You can define how song sections behave, and select them during performances using big, touchscreen‑friendly buttons.
The Show Page has evolved in the last few years, and makes it easy to take your productions on the road. Let's revisit what it offers...
Studio One’s Show Page is, in essence, a way of incorporating a gig or live show manager into your DAW. The general idea is that you’re a band or performer who wants to play along to a backing track, with perhaps a live vocal and guitar, and some keys playing a virtual instrument or maybe a real synth (though you can subvert that entirely, as I’ll explore towards the end of this article). You can export your finished Studio One tracks directly to it, and on your tour it can handle backing tracks, live instruments and virtual instruments, let you cue up playback songs and sections, and send chords and lyrics to all your bandmates.
For live performers, then, it’s a pretty useful extension to Studio One — which is why I wrote about it in SOS three years ago (https://sosm.ag/studio-one-0221). But a few updates have since smoothed out the experience, as well as delivering new features like the Arranger track and Lyric display. So I thought now would be a good time to revisit the Show Page. I’ll try to explain why it’s probably more useful than you think...
Show Me Around
The Show Page Overview has a familiar feel, looking suspiciously like the arrange page in ‘regular’ Studio One: you have the same browser, the mixer’s here, and there’s a timeline, as well as something that will probably hold a list of tracks. But you have to think about this space a bit differently because, rather than writing and recording music, the Show Page is a place for performing it — it’s where you build a live performance set from completed songs or backing tracks. So, a song brought in from Studio One appears as a single, exported, mixed and processed audio file; there’s no editing or sequencing available, just playback, accompaniment, and some rather nice equipment automation. If you’re still writing your song, the Show Page is not for you...
In the main window (where, in a conventional DAW, you’d expect to have tracks) are what PreSonus call Players, and there are three types of Player: Backing Track Player, Real Instrument Player and Virtual Instrument Player. You build up your gig by adding the backing tracks for each song, one after the other, along the timeline. Then, you can tell it to switch presets, switch sounds, change plug‑ins, and so on for each song as it comes. You can add chords for your guitarist and lyrics for the singer and control it all from the computer or an app running on a tablet. Once you’re ready to play, you hit the Perform button, and it all transforms into this sleek, minimalist and large‑scale control screen that contains everything you need to put your hands on your instrument and perform. Let’s look at the details.
Players
Taking the general band idea as our guide, we can drag in our backing track from the browser and, underneath that, drag in our virtual instrument and create a Real Instrument Player for our guitar. Drag and drop works as it does in conventional Studio One, so it’s easy to drag in instruments, presets and audio files, and have things appear automatically.
The Backing Track Player is a simple audio track. If you’ve exported from a song into the Show Page, this is where your audio mix sits. You have Mute and Solo buttons, output routing at the bottom and, in the middle, everything for the Patch system that we’ll get to in a minute. By the way, the Read button is also related to the Patch system rather than the sort of automation you’d normally expect in Studio One.
You can create a Virtual Instrument Player by dragging the instrument from the browser. The setup is very similar to the Backing Track Payer, but this time you have MIDI In and Out options and the Patch field is populated with the selected instrument.
A Real Instrument Player is set up like an auxiliary input track — it even gets labelled ‘AUX’. The assumption is that you’re using a guitar, microphone or other ‘real life’ instrument, and want to run it through some effects or mix it with the backing track and other instruments. If you drag an effect plug‑in, such as the Ampire guitar‑amp emulation, into the Show Page, a Real Instrument Player will be created for it, and at the bottom this time you can set the audio input and output.
Finally, there’s a hidden player called the External Instrument Player, which can select different presets or patches for MIDI synths or keyboards. To do this, first create a Real Instrument Player for the audio to mix it through the same system or add effects. Then create an External Instrument for your synth, using Studio One’s Add Device system. You create a new instrument, give it a name, allocate it a MIDI output and so on. Once it’s in External Instruments in the browser, you can drag it in to create its own Player. (It’s different from a Virtual Instrument Player because it has a field for program and bank numbers.) You can also use this with MIDI‑enabled effects. While these are not instruments as such, if you set effect boxes up an External Instruments, you can drag them into a Player and have the Show Page select the right effect for each song — very neat.
Songs & The Arranger Track
When first released, the Show Page was mostly about songs, and you can still work that way. You add your songs, and it creates a setlist. Each song can load different presets and patches for effects, sounds and instruments. Your backing track tends to form the structure of each song, and as you add them to the timeline, they appear in the setlist on the left. The header above the song gives the name, time signature and tempo. A little icon to the top right offers a couple of options. It can play the song and stop, letting you wait for applause before manually kicking off the next song. It can loop it indefinitely, if for instance you have a loop that you want to riff over until you’re ready to launch into your hits. Or it can continue straight to the next song.
It’s not just song sections that can be controlled — you can also set patch changes at different points in a song.
Since version 5 of Studio One, though, the Show Page has also had an Arranger Track. This lets you break a song up into sections like Intro, Chorus, Verse and so on. Each section has a little icon of its own and a number of additional options. Like whole songs, they can stop, loop, or continue. But they can also loop a set number of times and continue, or be skipped altogether. You can leap between sections with the double click of a mouse. How quickly and smoothly that happens is down to the Sync Mode setting, on the left. This can be set at one to four bars, or none, or you can have it leap once the current section has finished.
You can hang onto that middle chorus as long as you like while the guitarist enjoys an extended solo.
The Arranger Track is potentially transformational to the management of your show: now, rather than looping a warm‑up song indefinitely, you can loop just the intro, or you can hang onto that middle chorus as long as you like while the guitarist enjoys an extended solo. In some ways, it can even become a simple clip launcher. Its versatility is awesome.
As well as playing back sounds, the Show Page can display both chords and lyrics.
Chords & Lyrics
Once the Arranger Track appeared on the Show Page, it wasn’t long before the Chord Track and the Lyric Track followed suit. You can write in lyrics for each section and add chords using the Chord wheel and Lyric Display borrowed from standard Studio One. Or, perhaps more efficiently, the whole Arranger, Chord and Lyrics tracks can all be imported from your Studio One song when exporting it to the show. Note that if you manually enter the lyrics into the Lyric Track, they’ll appear in Perform mode as a continuous line of text — to avoid this, right‑click on the lyric and tick the New Line or New Paragraph box, so that the Perform mode knows how to present it.
In Perform Mode, the lyrics get a whole screen to themselves for a full‑on karaoke experience.In Perform Mode, the lyrics get a whole screen to themselves for a full‑on karaoke experience. The Chords, though, get relegated to a thin line at the top, where they sometimes obscure each other — hopefully something that can be improved in a future update.
Patches
The key to the fluidity in the Show Page is the Patch system. You can take a snapshot of each Player at any time: this stores the Player’s settings, effects, plug‑ins, loaded instrument, preset and external MIDI settings. These are saved as Patches, which can be recalled manually or, even better, automatically at the start of any song or section. So, not only will the Show Page select the right sounds for the song, but it can also switch sounds for the chorus or turn on effects for the solo. It’s a beautiful thing.
To create a Patch, first set up your Player with everything you want to happen. This can be the virtual instrument with the right preset loaded, effects dropped in the mixer, mixer volume and pan, or bank and program numbers on External Instruments. Then hit the ‘+’ button on the player header and call the Patch something helpful. Job done. Now you can make adjustments for the next section or song and create another patch. A quick way to do this with PreSonus virtual instruments and plug‑ins is to drag a preset from the browser onto the Player: this automatically generates a Patch.
A dedicated External Instrument Player allows control over patch changes for MIDI‑equipped hardware, whether instruments or effects.
To set up the automation, choose the Patch from the little drop‑down arrows beneath the sections or songs on the Player’s track. You can also automate mutes so you can drop players out when they are not supposed to be playing, which is a great way of dealing with over‑noodling guitarists!
Perform Mode
With your set list done, your Patches lined up for auto‑switching effects, presets and fiddling with your external synth sounds, you’re ready to perform. Perform Mode throws away the clutter and gives you a focused, action‑packed, extra‑large overview. The timeline runs across the top, with the chords following along. From menus at the top, you can select the song from the setlist, set which Player you want to use and choose the corresponding Patch.
You then have four views. In Patch view, huge buttons can select any of the patches for your chosen Player. In Sections view, you can switch between the different Arranger Track song sections and swap them in and out of loop mode. Lyrics view gives you a highlighted line‑by‑line view of the lyrics in the Lyric Track. Finally, a control section creates a virtual control surface for your devices — rather than fiddle around with the tiny controls on a virtual instrument, you can map some nice, large faders and knobs and control those on screen.
All of this comes together very beautifully in a touchscreen interface. You can use an iPad, Windows or Android tablet along with PreSonus’ Studio One Remote software to mirror the Show Page Perform view and access everything with your fingers. It’s perfect for a live performance environment, where you definitely don’t want to be scrabbling around for a mouse!
Other Uses
Everything about the Show Page feels designed for gigging bands, worship set-ups, weddings and entertainers. But it also has the potential of reaching some other creative opportunities. You could, for example, use it as a karaoke machine, with backing tracks and accompanying lyrics on a nice big display. Or you could ditch the backing tracks altogether and simply use it as a studio gear manager. And once you start dropping audio loops into the Players, it has potential as a rudimentary clip launcher, along the lines of Ableton Live or Bitwig Studio. There’s no automatic time‑stretching as yet, so you’d have to pre‑prepare your loops, but looping sections and cueing up new ones is super easy. The other big one could be in theatre, radio or podcasting, where you might want a scattering of sound effects, atmospheric music, background sounds, and so on, which can be cued up and launched precisely when you need them, or looped as long as you want. I sense there’s a lot more to come with the Show Page...