“The Show Page could have been an awkward fit, but is a natural extension of the DAW”
Studio One has offered very capable bidirectional communication with PreSonus’ Notion scoring application since version 3, but v5 sees it fully integrated as an onboard editor. The Score editor appears in the Editor panel (or window when detached) as a new tab alongside the Piano Roll and Drum editors, and is as fully featured a notation editor as you could hope to find built into a DAW. Drawing and editing notes, symbols, articulations and dynamics is straightforward; live note and enharmonic input analysis is impressively accurate; multiple tracks can be displayed at once; and the detached window can be pinned for viewing the Score and Piano Roll or Drum editors together. You can’t print your score out, mind – for that, you’ll still need to export to the full Notion – but that aside, the Score editor is a triumph, giving orchestral composers (and anyone else with at least basic understanding of music theory) all the tools required to get ‘trad’ with their MIDI editing.
Another very handy new feature for composers working with complex sample-based orchestral libraries is the Keyswitch automation lane. This is simply a lane below the Piano Roll or Drum editor in which keyswitching notes are represented as a continuous series of bars on the timeline, bearing the names of their triggered articulations. Click to add a bar and assign an articulation to it from a menu of all those available in the loaded instrument – PreSonus’ own Presence ROMpler reports its keyswitches automatically, and keyswitch maps are quick and easy to build for other samplers. The keyswitching notes still also appear in the Piano Roll, but having them abstracted to a dedicated space for easy viewing as a data stream in their own right is an ingenious idea.
Although there are no new plugins added to the roster this time round, all of Studio One’s bundled effects have been redesigned, and some have been blessed with PreSonus’ State Space Modelling algorithm, which serves up highly authentic analogue-style saturation. The dynamics plugins all now boast sidechain inputs too, and Pro EQ and Limiter have both been upgraded to v2, with a 12th Octave metering option and linear-phase low-cut filter for Pro EQ2, and three Attack speed settings and two response/distortion modes for Limiter2. The lack of any new instruments is notable but not something we think should cause any upset – it’s not like anyone’s short on third-party synths, samplers and drum machines these days.