What is an audio track and what is an instrument track

M

manticoreboy

New member
Hi guys, I have Studio One 2 Professional and whilst I have done quite a bit of home recording over the last 20 plus years using Tascam Portastudios and also have used a PC extensively at work and home for 15 years plus I am a newbie when it comes to DAW.
I have done quite a bit of work on it so far playing around with it and watching tutorial videos from the likes of Groove3, you tube etc. and have recorded some tracks but I have decided to go back a bit and read the manual whilst watching the videos, the problem being I want to race ahead too quickly and I am now conscience of maybe missing stuff.

Can some please explain this.
in the manual it says ''before recording can take place you need at least one track on which to record'' (I am okay with what a track is).
It then says ''Studio One has 2 types of track; the Audio track and the instrument track. audio is recorded to Audio track, whilst musical performance data is recorded to instrument tracks''

Can someone please try and explain ''simply'' what the difference between audio and instrument track is and what ''musical performance'' data is?

is it simply ''Audio'' is say recording a guitar or vocal and ''Instrument'' is MIDI stuff such recording a drum track from my Superior Drummer software plug in.

many thanks in advance for any help

Phil
 
Are you familiar with "MIDI"? If not, you'll probably want to look it up and read a bit about it. Briefly, it's a data format used to stream music-related ("performance") information between two devices or programs (commonly-- but not necessarily-- between a computer and a keyboard or synth), as well as for storing music-related information in files. So when Studio One says "instrument track," they mean a track that contains MIDI data rather than audio data. MIDI data contains no audio information per se (i.e., recorded sound waves), just data that can be used by MIDI software (e.g., DAWs) and MIDI hardware (e.g., keyboards or synths) to generate audio when the MIDI data is played back through the software or hardware-- i.e., the MIDI data has no audio component but tells the software or hardware what notes and instrument sounds ("patches" or "programs") to play, as well as how to play them ("velocity" or volume, pitch-bending, modulation, etc.).
 
Audio Track

SeaGtGruff said:
Are you familiar with "MIDI"? If not, you'll probably want to look it up and read a bit about it. Briefly, it's a data format used to stream music-related ("performance") information between two devices or programs (commonly-- but not necessarily-- between a computer and a keyboard or synth), as well as for storing music-related information in files. So when Studio One says "instrument track," they mean a track that contains MIDI data rather than audio data. MIDI data contains no audio information per se (i.e., recorded sound waves), just data that can be used by MIDI software (e.g., DAWs) and MIDI hardware (e.g., keyboards or synths) to generate audio when the MIDI data is played back through the software or hardware-- i.e., the MIDI data has no audio component but tells the software or hardware what notes and instrument sounds ("patches" or "programs") to play, as well as how to play them ("velocity" or volume, pitch-bending, modulation, etc.).
Click to expand...

many thanks for explaining that, I sort of thought it might mean that but wasn't 100% sure - yes I have a basic (!) understanding of MIDI and have been using my old Alesis SR16 and Casio CZ1000 MIDI devices with Toontracks Superior Drummer plug in.

great prompt response

Phil
 
sorry can I ask one more question related to S1 Prof - does S1 know automatically if its an audio or instrument track e.g. I set up a new song template, open up my Superior Drummer plug in window, find a decent drum loop and drag it over to the left hand side of S1 window and a track appears but I cannot see it says anywhere that it is an instrument track or..... should I always set up a track first i.e. ''Add track'' and choose the audio, instrument track first?
 
I am not familiar with Studio One but AFAIK all DAW software needs you to set up Audio and MIDI tracks initially. You will then often have to "tell" the track where to get the MIDI data from (tho' you can probably set one device as default).

Note, it is usually very useful to be able to export MIDI data, to a USB stick say, so find out PDQ how S1 does that.

Dave.
 
I will say that is an odd way to describe the difference between audio and MIDI, but I guess as long as you know the difference.

The software needs to know process the data (since one will process the data for a VSTi and the other to a sound conversion). Without going into uninteresting details, MIDI data is much different than the analog data. Simply put, the two are processed and used differently, you just have to let the DAW know what is coming in so it processes it correctly.
 
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