Studio One Template Tutorial

Welcome back everyone! If you are a video person click here to go to the YouTube video, or simply scroll to the bottom of this post. If you like to read have have this information in front of you this is the spot. Today I am going to be talking about creating Templates in Studio One 4.5. Since I work on various projects, like the RAMP Fitness & Turn Your Head & Goff Podcasts, recording my own music or music for clients you find that time is important. If you are charging clients, they are not paying you to fiddle with your equipment. If you are recording for yourself you want to plug, play and go. I find that creating templates is an extremely efficient way to get this done…

If you have worked with Studio One, this page will be very familiar to you.

Step One: Open Studio One

From the home screen make sure to verify your Audio Interface set up. I am a big Universal Audio user and everything except VST gets routed through my system.

Verify your Audio Interface is correct. It is in the middle section of the home page on the bottom.

Step Two: Start a New Song

Step up your “song” the way you want. The picture on the left is what I use. The important bits are I record in 48 kHz and 24 bits. I will typically do bars, especially if I am going to create something where I am programing beats. For things like a podcast it is not important. Also, any of these settings can be changed very easily once you have started the session. Click “OK” and you your blank song will open in the arranger view.

Step Three: Open the Song Dropdown

On the top of the screen select the Song Drop down

In the drop down menu select Song Set Up. Once you are in the song set up you are going to select the I/O tab (I/O stands for Input/Output). Once you are in the I/O set you will see all of the available options your set up has. For now we are focused in the Inputs only, so DO NOT worry about the Outputs

In the Song Drop Down Menus, select Song Set Up

The picture above shows my initial set up when opening up my systems set up. if you notice on the top you will see things like A ADAT 6, that is not automatically set, and is not available yet.

Step Four: Select Your Inputs

Decide if you need Mono or Stereo channels. In my case I use both, with the vast majority being Mono

Select the inputs that you want to add for your sessions. Notice inputs 23 & 24 are both stereo. I use this rarely, but when I do, It’s nice to be able to click a button to access it instead of setting it up from scratch every time.

Once you have selected the added inputs, the next step is the most vital. PRESS APPLY! If you do not and just click OK, you will not have your work save. You know when you have applied your changes because the inputs light up, instead of the dull gray you get in the previous screen shot.

Step Five: Label Your Inputs

This takes a little bit of time, but remember you are only doing this once. I like to label the inputs. if you don’t when you search for what tracks you want to record on your track it will just read input 1, 2, 3 etc. I don’t like that personally, I know what inputs are what and that’s how I know what I record. Another pro tip, for your cables, like mic cables, label each end of them. That way if you are recording multiple mics you can just read what cables you are using. Doing something simple like that makes your life a lot easier.

Step Six: Back To Tracks

In the arranger view in Studio One (the main song page) you are now ready to add your tracks. Press “t” on your keyboard and you will be prompted to select track name, type of source (audio in this example), color etc. if you are selecting Audio you are most likely going to select Mono. Remember when I said I will still enable stereo tracks, this is where that can come in handy. A stereo channel doesn’t mean two Mono channels, it is one channel in stereo.

In this example I decided to add 8 Mono tracks. I made sure to check the ascending box next to the input drop down. This is really handy if you are recording multiple tracks at once, think mixing a drum kit. Select the input you want to start and this happens…

Studio One will created the selected number of tracks with the properly assigned inputs. Notice in the picture, there are eight tracks, the first one with the input of Apollo x8p 1 and the last one Apollo x8p 8.

Step Seven: Save as Template

You are now done. Click Save As Template, name it whatever your want. For me I will have one named RAMP and one named TYHaG (Turn Your Head & Goff); when I record one of those podcasts I will click on the template and my session opens with my settings all the same.

To Access your Template, when you start a new song and you get to the song set up window, go to the user tab as opposed the pre tabbed Studio one Templates and simply select the one you were looking for. Boom! you song opens up and you have very little set up to do.

Bonus Step: Other Cool Things You Can Do

So we walked through how to create a template with your I/O settings. There are other things that you can save in your template. I will use Podcasting as my example. You can also set gain levels, channel colors, if there inputs and sends in the effects you want to add you can. Any of the plug ins you use with specific settings will also save as part of your template.

This of it like this, you want to do nothing except press record any time you want to get to work. So everything you can save as part of your session or client template do it!