Audio Bend is similar to Elastic Audio in Pro Tools or Audio Warp in Cubase: it’s a way of bending, stretching and molding audio around in time without affecting the pitch. It is very useful for manipulating an out-of-time performance or can be used creatively to achieve brand new sounds.
First, click the Audio Bend icon to show the AB toolbar
With Version 5, Studio One now supports recording in 64-bit floating-point WAV format, the recommended recording format for audio interfaces with 32-bit resolution. With this format option, the maximum recording and processing precision now reaches 64-bit/384 kHz. To do this is Studio One. I use the Audio Bend menu, grab the audio and use the Slice option with Quantize and Merge selected. It does a pretty good job of slice and quantize, you can also adjust the sensitivity on the detection to get different results.
Select an audio clip (by clicking on it), then click the eye symbol to show bend markers
Then select the bend tool from the tool selection bar. You should have these three buttons selected:
You can now use the bend tool to create and manipulate bend markers.
Red regions have been stretched, Green regions have been compressed
Once a bend marker is in place, it will not move unless you move it. It acts like an anchor for that point in the audio. Therefore, if you want to bend a small portion of audio while leaving the rest unaffected, create two bend markers to the left and right of where you would like to apply the bend. Then you can use AB to mold the audio inside the two bend markers safe in the knowledge that audio outside them won’t be affected.
Depending on what you are applying AB to, you will want to use an appropriate timestretch algorithm to make sure the result distorts the audio as little as possible.
There are four algorithms you can select:
Studio One Audio Bend
Studio One Audio Output
Drums (Transient)- best for drums or other audio files containing numerous transients
Sound (Polyphonic) – best for polyphonic audio such as guitar, piano, or whole songs
Solo (Formant) – best for preserving the fidelity of a singers performance
Audio Bend – a general, all-purpose algorithm
If you need to, you can remove bend markers by selecting one and pressing delete. You can also remove all bend markers at once by right-clicking the audio and clicking “Audio” –> “Remove Bend Markers”