TonalDynamics
Active member
Maybe, but half the producers I know are guitar players, and remarkably enough about half the composers too
Ramin Djawadi and HZ are a couple of high profile examples.
Of all the guitarists I know, the number of them who wear Fender T-shirts, apparel, or have a Fender bumper sticker is zero.
Just like Gibson and Marshall, they're well known to be corporate giants now and are thus firmly in the 'uncool' department for most musicians (This coming from a guy who owns a number of Teles and Strats).
Most guitarists are Reaper/Ableton/Logic/Pro Tools (also some S1) users and have a working knowledge of those DAWs...
I don't see them abandoning what they currently know just because there's a Fender tag on it, if anything quite the opposite, they'd probably actively avoid it, despite owning many of the amps and guitars like myself.
As for guitar players being underrepresented in the DAW market? I highly doubt it, pretty much all of them I know use one of the DAWs listed above... ten years ago maybe but not in '26. In fact I'd argue that modern guitarists tend to be among the MOST tech-savvy of players...
Maybe it's a generational thing?
Does refusing to develop or update features for the professional market (or 'aficianados' as the CEO calls them) not count as 'dumbing down'?
Studio One was always billed as a Cubase alternative in terms of feature set and that's where it largely succeeded, i.e.,
'Cubase but better and much less annoying'.
As a former Cubase user that philosophy certainly worked on me for over a decade as an early adopter of Studio One v1.
Our boys out of Hamburg had great work ethic, great passion for innovation, and by golly I think I was among the first to realize that they had actually bested Steinberg at the DAW-making game.
Fast forward to present day...given the dearth of feature-updates (sorely needed) and new features since v7 it's super obvious Fender have decided to abandon that creed along with its userbase and are instead remaking Studio One -- er, sorry -- 'Fender Studio', in their own image.
Incidentally, does anyone remember this little chestnut?
Back when Fender first acquired Presonus, we had the CEO yapping about stuff HE would like to see in Studio One and I quote:
"The simplest version of Studio One right now has a 150-page owner's manual, which I have said to the team is 149 pages too many,” he says. “Because you should be able to get out of the box, press one button and you're off to the races. So that's, again, a very easy brief, but very difficult to execute. But there has been a gravitational pull by aficionados to just keep jamming more and more features into DAWS when, in fact, I think you need to take away more features, make it simpler and more intuitive and less expensive." -Andrew P. Mooney, CEO Fender Musical Instruments inc., former chairman of Disney Consumer Products (DCP)
It reads like a textbook 'Boomer mad at technology' rant. The dude literally TOLD us he was going to do this and everybody pretended either not to hear him, or that he misspoke... but the first shot often lands the truest.
Anyway, I've read every jot of the release material, and the following items:
- Arrangement Overview
- (This is a genuinely nice QoL feature.)
- Metronome subdivisions
- "Transform to Rendered Audio" converts mono track into stereo track in certain situations
- A nice bug fix.
- [Score Editor] Note duration differs from Note Editor in certain cases
- Another nice bug fix.
15 months since v7 btw.
If we're at the point where we're celebrating merely because features aren't being removed, I think it's safe to say it's the end of an era.
JB
