Metadata such as title, artist and composer that you enter into the Song Setup window will be displayed on the score.
Version 5.1 recently dropped and it includes score printing and more besides. We explore the new features in the Score Editor.
One of the brand‑new features of Studio One 5 was the Score Editor. Composers and the musically adept could now view their music in a more traditional form. This has been possible in other DAWs, but it was brilliant to see it implemented here, and it looked great and seemed to work well albeit with a somewhat limited set of editing tools. There were a number of things missing but probably the most obvious was the ability to print. This seemed remarkably odd to me, and so I moaned about it in my review of Studio One 5. Now, I’m not saying that PreSonus were so profoundly challenged by my remarks that I spurred them into action, but it’s interesting to note that just a couple of months later, version 5.1 drops and it happens to include score printing and a few more things besides.
So, with that omission rectified let’s get into the scoring side of Studio One and see if we can produce a page or two of decent looking sheet music.
What’s New
The Score Editor has a couple of lovely new buttons. One gives you all your tracks laid out as beautiful pages of music, and another shows you just the part you’re working on. It’s all labelled up with the name of the project and your name, and it makes you wonder where that information came from. You can change the text by clicking on it, and it will throw up the Song Setup window which contains all the metadata about your song like title, artist or, in our case, composer. I swear I’ve never seen that window before — which goes to show that you can learn something new every day. Add your details, maybe an inspirational picture, and it’s reflected in the score (the text, that is, not the picture). You can’t move the text around or anything, but it’s all sensibly placed, you can change fonts and size, and it looks perfect for a printout.
The third new button is the Print Score button: hooray! You can print out your individual part or the full score simply and easily onto a sheet of paper or to a PDF. Now that our score printing fantasies have been fulfilled let’s look a bit closer at what you can do in the Score Editor.
Basic Editing
As I noted in my review, the editing tools are pretty basic and very few action commands have been carried over from the piano roll editor. You can add notes by selecting the length value from the toolbar and dropping it in with the pen tool. You can also edit the pitch of notes very easily by grabbing the appropriate one and moving it up and down. Dealing with time is a different thing. You can’t scatter notes about like you can in the piano roll — they have to make sense and be placed correctly or Studio One won’t play ball, but that’s precisely how it should be when writing a score. Once you tune into the sense that when placing notes on a staff you have to do it properly and in a musical context, then it’s rather easy.
Over on the left of the Score Editor we have two new tabs that give us Track (part or staff) information and Layout information. Click in a staff to select it and then you can do notational things like define how the staff is named and what abbreviation is used on subsequent pages. The staff type can be chosen here too, and you can now opt for Grand Staff for a piano track (which has moved from the right‑click menu in the previous version).
The new score page view and layout options.
Lastly, there’s Transposition, which allows you to change the key for a transposing instrument. So, for instance, a brass instrument like a trumpet or trombone will sound a Bb when it plays a written C. As you’ve probably written the part using a keyboard then it won’t be in the right key if someone plays it on the actual instrument. Transposition will change the score to the right key for that instrument and show the correct notes it should play. It does all this without changing the notes being played back through your MIDI sound source or virtual instrument, as this is only for the benefit of the print. You can check back in the piano roll editor and see that the notes are unchanged.
Presets
To make it all easier there’s a whole bunch of presets you can apply from a drop‑down menu, which cover pretty much every instrument. It’ll drop in the staff type, clef, transposition and common name and abbreviations; it makes swapping instruments about and printing new parts a real doddle.
Although there are presets for guitar and other fretted instruments, there’s no tablature or option for adding chord symbols. There is an option for a drum or percussion staff and presets associated with it, but the note heads remain as regular notes. To change the note heads to reflect percussion notation you’ll have to select the notes and use the Notehead Symbol tool to change them by hand.
The other tab is called Layout, and this acts on the whole score. You can choose between a continuous or paged score, whether to include tempo marks, and whether transposition is shown. If in Page view then you can select the page size, orientation, margin size, note size and spacing, and what font you’re using. There’s enough here to shape up a convincing‑looking sheet of music. You can also enable and disable transposition globally here in case you want to work on the score in the same key and re‑enable the transposition before printing.
Multi‑measure rests are available when you opt to view a single part by selecting the ‘single track view’. These pull together all the consecutive empty bars into a single multi‑measure bar with the number of bars it refers to displayed above the line.
Studio One 5.1 introduces a Key Signature track to let you enter and keep on top of key changes and time signatures within your project. This is available below the timeline in the main arranger window along with other utility tracks such as Chord, Marker and Tempo. While the Signature track is not present in the Score Editor, any changes you make to the key or time signature are immediately reflected in the score.
The Signature track, showing time and key signature changes reflected in the Score Editor.
Notion Way
Further editing and many more advanced features are to be found in PreSonus’ Notion scoring software. There’s a dedicated button under the Song menu where you can send selected parts directly to Notion for editing. Notion 6 is available at an additional cost, although if you’ve opted to become a PreSonus Sphere subscriber then Notion is already included.
You can select the page size, orientation, margin size, note size and spacing, and what font you’re using. There’s enough here to shape up a convincing‑looking sheet of music.
Onwards & Upwards
There’s enough I think in the 5.1 update to satisfy most people’s needs for some rudimentary score editing and printout. Had these features been present in the original release then I wouldn’t have had anything to complain about. PreSonus say that there are more updates to the score to come, which is very intriguing and I wonder how far the integration of Notion will go. For me, I’d like to see the chord track reflected in the score to give guitarists an easier way to follow along. Then perhaps lyrics would be the next step, which, along with the chords, would let us produce a complete song sheet.
There are some new track visibility features that have not made it to the editors which might be useful. The Track Filter can be enormously powerful when dealing with the large track counts you would have when working with an orchestra. You can filter down what tracks are visible by name, selection, loop range and solo, and one particularly useful one which is ‘Show tracks with events under cursor’. This means you can put the time cursor anywhere in your project, and you’ll only see tracks that have an event at that moment. It would be brilliant if that filtering was reflected in the Score Editor. As it is, in either the piano roll or Score Editor you have the standard track list where you can manually turn tracks on and off, but no filtering. And while we’re thinking about filtering, the ability to show only certain orchestra groups would also be useful — so strings or brass instruments, etc. I imagine this is the sort of thing that Notion would sort out for you, though, so if you work with scores a lot, Notion would be well worth considering. [And Notion comes with the PreSonus Sphere monthly/annual subscription, along with all PreSonus software, should that appeal - Ed.]
