The company announced the release of the free, multi-platform digital audio workstation (DAW) Fender Studio on its official website. The software app offers beginner musicians and guitarists a simple and convenient way to record, edit, and mix music.
Fender states that the Fender Studio DAW was developed by former PreSonus employees who participated in creating the PreSonus Studio One DAW. The choice of developers is not accidental — at the end of 2021, Fender acquired PreSonus, promising to support the workstation's creators without interfering with their processes.
Evidence of the Studio One creators' involvement is also evident in the design of Fender Studio, which clearly draws inspiration from the PreSonus product. This is evident in the color scheme, menu layout, and other elements of the program's interface.
According to Fender, the Fender Studio DAW allows users to record, edit, mix, and export audio, enabling them to transform ideas into finished tracks. Users can work on eight tracks of audio within a single project. It should be noted that the program does not yet support MIDI, though this functionality will be included in future releases.
The developers call one of the workstation's features "quick tap recording." On the DAW's start screen, a special place is reserved for the record key. Pressing this key automatically starts recording and creates a project in DAW. The authors note that this solution will be useful for quickly recording ideas.
The DAW includes emulations of Fender guitar amps and pedals. According to the description, users have access to copies of the '65 Twin Reverb and Rumble 800 v3 amps, as well as overdrive, chorus, delay, reverb, and bass overdrive pedals.
Users can expand the number of pedals by registering an account on the Fender website. Users with a verified account also receive access to the following amps:
The workstation comes with a metronome, a guitar tuner, time-stretching and pitch-shifting functions, and a set of standard effects, such as compressors, equalizers, and reverbs. Additionally, it includes vocal processing with a detuner, vocoder, ring modulator, and voice transformer.
In addition to its audio recording and editing capabilities, Fender Studio can be used as a practice application. The program includes a catalog of Fender Play back-tracks with a wide variety of genres and songs. You can import back-tracks into a new project and break them down by track. This allows you to mute individual parts in songs. Importing also allows you to adjust the tempo and tone of the backing track.
Fender Studio is positioned as a free competitor to Apple's GarageBand. The company also hopes that Studio will serve as an entryway to the PreSonus ecosystem of products. Users interested in more advanced audio capabilities can upgrade to PreSonus Studio One Pro, which offers a similar interface and more advanced features.
Continuing the theme of competing with GarageBand, Fender is betting on the cross-platform nature of its workstation. According to the system requirements, the DAW is compatible with the following operating systems:
Depending on the operating system, the workstation can be found in the Apple App Store, Windows Store, Google Play Store, or on the official Fender website. You can also find more details about the DAW software there.
