Studio One: Session Navigation

Speed up your S1 session navigation with these pro‑user tips.

Studio One has a well-earned reputation for speed and agility. It has the sort of interface that feels fluid, integrated and easy to navigate. But that only really starts to gel once you’ve mastered a number of essential key commands and shortcuts. Otherwise, working your way through menus can be as dull as it is in any other DAW environment.

So, here are my tips for getting to where you need to go and doing what you need to do in the fastest possible time.

Avoiding The Timeline

Clicking in the timeline to change the play head cursor’s position or create loop points can be annoying. The timeline is narrow, and if you happen to be working on a track all the way at the bottom of your massive monitor screen, it can require an enormous amount of mouse energy to get yourself back to the top. So, here are some ways to minimise messing around in the timeline.

The ‘Locate when clicked in empty space’ option lets you move the play head without you having to drag your mouse up to the timeline each time.Clicking in empty space: This one is a hidden gem. Click on the spanner icon at the top of the Inspector, and it will bring up an Options menu. One of those options is ‘Locate when clicked in empty space’. Tick this box, and whenever you click outside of a clip in the arrangement window, the play head will leap to that point or the nearest quantised position. Saves many long throws of the mouse.

This can also work within events if you have the Smart tool engaged. This is selected on the toolbar by clicking the left‑hand icon that looks like a left square bracket. The Smart tool gives combined tools so that if your mouse is on the top half of a clip, it uses Range, and on the bottom half, it uses the Arrow tool. Another tool can be swapped in by holding Ctrl (Windows) or Cmd (Mac). Anyway, with the Smart tool selected, the Range tool can be used to locate the play head by clicking on the top half of the event.

Timeline reset on stop: One minor annoyance that I’ve been living with for years is that I’m always having to drag the song pointer back to the beginning to where I want to play from. Play and Stop, by default, works very much like a ‘pause’ on playback. So whether you are pressing the space bar to toggle playback or clicking on the transport controls, the song pointer/play head cursor pauses and then starts again from where it stopped. Commonly, you’re going over the same part of your song again and again, and while looping the section can be useful, it would save you time if you could restart playback from the same place without having to think about it.

The shortcut Alt+Numpad 0 toggles Return to Start on Stop behaviour: when enabled, hitting Play after stopping playback will play back from where you first played, rather than the point at which playback stopped.

The way to change the behaviour is to right‑click on the transport bar and select Return to Start on Stop. Now, it instantly leaps back to wherever playback started from, ready to play again. In different scenarios, this can be equally annoying, so maybe it’s worth committing the shortcut Alt+Numpad 0 to memory to toggle between the two.

I’ve always found...