Studio One: The Tempo Track

The Tempo track, shown here at the top, lets you make adjustments to your project’s tempo just as you would apply any other type of automation.

Take your music off‑grid with Studio One’s powerful tempo tools.

Nestled amongst the more familiar Global tracks such as Lyrics, Chord, Arranger and Marker tracks is the often ignored Tempo track. The Tempo track keeps pace with the gear changes in our projects and lets us make sudden or smooth alterations in speed. If your music production is dedicated to the truth of a single bpm, then the Tempo track is probably completely unnecessary. But once things start to drift, timing starts to shift, or when the music breaks free from the grid, the Tempo track can feel quite magical.

In this workshop, we’re going to look at how the Tempo track can work miracles on uneven timing and move through different bpms like it’s completely natural. We’ll also check out how Studio One v7’s new Advanced Tempo Detection comes into play.

Tempo Track

As with the other Global tracks, the Tempo track can be found at the top of the track list in the arrangement window. To access it, click on the drop‑down menu that looks like a hamburger with a notch taken out of the filling; it sits alongside the Inspector, Spanner (options) and Automation icons. The menu reveals the eight Global tracks that apply their skills over the whole project. The bottom one is the Tempo track.

If you want an audio event to conform to the Tempo track, it must first have Timestretch enabled in the Track Inspector, and a tempo defined in the Event Inspector.

When you open this track, you usually see a flat line representing the current project tempo. You can mess with this line in the Tempo track just as you would any other automation: adding automation points, drawing in lines, and making the project speed up and slow down by following the line. You can set a minimum and maximum bpm range so that you can focus on the sorts of changes you want to make. The result on playback is that Studio One works overtime to change the speed of the MIDI and audio in line with whatever changes you write in there.

Let’s demonstrate this with the ‘DJ Jazzy Jeff — Get Some Air’ demo project that you can download from PreSonus. On the Tempo track, you’ll see that the tempo is set to a flat 100bpm. If you hover the mouse over the line, it will turn into a finger. Click at the beginning of the verse to set an automation point at 100bpm, and then click at the end of the verse to set another and drag it up to about 150. You should now have a nice straight line running from 100 to 150 bpm across the verse. Press Play and DJ Jazzy Jeff will stay in perfect sync with the increasing speed. It’s seamless and brilliantly impressive.

As with other automation, if you hover your mouse between the two automation points, another little spot turns up that you can drag to add some curvature to the line. The ‘Get Some Air’ demo project is very amenable to tempo changes: you can draw in all sorts of sudden, subtle or...