2019 Presonus Studio One Template Waves + UAD Only - REGULAR PRICE $15 USD

The usefulness of templates is quite rightly emphasised in discussions of recording and production in a DAW. A template can define a strategy for how a session will flow. Understand this, and the boring drudgery of configuring a template becomes nothing less than the laying of a foundation on which all that you create will be built.

As there are many working styles, there are many approaches to creating templates. This month I will take a look at one of my band recording templates and focus on the thinking behind its configuration. I’ll also share a few tricks particular to Studio One’s abilities.

All Submixed Up
Screen 1: Band mixing template. This shows all of the tracks in the template and how they are organised into folders and colour-coded.
Screen 1: Band mixing template. This shows all of the tracks in the template and how they are organised into folders and colour-coded.
The template in Screen 1 is for recording your garden-variety pop and rock band (although we can hope for better). The first, and possibly most important, thing to notice is that tracks are organised. In my view, grouping, submixing, track organisation and other such dreary impositions of conformity are perhaps the most important aspects of organisation in session design and layout.

In this template, related tracks are packed into folders, which correspond closely (though not always exactly) to the primary bus channel submixes: drums, synths, guitars and vocals. There is only one bass track here; in a real session, often there will be more than one (DI and amp, for instance), in which case the tracks are packed in a folder and the tracks routed to a bass submix bus channel. There are lower-level submixes nested inside some submixes: drum tracks feed snare, tom and stereo pairs submixes, all of which feed the drum submix.

Why so many submixes? There are several good reasons. First, it provides a useful level of granularity in between adjusting each and every track individually and only having control over the balance of a small number of submixes, each containing large numbers of tracks. Second, submixing presents the ability to do bus processing. Third, there are a few simple methods for bouncing each submix out to its own file, ie. making them into stems. (A ‘stem’, as traditionally defined, is simply a submix that has been ‘printed’ to a file.)

Screen 2: There are four cue mixes in this template. They serve as group returns when monitor mixing is done in the audio interface, and as musician mixes when low-latency native monitor mixing is used.
Screen 2: There are four cue mixes in this template. They serve as group returns when monitor mixing is done in the audio interface, and as musician mixes when low-latency native monitor mixing is used.
There are more types of submixes in a template like this, of course, such as monitor mixes and effects sends. I have three MOTU AVB interfaces with onboard mixing, meaning there are a fair number of gazintas and gazoutas routing around. This often makes it most convenient for me to do monitor mixing in the interface. When I do that, the four cue mixes shown in Screen 2 are used as group returns I can route to the interface mixer and create separate mixes there for the musicians. On occasions when I use native low-latency monitoring in Studio One instead of mixing in the interface, the same cue mixes get used instead as individual mixes for the musicians.

Choose Template

Presonus Studio One Template $15.00 USD