; this is how many times it plays, so you can repeat Scenes and arrange the list however you want. Hit the little power button next to the Playlist header to launch the list and play through your whole song. You can make as many Playlists as you like.
Now, how do we capture our Launcher playlist song for distribution? There are two ways: directly using the Export function, or indirectly via the arrangement window. With the Playlist active, click on the Song menu and select Export Mixdown just like you would normally. You’ll find that there is now a Launcher Playlist option under Export Range. The more indirect route is to insert the Playlist into a song on the Arrange page. You can do this from the little drop‑down menu from the Playlist header, and it’s all there for you to export a mixdown or develop further as you would with any Studio One song.