How many of you use Studio One 5's Show Page?

[pdxindy]

I left the comment I originally responded to so you could understand your mistake - you said "pattern based workflow", you didn't mention anything about "clip launcher/session view", which is a different thing (albeit built on a pattern based workflow). As you point out in the video description, the clip launcher is all about live performance, it has limited application in production that is as easily handled by other DAWs. If you pressed save at the end of that video, for example, what you did wouldn't be there next time you opened that project for you to work on some more.

Yes, indeed pattern workflow is different from clip launching. The former is a limited sub-method of the latter, i.e. I can easily have pattern workflow in Bitwig or S1, but I can't have clip launching workflow in S1 the way I can in Bitwig, i.e. experiment live with different combinations of clips. Sure, I can drag & drop clips beteween patterns in S1 or to the main arranger, effectively achieving the same final result, but there's no spontaneity and happy accidents in that

And no, you can obviously record everything that's happening in Bitwig's Clip Launcher. You really didn't spend much time with Bitwig when you had it, did you?

The poll reveals the situation... now it is 69-3. Overwhelmingly S1 users are not using the Show page.

A poll about Bitwig and whether users use the Clip Launcher would not be 69-3

[antic604]

A poll about Bitwig and whether users use the Clip Launcher would not be 69-3

Not Bitwig specific, but still pretty interesting:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=562806

[pdxindy]

A poll about Bitwig and whether users use the Clip Launcher would not be 69-3

Not Bitwig specific, but still pretty interesting:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=562806

Clip Launcher (session view in Live) is a useful tool... Live wouldn't have become the most widely used DAW if it weren't.

69-3 is about the most lopsided poll I've ever seen on KVR

[BONES]

If you look at the results of this survey, you'll see that whilst Live is the most popular, it also has by far the most users who consider themselves beginners and the least users who consider themselves professionals, so you could reasonably construe that it's mostly the choice of the clueless who don't know any better. Amongst people who know what they are doing, even Studio One has 50% more users than Live.

... I can't have clip launching workflow in S1 the way I can in Bitwig, i.e. experiment live with different combinations of clips. Sure, I can drag & drop clips beteween patterns in S1 or to the main arranger, effectively achieving the same final result, but there's no spontaneity and happy accidents in that

Why not? You're essentially doing exactly the same thing, just in a different way. But, honestly, how often do you have different random elements to combine? Surely most of the time you start with one thing and build all the other elements around it, don't you? So you know as you work what's going to go with what, there is very little chance of some serendipitous combination that's going to be anything more than you expect. A Clip Launcher might encourage you to try things but once you have that mindset, I think it's easy to find ways of doing it effectively in other hosts. Like the Show Page, Clip Launcher workflow is all about live performance, it's just aimed at a different segment of the market.

And no, you can obviously record everything that's happening in Bitwig's Clip Launcher.

Of course you can but the point was that you didn't, did you? Because that's not really what it's for.

You really didn't spend much time with Bitwig when you had it, did you?

I didn't spend one second with the Session View, it is completely irrelevant to the way I work or what I was looking for in a new host. I spent three months trying to get a couple of songs going in Bitwig and didn't manage to get even one done to a standard I was happy with. To be fair, I think a big part of the reason I fared much better in Cubase, and later in Studio One, was because I had built up my arsenal of plugins by then, where with Bitwig I still had to rely too much on it's native synths and effects, like I had in Orion, and they were mostly terrible by comparison. If I had to rely on Mai Tai and Presence in S1, I'm sure it would be just as unpleasant an experience as Bitwig was for me. I don't use any of S1's built-in instruments at all, ever, whereas three-quarters of the tracks on most of our songs in Orion used built-in instruments - Wasp, Sampler, DrumRack, Ultran, WaveFusion and Screamer. I still use the built-in effects a fair bit, though - Limiter, ProEQ, Analog Delay and Ampire.

The poll reveals the situation... now it is 69-3. Overwhelmingly S1 users are not using the Show page.

Right, because there are only 72 people in the whole world using Studio One. This is one tiny, insignificant and severely f**ked up microcosm, largely at odds with the wider world.

Not Bitwig specific, but still pretty interesting: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=562806

The most interesting aspect is that the second biggest group who responded don't use Clip Launcher at all and the biggest group only use it peripherally, like the Scratch Pads in Studio One. Only 12% of those who responded use it as the main part of their workflow, which is interesting for an application that is mostly built around that feature.

[apoclypse]

[quote=BONES post_id=8289704 time=1639100606 user_id=63
The most interesting aspect is that the second biggest group who responded don't use Clip Launcher at all and the biggest group only use it peripherally, like the Scratch Pads in Studio One. Only 12% of those who responded use it as the main part of their workflow, which is interesting for an application that is mostly built around that feature.
[/quote]

A lot of Ableton users do not even use the Session view, they do most of their production in the Arrange view. For one if you are making a song and not playin live, transferring clips from the session view to arrange view in Ableton is a PITA. Bitwig makes this a bit easier due to how the UI is designed, but when I'm making song in Bitwig I'm not even using the clip view.

For me most of the time I'm using the clip/session view just to store things. In that regard Scratch Pad in S1 pretty much serves the same function in my workflow. My only gripe with the Scratch Pads is that I think Presonus needs to rethink the UI on it and how to access things there a bit, maybe merge Scratch pads with the Blocks workflow in Reason just to make it a bit more versatile. I think Presonus could be doing more with it.

[antic604]

... I can't have clip launching workflow in S1 the way I can in Bitwig, i.e. experiment live with different combinations of clips. Sure, I can drag & drop clips beteween patterns in S1 or to the main arranger, effectively achieving the same final result, but there's no spontaneity and happy accidents in that

Why not? You're essentially doing exactly the same thing, just in a different way.

But that's the whole point - you're doing it in a different way. There's huge difference in spontaneity and flow when you have a grid of clips you know go together wall, your DAW keeps them in sync and you're free to "randomly" tap cells on a Launchpad-type controller to jam out ideas; compared to deliberately moving & pairing blocks on the timeline. Some of the best moments in my music result from triggering by mistake the clip that I wasn't planning to play, or when I triggered it too early / too late and it created some interplay I didn't plan for.

I realize it doesn't sound very "artist-y" or "musican-y", but I never claimed to be one. I just know what sounds correct, what sound good and works together well and for me - and apparently many others - things like clip launchers help to realise ourselves as "artists" in that way.

And no, you can obviously record everything that's happening in Bitwig's Clip Launcher.

Of course you can but the point was that you didn't, did you?

I was 20-30% into that track and usually I try to not put anything on the timeline before I have 2-3x the material you're seeing there, because once it's on a timeline I subconsciously "commit" to it. In the actual track the into is very much the same to what's on that YT, but there's 3 additional sections in the middle, that probably wouldn't have existed if I printed that on the timeline and went from there. That's how I work. I realise you and others might not.

I didn't spend one second with the Session View, it is completely irrelevant to the way I work or what I was looking for in a new host.

Then I don't know why you want to discuss it all the time.

If you never tried it, then you have no actual idea about how it works and what it can - potentially - bring to someone's workflow. It's like me arguing with someone that all guitars are the same and they just differ by colour or shape. Or that Cubase's staff notation features are inferior to Studio One's. Except that I'm aware I know nearly nothing about guitars or notation, so I sit quiet for those discussions.

[antic604]

A lot of Ableton users do not even use the Session view, they do most of their production in the Arrange view. For one if you are making a song and not playin live, transferring clips from the session view to arrange view in Ableton is a PITA.

I think even more important factor is the fact that you're very limited in terms of editing audio in Session View. At some point you need to drag it to Arrangement and back if you want to chop the sample, reverse some bits, etc. Bitwig is really a huge step up in that area, letting you practically to do everything in Clip Launcher, incl. comping (which Live can't do either).

Also I wonder if the choice of view depends on music type? For psytrance the core of the song is droning kick & bass combo, usually never changing a key & scale for the whole length of 7-8 minutes. On top of that different things happen - acid lines, melodic lines, pads / atmos, sound FX sections, etc. That type of music seems like a good fit for clip launcher workflow, i.e. you have the core running, you build a "library" of ideas for the elements I listed above and then just "experiment" with pairings and order that works.

I can't imagine working in Clip Launcher with a jazz song, film score or even a normal pop song. But that's perhaps a limitation of my own mind

For me most of the time I'm using the clip/session view just to store things. In that regard Scratch Pad in S1 pretty much serves the same function in my workflow. My only gripe with the Scratch Pads is that I think Presonus needs to rethink the UI on it and how to access things there a bit, maybe merge Scratch pads with the Blocks workflow in Reason just to make it a bit more versatile. I think Presonus could be doing more with it.

That's a very good point and something I'm missing as well (as an option, obviously).

Studio One already has shared copies for clips, but I wish it also had shared arranger track sections, i.e. if I'd move a whole vertical slice of arrangement from Scratch Pad to Arranger in that mode, whenever I'd edit, remove or add clips to the source, it would also be reflected in Arranger - like in Reason's blocks indeed:

https://youtu.be/I6UFCdD4Lyk

[BONES]

The problem I see with that workflow is that it makes your arrangement too rigid, so you'd spend as much time going around muting stuff and making global changes as you would if you just did it the old fashioned way. i.e. It's not likely to save you any time or effort, you just put that effort in elsewhere.

For me, the best, most useful tool in Studio One is the "D" key. It makes it so easy to make a change to a drum or bass pattern and then quickly propagate it through an entire arrangement that I've never really bothered with patterns. The other thing for me is that being able to do everything in one place, without have to change modes or open a different window definitely makes my workflow smoother and, ultimately, faster and better. As you can see, I have the three windows I need open at once and there simply isn't room for another window.

Laptop.png

There's huge difference in spontaneity and flow when you have a grid of clips you know go together wall, your DAW keeps them in sync and you're free to "randomly" tap cells on a Launchpad-type controller to jam out ideas; compared to deliberately moving & pairing blocks on the timeline.

Rubbish. Both are deliberate, you just said so - "clips you know go together wall (sic)". So you've already got it all organised, you're just trying different ways of putting it together. More to the point, when you are getting those clips together, you already have a pretty good idea what is going to work with what and, at the end of the day, it is only going to be incrementally more likely you'll come up with something unexpected than doing it another way.

Some of the best moments in my music result from triggering by mistake the clip that I wasn't planning to play, or when I triggered it too early / too late and it created some interplay I didn't plan for.

Same for me when I drag/copy the wrong pattern/clip or drag the right one to the wrong spot. It actually happened to me last night, when I was dragging bits around to change the way a song ends and accidentally discovered a way better outro than the one I had been planning, just by pasting a MIDI clip meant for one instrument into the wrong track. In a more deliberate sense, it's how I condense a lot of the track counts on the covers I work on down - by moving the MIDI clips between tracks to see which parts I can combine into one. That's actually something that wasn't easy in Orion because the patterns belong to each instrument, you can't just drag them from one track to another.

I realize it doesn't sound very "artist-y" or "musican-y", but I never claimed to be one. I just know what sounds correct, what sound good and works together well and for me - and apparently many others - things like clip launchers help to realise ourselves as "artists" in that way.

Sure but that doesn't make it in any way uniquely useful, it's just one way of dong things that you prefer. It doesn't give you anything you can't get in several different ways in the same or other hosts. It's not better, it's not worse, it's just different and in my assessment it is way too much effort for too little gain in production. When using it for live performance, it definitely does stuff that would be way harder to do any other way. Again, it's called "Live" for a reason (whereas Reason is called Reason for reasons unknown).

once it's on a timeline I subconsciously "commit" to it. In the actual track the into is very much the same to what's on that YT, but there's 3 additional sections in the middle, that probably wouldn't have existed if I printed that on the timeline and went from there.

I'd suggest that using the Clip Launcher is what puts you in that mindset because, for me, I am not committed to an arrangement until I have to send the masters off for manufacture. It's actually a limitation of that workflow that I hadn't thought of and a trap I could easily see anyone falling into.

Then I don't know why you want to discuss it all the time.

Because you never know when I might be able to winkle out that little scrap of information that transforms my understanding. In the meantime, there is always the chance someone might learn something about the alternatives, too. Isn't that the value of forums like these?

If you never tried it

I said I never tried it in Bitwig but I was around when Ableton first launched Live and I had a good play around with that, way back when. And perhaps if I'd been able to get the basics working for me in Bitwig, I might have found some time to explore further? But I never got that far, for better or worse.

then you have no actual idea about how it works and what it can - potentially - bring to someone's workflow.

If that's true, then you wasted your time with the video you made, didn't you? Because that's the thing, it's easy to see what something has to offer without knowing how to use it yourself. Again, it's part of the value of places like this - you can mine other people's experience to form your own opinions about things without having to waste your life finding out for yourself.

[Psalmist91]

Compared to Gig Performer (which I haven't used…

Just correcting the record here.

Gig Performer has an audio file player plugin that supports 8 tracks (wav, aif, flac, mp3, etc) that can be played individually or in combination and looped. And since it's implemented as a plugin, you can just create more instances if you need more than 8 tracks. (No time stretching yet)

Gig Performer has a MIDI file player plugin that can load up to 128 SMF songs and you can mute or re-channelize individual tracks (format 1 files) of each song and route them to different plugins.

You can't record your audio or MIDI tracks inside Gig Performer but if you're wanting to use your own, then you can of course just export such files from your DAW. By the way, you can get really sneaky with MIDI files since you can create tracks with MIDI messages that can control other aspects of Gig Performer itself.

I'm not sure what you mean by "non-linear" and "non-standard mixer" but if you're talking about GP's visual routing of plugins as an alternative paradigm to channel strips, you'll find that in fact it's much easier to do routing (including traditional inserts and sends and combinations) as you don't have to be concerned with aux channels, bus channels, etc. One of our guitar users provided a very nice example of this on our blog (https://gigperformer.com/gig-performer- ... strip-way/)


(Disclaimer, I'm one of the GP developers)

Deskew: Thank you so much for speaking in!