Los Angeles, CA – July 2014… Balancing the demands of being on the road with the need to stay creative is a challenge every touring musician faces. There’s often little time between tours to come up with new ideas for the next record, and the hustled pace of the road can make it hard to find time to tap into the creative muse.
For singer/songwriter Rome Ramirez, a busy touring schedule means grabbing inspiration when and where it appears. A professed “technology nerd,” Rome has long carried a mobile recording rig with him on the road. “I’ve tried pretty much every DAW program there is,” he says.
Recently, Rome switched from a well-known DAW to PreSonus® Studio One®, and he has made it clear there’s no going back. “I am a true Studio One convert, I really am,” he reports. “No other program comes close to Studio One for workflow and creativity. I can just open it up, and it’s a blank slate, waiting for me to lay my ideas down. It’s so immediate – it lets me focus on my music and be creative without getting bogged down by the technology.”
That said, Rome is hardly a stranger to technology. “I actually love being my own engineer,” he says. “Technology totally inspires me. I love getting into it and tweaking all my sounds, and I love all the old-school sounds I can get with Ampire and some of the other Studio One plug-ins.”
The band also carries a 16-channel StudioLive 16.4.2 mixer on the road. “We use the StudioLive in our rehearsal studio, and it also travels with us on tour,” explains Eric Freedman, the band’s long-time engineer. “It’s really warm and big sounding. I use pretty much all of the onboard effects, and I love the Fat Channel.”
Pairing the StudioLive mixer with Studio One enables Freedman to essentially always be in record mode, he observes. “I record all the shows, and any time they’re working on new material on the road, I’m able to set the whole thing up and be recording in Studio One with just a couple of clicks.”
For Rome, the ability to re-create a familiar workflow in Studio One was a big plus in switching from his previous DAW. “One thing that made it a smoother transition was the ability to map out all the keyboard shortcuts, meaning you can basically do a lot of things in Studio One the same way you’ve done them in any other program.”
“Workflow, to me, is everything, and I was completely blown away with the ease of using Studio One and how quickly I was able to get familiar with the program. The MIDI, the automation, the drag-and-drop — everything is just so easy. I always tell people, it’s the speed of thought. That is what Studio One is to me.”
As anyone who has spent time on tour will tell you, there’s plenty of down time between shows. For Rome, Studio One helps make good use of that time. “I guess it sounds kind of boring but I’m always working,” he says. “When I get off the stage, I hang out for awhile but then I go back to the bus or the hotel, and I work. I’m working on new tracks all the time, and Studio One gives me the freedom to be creative, wherever I am.”
###
About PreSonus
Founded in 1995, PreSonus Audio Electronics, Inc., is a leading designer and manufacturer of audio-recording and live-sound software, hardware, and related accessories. PreSonus’s software, microphone preamps, signal processors, digital audio interfaces, digital mixers, control surfaces, loudspeakers, and other products are used worldwide for recording, sound reinforcement, broadcast, sound design, and Internet audio.
