• Hi and welcome to the Studio One User Forum!

    Please note that this is an independent, user-driven forum and is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or maintained by PreSonus. Learn more in the Welcome thread!

Studio Pro 8 - Discussion Thread

The protestations about the name and Fender's input are overdone. The DAW is Fender's property and has been for 5 years. They're entitled to call it whatever they like. You may argue with the marketing logic, but FLStudio, Live, Pro Tools, Cubase and many other DAWs have all gone through name changes in the past, often - but not always - because of new ownership. Fender aren't even 'new' owners. The logic (sorry!) of using '8' in the name is obvious; to emphasise that it is a continuation of the Studio One line that had reached version 7 - and, on opening v8, it's bloody obvious that it's the same product and not a fork of Fender Studio.

By all means criticise the product, but losing your shit over the name is wasted energy!
 
A few thoughts . . . :)

Starting in 2010, I was using NOTION and Digital Performer (MOTU) in ReWire sessions where Digital Performer was the ReWire controller and NOTION was the ReWire device; but then the Propellerheads (now Reason Studios) dropped ReWire; so no more NOTION providing real-time music notation.

Then starting with Studio One 5, the core of NOTION was embedded; and so I switched to Studio One. It got better in Studio One 6 and after using NOTION since 2010 when it was Notion Music, the music notation was the best ever for folks like me who use music notation to play VSTi virtual instruments. Yet, the folks who primarily need to create sheet music never have been very happy; but there are other products that apparently are designed for sheet music focused folks, which is fine with me.

I used Studio One 5, 6, and more recently 7; and everything was working very nicely. The music notation got better with each version of Studo One, and now it's focused and made as easy and efficient as I think it possibly can be.

Fender bought PreSonus a while back, which works for me; and earlier this week I saw a topic in this forum about Fender Studio Pro 8 and initially had a panic attack because I saw nothing about music notation; but a few folks assured me the music notation stuff was there, hence no panic attack required.

Rollback the clock a few years, and I posted to the NOTION forum (Notion Music and then PreSonus) every day and made a diligent effort to help folks, which also helps me because I learn by writing and doing research, which makes it like having a daily Pop Quiz.

After doing that daily since 2010 when initially I did not know what a virtual instrument was, and over the past year I have written a volume every six weeks in my ongoing series of books on "The Art of Digital Music Production", which is available currently as Kindle eBooks and if all goes according to play will are available as Apple eBooks, where the key bit of information is that the Kindle book application creates Kindle and ePub (Apple Books) versions.

For reference, the "official" strategy is to write a book in Word for Windows or Pages (Apple) and then to import it to the Kindle Create application for formatting; but there is no easy or practical way to attach titles to diagrams, which for me was a big problem.

The solution is to do everything in Kindle Create and to add captions or titles to diagrams using a combination of than Krita and Graphic drawing applications, so that each diagram or image has its own caption title, hence no need to mess with associating captions and titles with images and diagrams, because they are self-contained.

I suppose this is not the "standard" way of creating eBooks; but then I use a similar strategy for digital music production, where for example instead of having 120 notes, I have 12 notes and 10 octaves, so that for example I only need to remember there is a note named "C" that can be low-pitch, medium-pitch, or high-pitch depending on its octave, which is enhanced by doing everything on soprano treble staves and using transposition to cause the actual notes to be played as the octave notated or one or two octaves lower or higher than notated, which is easy to do when configuring a staff, all because I only learned soprano treble staff when I was in a liturgical boys choir.

it might be stupid; but it works and it lets me focus on the music, where I also do everything in the keys of C Major or A minor, 4/4 time, and specify sharps per measure as needed, which is a tiny bit more work but avoids needing to remember that when using other key signatures, the music notation does not look like what it really is, where for example when C is sharped in a key signature, you only see C without the added sharp, which one might suppose saved paper centuries ago but today is confusing for no logical reason. If it's C#, then I want to see the sharp (sorry for the pun). 🤪

Fender Studio Pro 8 appeared, and after exploring it for a few days, I like it! (y)

As an additional bit of background, I have a Computer Science degree and started doing mainframe programming in the late-1970's on the NASA Space Shuttle Mission Simulation System, which at the time had the largest Univac computers in the world; and among other things gave me a bit of free computer time when all the nightly work was done, which I used to write a computer program to print every possible chord on an electric guitar and was what now is called a "Grimmorie" and was hundreds of printed pages. This was OK with NASA, because it improved my programming skills, and along the way I devised a way to automate a lot of the work in preparing simulation code for astronaut training, which was used in the first two Shuttle missions during which I was a primary contact, meaning my work required me to be within 10 feet of the astronauts in the weeks before launch. It also mapped to having some "stick time" on the fixed-base simulator, which basically ruined me on playing computer games, since how can a computer game be better than the actual NASA shuttle simulator, where for reference there was a motion-based simulator but it required being a licensed pilot and wearing helmets, shoulder and seat harnesses, and all that stuff, because the hydraulic systems were sufficiently powerful to propel the simulator module through the top of the building if folks did stupid stuff.

Then Windows appeared, and I started doing Windows programming, which soon was called "software engineering"; and I became a Microsoft Solution Provider and wrote two books on Visual Basic programming, with this leading to being a Judge in the the last three Windows World Open Contests, where among other things I got to meet Alan Cooper who also was a Judge and created "Ruby", which was the foundation for Visual Basic.

A while later, Microsoft was accused of being a monopoly and one might guess this annoyed Bill Gates so much that he moved most of the Windows programming to India, which soon mapped to the appearance of ".NET", which ruined Visual Basic and annoyed me greatly,

Around the same time, Apple introduced the original iPod, which I got along with an Apple computer which was required to configure and charge the iPod. This was when I discovered "Aqua", the Graphic User Interface (GUI) for macOS and fell in love it, along with the overall simplicity of the way things are done on Apple computers where the strategy is based on James Martin's perspective that computers should help people rather than make people their puppets, or simply put "people are more important than computers".

Fast forward to this week; and I am a bit puzzled by some of the reactions to Fender Studio Pro 8, many of which make absolutely no sense, especially when they suggest Fender Studio Pro 8 somehow is vastly different from PreSonus Studio One 7.2.3, which it isn't.

I like to be a happy and gracious fellow whenever possible; but how can anyone with a working brain look at Fender Studio Pro 8 and then look at PreSonus Studio One 7.2.3 and suggest they are vastly different? :rolleyes:

Fender Studio Pro 8 is a very nice and quite elegant improvement to PreSonus Studio One 7.2.3; and as best as I can determine it was developed and software engineered by the same folks, if only because there is no way those folks can be replaced.

Why?

Fender Studio Pro 8 is doing so much advanced work that it's like macOS in the sense that the folks doing the work are so advanced and skilled that they are the only ones who can do the developing and software engineering.

Thanks to some very helpful clues and suggestions by other folks in this topic, I have discovered some very nice improvements in the GUI and behaviors of Fender Studio Pro 8, including the new Channel Overview GUI design and its behaviors, which is going to make my work creating songs a lot easier and more focused. It also was motivation to devise a new way to diagram GUI steps using curved dotted lines with arrows and new graphic symbols for "double-click" and "right-click" actions.

On top of all this, I get to do updates to Volumes 1 through 10 of "The Art of Digital Music Production" to use Fender Studio Pro 8 images, which I was going to do regardless to create eBooks for Apple Books, hence is not so much additional work. I already started doing screen captures with Reason 13 (Reason Studios) and most of the other digital music production software, which like clockwork changes frequently, if only because software engineers become bored and then without adult supervision are compelled to devise new stuff.

If there is a summary, then it's the fact that Fender Studio Pro 8 is a consistent and logical improvement and makes everything better.

It also makes it clear that "Fender" is a more ubiquitous name then "PreSonus"; and "Studio" is more focused than "Studio One".

I love Fender guitars; and over 15 years ago custom-modded a 1999 Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster, which I call the "Fabulous Fifty Million Dollar Trinaural Stratocaste®r", since it has two separate and independent output signals or channels but is not a stereo guitar. Among other things, it has what I call the "Really Big Knob" that operates a Varitone control.

I also learned that Elvis Presley could do natural vibrato spanning three half-steps, which is as mind-boggling as doing uvular trills on the "H" in "Hound Dog" when he was 21 years-old; and Scotty Moore had a custom amplifier that had built-in slapback echo.

FACT: Everything is better this week, and I am vey happy! :)

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
 

Attachments

  • SW-Setup-Edit-Parameters-For-VST-Effect.jpg
    SW-Setup-Edit-Parameters-For-VST-Effect.jpg
    204,8 KB · Views: 16
  • SW-Fender-8-PreSonus-7-Side-By-Side.jpg
    SW-Fender-8-PreSonus-7-Side-By-Side.jpg
    194,3 KB · Views: 15
  • 122-SW-FabulousFiftyMillionDollarTrinauralStratocaster-White.jpg
    122-SW-FabulousFiftyMillionDollarTrinauralStratocaster-White.jpg
    127,5 KB · Views: 16
  • 118-SW-Ray-Butts-EchoSonic.jpg
    118-SW-Ray-Butts-EchoSonic.jpg
    205,6 KB · Views: 17
  • SW-Slapback-Echo-Elvis.jpg
    SW-Slapback-Echo-Elvis.jpg
    193,7 KB · Views: 17
Last edited:
The protestations about the name and Fender's input are overdone. The DAW is Fender's property and has been for 5 years. They're entitled to call it whatever they like. You may argue with the marketing logic, but FLStudio, Live, Pro Tools, Cubase and many other DAWs have all gone through name changes in the past, often - but not always - because of new ownership. Fender aren't even 'new' owners. The logic (sorry!) of using '8' in the name is obvious; to emphasise that it is a continuation of the Studio One line that had reached version 7 - and, on opening v8, it's bloody obvious that it's the same product and not a fork of Fender Studio.

By all means criticise the product, but losing your shit over the name is wasted energy!
Studio One isn't even the original name of the software when you think about it...
 
Studio One isn't even the original name of the software when you think about it...

Yeah - though 'K2' probably wasn't a great name!
 
It all sounds very exciting and I’d like to try it but 24 hours after purchasing the upgrade it still hasn’t turned up in my products so I can download it. I put in a support request three hours after purchase but still no response from the support team. All I get is a message that my license is being prepared and to wait a couple of minutes before coming back to my product page. Pretty frustrating to spend your money and get nothing in return.
Did you get any reaction at all? I'm in exactly the same boat. Great way to treat customers.
 
Fender was always going to be in the name, starting from v8. Look at the logo:

7ender​

 
Only their marching orders are still coming from that same guy who wanted a one page startup manual (remember that one?) because he couldn't work through the process himself.

That guy is gone now. New guy coming in early February.

VP
 
Studio One isn't even the original name of the software when you think about it...
It is. At the time of the release of version 1.0, it already had that name. When I was beta-testing 1.0, it was already "Studio One".

Those were really nice, almost family-like times. Matthias (the developer and father of Studio One - still head of development today) would hang out with us in the evenings, we'd have a few drinks and celebrate. At some point he asked me if anything was bothering me in Studio One, and I said yes, there needed to be an "All Inputs" option for MIDI Inputs ("Instrument Inputs" in Studio One terms). Back then, you could only select exactly one single input device. He was like "Yeah, that makes sense"… and the next (slightly hungover) morning I had a new beta version in my inbox with the "All Inputs" option added. Suddenly I could play using all my connected synths. Not a super exciting story, but those were the early days - and really good memories.
 
Last edited:
It is. At the time of the release of version 1.0, it already had that name. When I was beta-testing 1.0, it was already "Studio One".

Those were really nice, almost family-like times. Matthias (the developer and father of Studio One - still head of development today) would hang out with us in the evenings, we'd have a few drinks and celebrate. At some point he asked me if anything was bothering me in Studio One, and I said yes, there needed to be an "All Inputs" option for MIDI Inputs ("Instrument Inputs" in Studio One terms). Back then, you could only select exactly one single input device. He was like "Yeah, that makes sense"… and the next (slightly hungover) morning I had a new beta version in my inbox with the "All Inputs" option added. Suddenly I could play using all my connected synths. Not a super exciting story, but those were the early days - and really good memories.
Was K2 considered a different product then? Because that's what I had in mind when I said "Studio One isn't the original name"
 
The name change doesn’t really appeal to me. I understand why Fender wants it that way, but from a marketing perspective I still find it too aggressive.
Logic to Apple Studio 12 or
Cubase to Yamaha Studio 15 — I’d find that pretty cringe as well.
Other companies don’t seem to need this. They let the software speak for itself.
If someone asks me now which DAW I use, I somehow feel embarrassed to say “Fender Studio.”

Still a great DAW, but there really haven’t been that many new features either.
 
When you login to MyFender, you'll see the option to upgrade your S1 licence for £89. However, there is no need to buy anything if your S1 licence still has time to run. Just install Studio Pro 8 then login to MyFender when prompted and you'll see your S1 licence info is carried over.
My new card has just arrived but the page that mentioned the £89 price has been logged out, and I cannot remember how to access it! If I log in to my account and access "My Gear", all I can see is my Studio 1 stuff. I managed to stumble upon the right option a couple of days ago, but I cannot figure out how! Any clues would be gratefully received 🙏😉 My S1 Licence has expired, BTW, which is probably why I didn't see the options that you described...

UPDATE: Oh wait... "My Fender"??? Hang on a sec...

UPDATE 2: Sorted and downloading now. Ye gods, what a convoluted web site! It's almost as if Fender were trying to make the discounted upgrade price difficult to reach 😉
 
Last edited:
That guy is gone now. New guy coming in early February.

VP
And the 'new' (he's been there 12 years) guy is a genuine musician - guitarist and songwriter. Bud Cole.
 
If someone asks me now which DAW I use, I somehow feel embarrassed to say “Fender Studio.”
I agree. I don't do this full time but i do have a good number of recurring/steady stream of new clients (to the point where maybe soon i can consider going full time in the near future) - not that it matters now because relationships are established but if i were originally seeking some of these guys and told them we would be recording/mixing on a 'Fender' product, they would've probably gone elsewhere because PERCEPTION wise (and perception matters) it sounds quite amateurish.
 
I have just finished installing Fender Studio Pro 8, and it has just been through the process of activating my purchased item. However some of the items have failed to activate. Any clues, anyone?
SCR-20260115-npqc.png
 
I have just finished installing Fender Studio Pro 8, and it has just been through the process of activating my purchased item. However some of the items have failed to activate. Any clues, anyone?
View attachment 2734

I get this all the time too.

Unless you are actually licensed for ALL those "extra" plugs - you will always see this message.

It's been like this for at least 2-3 versions (years) now - essentially unfixed.

VP
 
I don’t really care what something is called, at least to a certain extent. What matters more to me is the brand identity behind it. That can play a big role in deciding whether it’s worth investing time in learning, maintaining, and integrating a piece of software. The real costs (and benefits) lie in longterm commitment and the skill development, not in the price of an update or upgrade.

Fender has a strong brand identity built around stringed instruments and amplifiers. It makes sense for that identity to be reflected in their software (as it is now), because using the Fender name for something with a completely different identity could undermine the brand’s story.

From that perspective, coming from an electronic‑music background where amps and guitars are present but not central, waiting for the next big update of Fender Studio is simply less exciting than waiting for updates from a brand with a broader creative scope.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of choice when it comes to DAWs, and Studio One 7 remains a mature, reliable workhorse that I’m very happy with. That said, the next price‑drop round from developer B will be taken more seriously than before. 😉
 
Wow so many moans about the name! Who gives a flying fader about the name of their DAW :ROFLMAO:
Glad to see video added to Show Page, doesn't look as if anything else has been added to Shows, DMX would be good, but at least if there's a new feature then maybe they haven't abandoned it after all...

I wish they'd sort the automatic language options on their website though - I have to scroll all the way down to the foot of the page to select ENGLISH (I live in France and it automatically chooses French) but then when I click on a link within that English page it reverts to French - anyway what I couldn't find was System Requirements - I use the Show page on an older MacBook Pro running Monterey, and would like to know if this new release will run on it. I'll go for the upgrade at 99€ anyway, for the M4 Studio Mac - I like the overall look and some of the new features seem useful - and I'm upgrading from version 6 so that's a good deal for me, having not bothered to spend 149 to go from 6 to 7. Always good to have the latest version anyway, and I can keep V6 in case there are issues whilst they bug-shoot 3rd party plugins.

And again guys, the name?? get over it!! I've got a 1963 Fender Jaguar sitting in the corner - I'm fairly sure I won't get mixed up and try to connect my MIDI controller to it.....
Let's just put it this way- having dealt with both Fender customer service (literally ignored in an emergency situation) and Presonus customer support, who stepped up and SOLVED my issue, I'm not thrilled with the total merge of Presonus into the Fender conglomeration. I got *exemplary service* from Lawrence and Brian at Presonus and Fender never even responded. FWIW.

And honestly?? IDK about you but I don't want every musical item I own to be branded by one company. Individual brands have vibe of their own. Case in point? Have you *seen* Fender's new answer to the beautiful and popular Marshall bluetooth speakers? Ugly and generic. Obviously they didn't get that *looking reminiscent of a cool old amp was a big part of the charm.*

Opinions vary, most certainly. Those are mine.
 
I have just finished installing Fender Studio Pro 8, and it has just been through the process of activating my purchased item. However some of the items have failed to activate. Any clues, anyone?
View attachment 2734
Do you have the subscription? Or did you buy these products separately?
 
Back
Top