Scratch Pads are accessed from this button in the toolbar. You can have as many as you want, and can duplicate existing ones to try variations on your variations.
The Scratch Pad is your ticket to fast, easy, non‑destructive experimentation!
PreSonus introduced Scratch Pads to Studio One version 3, about eight years ago. They are an innovative form of version control, allowing you to experiment with different directions within a single project. In many other DAWs, you would have to scatter the timeline with little experiments as you rework a chorus, or your project folder would overflow from a stream of saved revisions with increasingly cryptic or desperate filenames. Scratch Pads let you experiment with your arrangement without losing sight of your work’s main thrust. They are also really easy to miss.
In this workshop, we’re going to get into the Scratch Pads. We’ll look at how they work and, perhaps more importantly, how you can use them to develop your music.
Scratch That
The biggest reason Scratch Pads exist is because we are messy and destructive beings and cannot be trusted to take good care of our compositions. As we develop our music and start working with ideas, we might find ourselves wanting to focus in on a section for experimentation. We don’t want to destroy what we’ve already created and so, normally, we have two options. We can copy the section to another part of the timeline, make our changes and copy it back in. That can work well, but it can also get complicated, and you need to be very tidy to make sure it fits back in place, or you might have to do a lot of clip shuffling to get it right. The other option is to save the project as another file and work on it safely in the knowledge that the original is not being tampered with. This works OK, too, but listening and comparing between two projects is messy and time‑consuming, and recombining them again is difficult. Both these options require you to have almost inhuman project management skills and a level of togetherness that I rarely see in a studio.
So, into this mess enters the Scratch Pad, and you wonder why no one thought of it before and why no other DAW has adopted it. Maybe everyone else has got their shit together?
Padding Out
A Scratch Pad is an alternative arrangement page within Studio One’s Arrange view. It splits off to the right of the main Arrange View and is in the same format, following the same tracks and using the same editing tools. You can throw the playhead into the Scratch Pad by clicking in its timeline ruler. Dragging the vertical dividing line reveals more or less of the Scratch Pad, although you never fully lose the main arrangement underneath. Scratch Pads have no impact on the mixer console, as the tracks flow through from the main arrangement to the Scratch Pads, so you should see it not as an alternative project but as an alternative arrangement.
The main concept is that it’s a space where you can drag audio and MIDI clips, sections or elements in order to experiment with them safely away from your main arrangement. When you drag in clips, they are automatically copied without you having to hold the Alt/Option key, so you are never in danger of losing the original. However, you can also drag in whole sections using the Arranger track, which handles the Alt key differently. If you drag without the Alt key held, it copies, but if you hold the Alt/Option key, it cuts, removing the material from the original arrangement. Weirdly, this is the exact opposite of what happens when you move things around in the main Arrange page.
The Arranger Track combines perfectly with the Scratch Pad, making the movement and transference of sections between main and Scratch Pad arrangements seamless.
It should be noted that the Arranger track combines perfectly with the Scratch Pad, making the movement and transference of sections between main and Scratch Pad arrangements seamless.
You can treat the Scratch Pad just like the standard Arrange page. All the slicing and dicing tools are there; you can pull in other loops, record audio, enter MIDI notes, and access the piano roll, audio editors and mixer. However, this does not extend to the Score Editor. In practice, it works exactly as if it was your main Arrange page. You can have as many Scratch Pads as you like, adding new ones or duplicating existing ones from the button on the right of the toolbar. You can only view one at a time, and you can rename them to keep track of your flights of fancy.
Radio Edit
If you have a finished song with a neatly annotated Arranger track, you can use a Scratch Pad to try out some radio edits or shortened trailer or jingle versions of your track. Studio One has some workflow shortcuts to make this really easy. Rather than creating a new Scratch Pad and dragging sections to it, you can drag to select all the Arranger sections, right‑click and select ‘Copy (or Move) to new Scratch Pad’. This gives you an exact duplicate of your song that is ready for some alternative edits.
The Arranger List in the Inspector window gets populated with the sections from all your Scratch Pads underneath the main one. So, you can whizz around the Scratch Pad using the Arranger List, just like you can in the main window, making it really easy to navigate. You can enable Sync Mode to keep the movements between sections quantised to a bar or two. Then you can make edits in the Arranger track, slicing verses in half or reducing the length of the chorus, and using the right‑click menu option Delete Range to remove unwanted sections and have everything else move in to take up the slack. All of this without having to slice up the individual clips or change the arrangement. Working with the Arranger List and then applying those changes to the Arranger track in the Scratch Pad is a really fast way to cut down a song into bite‑size pieces while retaining the gist of what you’re doing.
Loop Variations
Another great use is in the auditioning of variations. Say you’ve got a chorus with a particular drum loop, and you’d like to try out some other options. You can copy the chorus to a Scratch Pad, remove the loop and replace it with other loops from your library. As you are just dealing with the chorus section and not the whole song, you can duplicate the clips out a few times and add different drum loops into each duplication.
Here, a chorus has been copied to a new Scratch Pad, where three different variations are being auditioned. You can also use a different Scratch Pad for each variation, if you prefer.
This is a fine and efficient way to handle the auditioning, which doesn’t fill up your main timeline with a scattering of multiple experiments; the Scratch Pad is awesome for this. However, if you are using the Arranger track to pull the chorus across, then you don’t really want to be changing its duration, or you might have some difficulty pulling it back into the main arrangement. So, perhaps a more efficient way is to audition different loops or versions across multiple Scratch Pads.
Once you find a loop you like, you can copy the new chorus to another Scratch Pad and try out another loop or two. Once you’ve got a few Scratch Pads working the same chorus with different loops, you can swap between them while Studio One is playing back by selecting the pads from the menu. It’s a much better way of auditioning variations and changes and homing in on the one that’s going to work the best.
Having said all that, Studio One is famous for having three different ways of doing something when one would be plenty. If we go back to using a single Scratch Pad, we can make resizing the chorus less problematic by using the Arranger track to section out the duplications. That way, the chorus stays the right length, and you can simply choose the one you want to drag back into the main arranger. You have the added bonus of being able to use the Arranger track Inspector to quickly leap from section to section to audition those loops, or simply double‑clicking in the Arranger track.
Whichever way you find works best for you, this is infinitely better than messing up your original timeline with a scattering of clips and samples.
Listening
But wait, there’s another approach that could be even more efficient, depending on your point of view. In the main toolbar is a speaker icon that you may know as the Listen tool. When you use it in the main arrangement window, you’ll find that it will solo whatever clip you click it on. In the Scratch Pad it has a very different and much more interesting function. If you set your main project playing back, so the timeline in the Scratch Pad is greyed out, you can use the Listen tool to teleport clips from the Scratch Pad into the main arrangement. It only happens while the mouse button is being held down, and you can see a grey version of the clip overlaid on the track. Once you release, the track is returned to normal.
So, you can loop the playback around your original chorus and simply click on the new drum loops you’re auditioning and have them play in the right place within the original track. It doesn’t solo the clip like it does when you are working in the active arrangement; it plays the clicked‑on clip in place. This also works going the other way, to teleport clips from the main arrangement into the Scratch Pad.
As well as housing audio and MIDI clips, Scratch Pads can also contain automation, allowing you to experiment with different automation passes or modulation treatments.
Automation
Scratch Pads don’t just deal with clips, they can also deal with automation. If you’re anything like me, then you’ll find that you can easily mess up a track by experimenting with automation. The Scratch Pad is perfect for trying out and comparing how something would sound if it was modulated. You can check out different ways of moving parameters, you can record different passes and tweak them differently, and you can compare what the effect is in the context of the song. It can be like building up a library of different captured parameter performances that you can then drop into your song whenever and wherever you like. However, the Listen tool doesn’t work for automation, which is a shame.
Hopefully, I’ve been able to point out that while the Scratch Pad does the job of keeping your project tidy, it offers multiple ways of working on your music without losing the focus of your song. Perfect for experimentation but also great for keeping your shit together.