Pre-count, Pre-roll and auto punch! What are they and why you should use them.

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about three functions, present in basically any DAW, which are fundamental when recording any instrument, and that sometimes gets overlooked: pre-count, pre-roll and the auto punch.

Pre-roll is something that comes from the analog world, it means that the track would start playing, making you hear what you have already recorded, and then the engineer would, by pressing a button, start recording you on the fly.
Today we can automate this function, and order to enable it in Studio One you need to press the O hotkey, or click on the pre-roll icon (the first arrow in the pic).
Then, by clicking on the wench icon (the second arrow in the pic), which brings us to the metronome setup menu, we can simply tick on or off the pre-roll and/enter the number of bars to play before starting recording. 
This way, once you will hit record, first it will make you listen to the previous 2 bars, so you can start already playing along with them, and then it will start recording automatically at the right point.

From that same menu you can activate also the Pre-count, which means that before playing or recording it will first play a set amount of metronome bars, to be ready with the right tempo before starting recording.
This function is used if you're starting your track from zero, so you don't have any part to play as pre-roll.

How does the computer know exactly, especially if it starts from 2 bars before, where to start recording and where to stop?
You need to select the area with the mouse, the recording will start and stop exactly within the selected part of the track.

Auto punch instead is another function that puts you in and out of record, as the track is playing back, meaning that you need to have the record button assigned to a hotkey (in Studio One is by default the NumPad * button), and as you play a track you can press the * key in real time to start recording, and press it again to stop recording, all without stopping the track from playback, which can be useful especially when tracking vocals, if you want to re-do just a word here and there without interrupting too much the flow.

I hope this was helpful!

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