Sony Pixel Power calrec Sony

Studio One: A Brief Exploration with Josh Cumbee

20/12/2023

The GRAMMY-nominated artist, producer, and songwriter shows us how he uses Studio One to cook a musical idea from scratch.

Josh Cumbee is a triple threat: The LA-based artist, producer, and songwriter started releasing his own music while he was enrolled in the music business program at USC, then branched out into television and film composition before landing an engineering gig with super producer and John Legend co-writer, Toby Gad.

In 2015, he was nominated for Album of the Year at the Latin Grammy Awards and has since gone on to work with Olivia Rodrigo, Madonna, Sia, Sean Paul, Janet Jackson, Armin Van Buuren, and more. The secret to his sweeping success? There's so much room in the sandbox, and there's so much flexibility with audio and with all the tools we have. And for me, I feel like I have to capture everything. I have to suck all that oxygen out of the room and put it into the idea.

Watch this episode to see how Josh weaves lush pads and dynamic vocal stacks into bespoke percussion and found sounds with Studio One.

In this Brief Exploration, Josh Cumbee builds a richly-layered track from scratch using a dynamic range of instruments and effects from Studio One's complete suite of included plug-ins.

Josh starts with a base layer of haunting synth pads before improvising a short, syncopated guitar riff over the top to generate the initial rhythmic pattern. I usually just have takes to layers' on, do a couple passes, and use a little bit of quantization because I don't want to lose that human feel I like to get a couple takes, until I feel like I've felt it emotionally. Then if there's any problem spots, I comp through from previous ones. Then the whole composition gets a healthy dose of Studio One's Analog Delay to generate ambience and depth.

With the melodic foundation in place, Josh drums out a beat on a tightly mic'd road case and drenches it in juicy, fat, nasty Red Light Distortion to create something as bespoke as possible, and then work the samples around that, rather than having to try and make the samples fit into this world. Then he improvises lyrics and a vocal melody using a combination of templates and onboard effects: I'm a total sucker for harmonies, and I find it's very inspiring - especially once you find a hook line - to play around with that. For me, the way that I'm able to do those quickly is by having a template already set up and for background vocals, I can instantly fix it with Melodyne.

In the home stretch, Josh transitions to the low end with a bone-rattling bassline courtesy of Studio One's stock monophonic subtractive synth, Mojito, and the Eris Sub 8. Then he creates avant-garde percussion samples from the sounds of clanking camera equipment he captured during setup - I could dig through a sample bank for a thousand years, and could never find what happened in this room today - and drenches the entire composition in additional textures and tones for a hauntingly atmospheric finish.

Any final words of wisdom? Studio One can be intimidating because there are so many options. And when you see somebody using it in an advanced fashion, it gets a little scary; but the truth of the matter is Studio One isn't the deep end of the pool - it's more like an ocean. You kind of can walk in from the beach. You bring your key commands from another DAW, you can bring a lot of your workflows. You just find that there's more depth and flexibility every step of your process that allow you to continue to level up, so you never really plateau.

PreSonus products used: Studio One, Analog Delay, Red Light Distortion, Melodyne, Eris Sub 8

Try Studio One for free, and check out the rest of our A Brief Exploration series here.
LINK: https://blog.presonus.com/2023/12/20/josh-cumbee-studio-one-a-brief-ex...
See more stories from presonus

More from PreSonus

16/08/2024

Keyswitching with Smaller Keyboards

By Craig Anderton Keyswitch keys enhance expressiveness by letting you trigger various real-time articulations for instruments like strings, brass, guitars, an...

09/08/2024

How to Get the Most Out of the Channel Editor

By Craig Anderton The Channel Editor places all of a mixer Channel's elements-level fader, inserts, sends, individual effects, input controls, routing, mac...

02/08/2024

Free Download: 25 Analog Cab IRs!

By Craig Anderton Yes, just click here to download 25 Analog Cab IRs.zip. The IRs are 1024 samples long, 48 kHz, 24-bit, and mono, so they work with pretty muc...

26/07/2024

Creative FX Sound Design

By Craig Anderton It's been a while since we've had a post for sound design fans. So, let's create some crazy FX for sci-fi/suspense/horror movies,...

24/07/2024

Brandon Ellis | Take the Leap | Quantum Audio Interfaces

The Black Dahlia Murder guitarist and New Jersey native talks about taking his leap. A life in music requires passion, creativity, dedication - and for many cr...

19/07/2024

A Dive Into Inside-Out Mixing

By Craig Anderton There's no right or wrong way to mix. For example, many successful engineers adjust individual tracks, and then mix groups of tracks....

12/07/2024

5 Session-Saving Tips for Studio One

By Craig Anderton I admit it: the following tips are based on personally embarrassing experiences. I like to work fast to keep the creative juices flowing, but...

05/07/2024

The Ultimate Creative Block Unlock

By Craig Anderton You've probably seen ads for packs of MIDI chords that claim to help you write hits that will make your listeners' jaws drop in amaze...

28/06/2024

Grab Cab Impulses for Ampire from Any Amp Sim

By Craig Anderton Some of my favorite guitar sounds involve using Ampire's amp, bypassing its cab, and adding a cab from the Helix Native plugin. Others in...

26/06/2024

Mad Keys | Take the Leap | Quantum Audio Interfaces

The self-taught multi-instrumentalist and St. Louis native talks about taking his leap. A life in music requires passion, creativity, and dedication - and for ...

21/06/2024

Dynamics Processing for MIDI Velocity

By Craig Anderton Sure, you can follow your virtual instrument with an audio compressor. But there's a problem: an instrument's dynamics and expressive...

20/06/2024

KOTA the Friend & RMB Justize | Studio One x TuneCore

Watch the independent artist and Wiz Khalifa producer cook up a song in a single day Imagine meeting someone for the first time and making a song together. Tha...

14/06/2024

Studio One's Keyswitching Secrets

By Craig Anderton Announcement: The 2nd Edition of The Huge Book of Studio One Tips and Tricks is now available as a free download for owners of previous versi...

07/06/2024

Unlock New, Unique Vocoder Effects

By Craig Anderton Usually, the Vocoder inserts into a track that provides the modulation, and the Vocoder's sidechain receives the carrier. But why be norm...

06/06/2024

Louis Michot | Take the Leap | Quantum Audio Interfaces

The GRAMMY-winning fiddler, songwriter, and New Orleans native talks about taking his leap. A life in music requires passion, creativity, dedication - and for ...

31/05/2024

A Guitar Solo Trick You've Never Heard Before

By Craig Anderton Let's get right to what this sounds like. It's not quite feedback or tape reverse, it's well, listen to what it does in this blue...

24/05/2024

Add Punch & Snap to Drum Hits

By Craig Anderton A Pro EQ3 stage's gain can respond dynamically to incoming signal level, so that louder inputs kick the gain higher (or lower). But Studi...

22/05/2024

How To Distribute Your Music with Studio One From Creation to Digital Streaming Platforms

If you're a PreSonus user, you're probably pretty hands-on in producing ...

17/05/2024

Studio One: Your Binaural Beats Lab

By Craig Anderton When I heard about binaural beats, I was interested-I like beats, and I'm into binaural audio. But this has nothing to do with either o...

15/05/2024

The Pocket Queen | Take the Leap | Quantum Audio Interfaces

Professional drummer, producer, and New Orleans native talks about taking the leap. A life in music requires passion, creativity, and dedication - and for many...

08/05/2024

Introducing the All-New Quantum Audio Interfaces

Take the Leap with the Next Generation of PreSonus Audio Interfaces MEET THE ALL-NEW FAMILY OF QUANTUM AUDIO INTERFACES The culmination of nearly 30 years of ...

08/05/2024

INTRODUCING QUANTUM

Take the Leap with the Next Generation of PreSonus Audio Interfaces MEET THE ALL-NEW FAMILY OF QUANTUM AUDIO INTERFACES The culmination of nearly 30 years of ...

03/05/2024

Groove Hacking with Multiband Gating

by Craig Anderton About four years ago, I did a tip on multiband gating. Although it was a cool effect, it was guitar-centric, cumbersome to edit, and time-con...

26/04/2024

The Real-Time 6-to-12-String Guitar Converter

By Craig Anderton With this technique, when you play a standard 6-string electric guitar, you'll hear the rich, vibrant sound of a 12-string guitar. The pr...

19/04/2024

Impact XT's Secret Clip-Launching Talents

By Craig Anderton Impact XT can launch clips, which is great for songwriting (see the blog post Songwriting with Impact XT). But few people realize that Impact...

12/04/2024

Make Better Mixes with Selective EQ

By Craig Anderton Good mixes often depend on carving out a unique sonic space for each instrument, so you can hear them clearly. Sometimes carving out that spa...

05/04/2024

Multitimbral Magic with MIDI Guitar

By Craig Anderton MIDI guitars are a niche product, because the learning curve can be daunting for some guitar players. However, I'm surprised how many pro...

29/03/2024

Avoid Collaboration Concerns

By Craig Anderton As the universe of Studio One users grows, so do opportunities for collaboration. But your collaborator may not be using the same version of ...

22/03/2024

Create Rhythmic Alchemy with the BeatCoder

By Craig Anderton Over three years ago, I wrote a blog post on how to make a drumcoder. Its design was somewhat like a vocoder-drum audio served as a modulat...

15/03/2024

Make Stereo Downmixes More Immersive

By Craig Anderton One of Atmos's coolest features is scalability. No matter how complex your Atmos project may be, you can render it as Binaural, 5.1, 5.1....

13/03/2024

Studio One: A Brief Exploration with Great Good Fine Okay

Watch the Brooklyn Synthpop duo remix their song Blame in Studio One Less than 24 hours after meeting each other, producer Luke Moellman and vocalist Jon San...

10/03/2024

Stamp Out Boring Flanging!

By Craig Anderton The impetus behind this design was wanting to add envelope flanging to amp sims like Ampire. But there's a problem: most amp sim outputs ...

01/03/2024

Creating Room Ambiance with Virtual Mics

By Craig Anderton Supplementing close-miking techniques with room mics gives acoustic sounds a life-like sense of space. Typically, this technique involves pla...

27/02/2024

Notion Mobile 3.3 Now Available

Notion Mobile v3 took mobile music creation to the next level with support for iOS, Android, Windows, Fire OS and macOS. Now v3.3 adds many enhancements and fix...

26/02/2024

The Sweet Spot with Grammy-Nominated Producer 6ix

Logic's Grammy-nominated producer breaks down his Sweet Spot. Before he found success as an avant-garde hip hop producer, 6ix was just 30 units shy of a de...

25/02/2024

The Sweet Spot with Multi-Platinum Producer Warren Huart

The Grammy-nominated multi-Platinum producer breaks down his Sweet Spot. From the studio with chart-topping artists like Aerosmith and The Fray, to empowering ...

23/02/2024

Don't Make This Mixing Mistake!

By Craig Anderton Do you think of mixes in absolute terms, or relative terms? Knowing the difference, and when to apply which approach, can make a huge differe...

16/02/2024

Tuff Beats

By Craig Anderton Calling all beats/hip-hop/EDM/hard rock fans: This novel effects starts with drums modulating the Vocoder's white noise carrier, and take...

09/02/2024

Reinvent Your Stereo Panning

This tip is about working with stereo, NOT about Dolby Atmos or surround-but we're going to steal some of what Atmos does to reinvent stereo panning. Stud...

07/02/2024

Studio One: Mix in a New Dimension with Jeff Ellis

The GRAMMY-winning recording and mix engineer shows us how he uses Studio One to create an artful immersive mix. Jeff Ellis is a force to be reckoned with. The...

02/02/2024

Presence Electric 12-String (the Artist Version Remix)

Presence's sound library includes a fine acoustic 12-string guitar, but not an electric one. So, perhaps it's not surprising that one of the more popula...

26/01/2024

Faster, Simpler, and Better Comping

At first, this might not seem too exciting. But follow the directions below, and try comping using this method-I don't think you'll be disappointed. Thi...

19/01/2024

How to Quickly Slash Your Latency

You know the feeling: You're tracking or doing an overdub with a virtual instrument or amp sim, but you're frustrated by the excessive latency inherent ...

12/01/2024

How to Fix Phase Issues

Recording audio using more than one feed from the same source may create phase issues. For example, when miking a bass amp and taking a DI (dry) input, the DI&#...

05/01/2024

Bigger, Wider Sounds: Try Stereo Miking

If you haven't experimented yet with mid-side stereo miking, you'll be in for a treat when you do. Here's why: Record background singers with gorge...

29/12/2023

How to Prioritize Vocals with Mix Ducking

This complements the tip Better Ducking for Voiceovers and Podcasts and the tip Why I Don't Use Compression Anymore. It applies the concept of voiceover duc...

22/12/2023

Should You Use Highpass Filters when Mixing?

Engineers sometimes advocate using high-pass filters to clean up the low end and tighten the sound. Others believe that because of issues inherent in highpass...

20/12/2023

Studio One: A Brief Exploration with Josh Cumbee

The GRAMMY-nominated artist, producer, and songwriter shows us how he uses Studio One to cook a musical idea from scratch. Josh Cumbee is a triple threat: The ...

15/12/2023

Why I Don't Use Compressors Anymore

This wasn't a conscious decision, or something I planned. But when I looked through my last few songs while seeking candidates for a book's screenshots,...

08/12/2023

Phrasing-The Final Correction Frontier

First, a follow-up: In the October 13 tip about creating Track Presets for parallel processing, I mentioned that Track Presets can't include buses, which is...