DAW of the Year

Breaking into the hotly contested and decidedly ‘closed’ DAW market is never an easy task, but with the brilliant Studio One, previous hardware specialists PreSonus have established themselves as a major player in just eight years.

Version 4 doesn’t mark the biggest step in Studio One’s evolution, but it certainly cements it as a hugely capable environment for all genres – not just the instrument-based genres with which it’s associated. The new Patterns feature is the main contributor to this subtle repositioning, comprising a clever ‘variation-based’ stepsequencing system that’s fun and productive.

The Drum Editor, meanwhile, gives a more intuitive alternative to the piano roll for percussion programming, while the upgraded Impact XT and Sample One XT plugin instruments have both been improved vastly over their predecessors.

The biggest new addition in Studio One 4, though, is Harmonic Editing of both monophonic and polyphonic MIDI and audio parts, by which a whole track or just individual elements within it can be shifted in real time to the key or chord progression of your choosing. The analysis and subsequent editing process involved is fairly intuitive, and the dedicated Chord Track makes light work of moving chords around. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but Studio One 4 is currently the only DAW that can pull such trickery off with polyphonic material, and it serves great purpose as a compositional aid.

As the plaudits laid upon it by its rapidlyincreasing user base testify, Studio One 4 is one of the most feature-packed, configurable and forward-thinking DAWs money can buy. Choosing a DAW is one of the most important decisions a producer has to make, and those who don’t include PreSonus’ entrant in their shortlist risk missing something truly special.

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