Track List Breakdown
1. Inspector - allows for more detailed control of various parameters for each track.
2. Settings - houses various toggle-able settings for track behavior and selection
3. Show Automation Toggle - when turned on will show any automation that you have applied to the tracks in your project.
4. Global Tack Visibility - has a list of various controls that will affect the entire project and clicking on each will toggle visibility (e.g. adding indicators for where your project starts and ends.)
5. Add New Track - Brings up a window to allow you to add different types of tracks to the project.
6. Mute, Solo, Arm to Record, and Monitor - From left to right: Mute will cause the track to not make sound during playback. Solo will mute all other tracks that are not also solo'd. Arm to record indicates that when you press the main record button in the transport controls that you will record on that track. Monitor will allow you to listen to the input on this track at all times (e.g. if you are on an audio track you will hear the sounds that are going through the microphone both in and out of recording.)
7. Input/Output Selection: This allows you to chose between different input (e.g microphones on audio tracks) and output (e.g. virtual instruments on instrument tracks) devices for that track.
8. (Virtual Instrument Track Only) Instrument Display Toggle - Toggles the graphical interface for the current virtual instrument associated with that track.
The Global Track Visibility tab gives you several options of ways to make large changes to your entire project at different points in time. Keep in mind that these not only affect the track selected, but every track in the project. Most of these will be familiar if you have ever had even passing interactions with reading sheet music, or working on music in general. If you are not using Studio One for music making, then some of these will not be relevant for you, but tools like the ruler, marker, and arranger can still be used for non-musical projects.
Going through these one by one:
Ruler: Helpful for if you want to view the timing of the song in multiple ways. Say your project is currently measuring the time at the top in musical measures, the ruler will allow you to also view the timeline in seconds. (In the example above you have measures on top and seconds on the bottom.)
Marker: Shows the start and end markers, these are only useful for when you want to export your project, but it does save you time so it is recommended to add them once your song length is decided. They can be moved at any time, so if the length of the project changes it will not pose an issue.
Arranger: This will let you draw markers in your song that will move around all the tracks in the section that you select. Be careful to avoid overlapping sections with this tool, you can sometimes pick up sections that you do not want to pick up and will have to undo the move to restore the sections to their previous state.
Signature: Allows you to make changes to the time signature (how many beats in a measure) of the music at different points in the song.
Tempo: Allows you to control changes in the tempo (how fast or slow) the song is over time. This can be done gradually or all at once, as seen in the example above.
There are a couple of places to control the inputs and outputs for different tracks. The first would be right next to the main track controls.
This is where it would be on an audio/microphone track. When using an audio interface like the AudioBox in the Recording Studio, you have two different places to plug-in your microphone, this selector allows you to choose between those two inputs (for more information see our guide on how to set up multiple microphones in Studio One here)
For virtual instrument tracks, it works a little differently. This selector is instead deciding what virtual instrument to send the MIDI information to that is recorded in the track (for more information on MIDI see the section on Stock Instruments). Put simply it decides what virtual instrument will play the sounds on that track.
If you are having trouble with getting a midi controller/keyboard to play sounds a place to check is in the inspector panel (highlighted in the overview) you will see a section like the one pictured above. The output is set to the virtual instrument called presence, and the input is PS-49, the name of the midi controllers we have here in the recording studio. If this input is unassigned, you can assign it to the midi controller you would like to use.
