A "Made with Bitwig Studio" Topic

[grymmjack]

When you say "made with BWS" do you mean only the stuff it comes with, or just the host with any number of plugs?

[bulusglo]

Hi Grymmjack,

I thought, to start with, that one could just tell what's BwS and what's not.
If only BwS's kick device is used, why not
Imo, the interest of a post relies on the poster.
As we may learn something about BwS.

B.

[Fjorko]

Very good. I like it. ! Sounds really crisp & the bass is really lush. Do you master yourself ? If so - what do you do and what do you use ?

Thanks a lot! Bass is done with Diversion.. kick is tuned carefully.. adds a nice tone to the whole thing..

This isn't actually mastered at all.. its come straight out BW like this with nothing on the master. I do however normally have my own mastering chain on my live set, or do my own when sending to friends/dj's, if its not already due to be done professionally. In fact, its kinda weird posting this here and not posting to my SC and FB followers - was originally uploaded just for my own purposes

To answer your question though, for mastering, I just use good ol' Izotope 5, as I find I can coax a good sound out of it (after some help from a pro a few years back)

Cheers for the kind words! I'm really enjoying Bitwig so far, coming from AL (yes i might be what some call the target audience! ).. and finding the much better PDC a real treat as my tracks are automation heavy.. now all I need is a real way to deactivate CPU usage on plug without deleting them and I'll be happy happy happy!

Do you have monitors? Cause if not you should defo get some.. the quality of your track from just using headphones is good! The only think Id say is maybe the kick has a bit to much weight or length to it.. but this I only really picked up on right at the end when the kicks repeat a bit faster (bit of overlap on the sub). - But certainly very nice all round

Anhken - a well known Trance/Progressive producer tipped me as well and said I should make my kick a little more punchy - which I tried to do last night, but I think I may have screwed it up now....does it sound better or worse now?. I think it sounds too thin TBH. Must say i need to work very hard on bass and kick design still, those are my weak points atm, but I'm determined to get it right !

[grymmjack]

Hi Grymmjack,

I thought, to start with, that one could just tell what's BwS and what's not.
If only BwS's kick device is used, why not
Imo, the interest of a post relies on the poster.
As we may learn something about BwS.

B.

10-4.

How about a sort of microblog journal of our experience too? I can get on board with that so I'll give this a try.

Here is something I made recently that I happened to be using BWS when I made it.

It started with me creating a Polysynth preset from scratch. I tweaked it until it sounded good on it's own but found that the unison was a little funky when I boosted it to 2V on each OSC. Doing this gave a sort of random panning effect that I didn't quite understand, so I set "R" to retrigger/sync up the OSC's and that seemed to help reduce the panning artifacts. I was simply trying to figure out what kind of unison setup there was under the hood as the documentation is pretty sparse in the manual (that I could locate given my patience level and inspiration level at the time; RTFM is not conducive to having fun when I find myself "in the zone").

Here's a screenshot of the patch:


Anyway, after not getting that just so, I added in a Mid-Side Split FX device to the Polysynth FX container and then was very pleased to see MID and SIDE containers within that device itself. My gut reaction was to drag a Tool device into each slot and adjust the Gain parameter up or down as needed, and I went down this road and created a little preset that had macros assigned to MID and SIDE gain so I could effectively widen or narrow the stereo image more precisely (or this might be a placebo) than the Tool device's single width knob. However, after going through this process I noticed tiny little dB meter sliders were already underneath the MID and SIDE containers of the M-S Split device and yep, the BWS coders already thought ahead and put this right in the base effect. So I smiled, deleted the old preset I proudly had made just before, and experimented with the macro knobs mapping the now on the full outside part of the polysynth to adjust Mid and Side instead of wrapping a wrapper which is silly. That worked great! It gave me the kind of control over the stereo image I was lacking natively in Polysynth to tame that unison pan spread a bit.

Here's a screenshot of the Width mapping in the patch:


Further inspired by the natural symbiotic relationship I was experiencing whilst planted firmly in the aforementioned zone (sorry to say that like a sir, it's just a goofy thing I do sometimes when I'm passionate and excited about something), I continued to tweak my Polysynth patch. I added MW support on the filter to widen that up a bit for emphasis, I added cutoff, resonance, envelope, and decay macro mappings for the filter, one for unison, and one for width. Then I added a multi-macro I called Age which subtly modulates Filter resonance, frequency, osc FM, the main pitch, and the Noise mix amount by a tiny amount at around 50 hZ using an S&H waveform on LFO1, and another mapping called Instable which simply adjusts the sweet spot of the LFO 1 depth knob increasing the age. Turning Age all the way down I get a clean beautiful patch, but as I increase Age it becomes a little less predictable with artifacts thanks to the S&H, and then I can tweak Instable knob to tune the intensity of this.

Happy as a lark, I now had a base patch and was inspired to build a simple arpeggio riff which I found myself recording in real time to capture the notes, then went into the piano roll and fine tuned. This process was interesting. Typically what I would do in Ableton is exactly this, record in realtime right to a session view clip. I usually do this without record quantization enabled because I like some of the human feel included when I capture and then refine in copies of the captured clip which are sliced to locate the good parts. So I did the same thing in BWS, however I did so using the Arrange View because it happened to be on my main monitor. The layout of the monitors was decided by BWS when I chose Dual Display (Arranger/Mixer) and they wanted the Arrange view on my main monitor. I disagreed later, but was fine with this situation for now. However it influenced my creative flow in a way which wasn't exactly bad, but also would like BWS very much to remember hey this guy likes his main monitor to have this configuration just so, so when he switches between layouts, let's help him out and put it just how he likes it. For now I can cope. But I was in Arrange view mode and that was not how I normally worked, but I was too inspired to care at this time.

Anyhow, from here I recorded about 8 different riffs over the next few minutes, sliding them around on the timeline and using the loop locators to simulate (for some reason it didn't occur to me that I could just move the window with my mouse manually LOL) region based riff capture like in Live, to make sure I had sufficient room and stuff to record my spontaneous noodling.

I was just having a blast listening to my new patch and really happy with how responsive Polysynth envelopes seemed, how really bread and butter and immediate it was, how useful the modulation system was, and so on. I spent a good 15 minutes just kind of noodling and riffing and this is the evasive zone part that I am always seeking and homing in on; the inspiration part. So after I recorded this raw stuff I had my work cut out for me and opened up the Edit panel. But before I did this I realized that OH YEAH there is a Session View kind of clip launcher thingy. Why not drag those clips from Arrange into nice little slots to organize the work I've made for myself in a much nicer way. So I did that, I did some rough razoring and dragged sections the clips from Arrange to the Launcher. Then deleted my arrange view so it was clean.

Here's what it looked like in the project after I recorded the soundcloud part:


I thought, I know BWS has ghost support with multiple layers and I remember seeing little lock icons in my GUI fly-by, so I'm sure there must be a way to make this workflow that was to follow (then take the mess and make it nice and OCD compatible snapping to the grid with some manual TLC and quantization) much better than in Ableton because Ableton sadly lacks this feature. I spent the next few minutes trying to figure out how to go about this. I first started double clicking the Launcher clips I now had my work captured into, but I found through some effort and frustration that Launcher clips are not the proper scope to support layers, and the drop down picker for Background in the Edit pane had no influence here (I thought perhaps I could choose another launcher clip from a scene row context but nope). Then I couldn't determine why it wouldn't work. My programmer instinct kicked in and I thought hrm, I know this works, it must be tied to the scope of each view. Meaning: to use layered editing it would make most logical sense to do so in Arrange, Launcher would be really hard to program for scope inclusion kind of UI stuff and so on a hunch I dragged the clip I was editing (the first in the slot of Scene 1) into Arrange, and duplicated the track so I had the entire thing, polysynth + MIDI clip right there twice identically. Then I went back to edit, and noticed AHA! There the layers were.

So now I was back into the groove, only after a small hiccup of user frustration because I couldn't grok where it would all happen with layered editing. Some explanation is needed at this time. I'm sort of OCD, OK I'm a LOT OCD, and I like things just so. I find that the BWS quantize is not quite perfect. For example, I had that mess of notes selected, and hit Q to quantize expecting that it would quantize and somehow read my mind what I wanted (LOL) and do so in little perfect squares. Well, quantize works to snap the beginning of the note, but not the length, and there is a bug (or actually I'm more inclined to think this a feature because I quite got on with it after a while) where the first press of Q quantizes in some kind of offset mode, e.g. the notes start positions stayed where they were as a group, but didn't snap to the grid, however it totally did quantize something, it just wasn't to the grid.

Here is what it looked like:


Second press of Q snapped my notes to the grid just as I wanted for the start of the note.

Like this:


The third press of Q somehow made the magic happen IF the note was sufficiently long enough at it's end tail bit to be included in the invisible code magnetism that this algo uses.

Like so:


I get it, obviously I undid what I did then, and went straight to the histogram quantizer bits as I recalled there was a END % slider. This didn't have any effect though, I was expecting a sort of ghosted real time response here for some reason (I blame gol and Image Line for ruining me in this regard as the FL piano roll is so good in that way and thought hmm maybe BWS had some of that feature too) but there was no visual feedback given. It wasn't immediately obvious that I would have to click the APPLY button in this window to make the magic happen so after some futzing I found that but after pressing the notes not long enough to be in that magnet zone to snap their ends to the grid were REALLY compressed to the point where it looked like it would be a total PITA to edit them in my OCD way . I chalked this up to a bug and just moved on because I was too inspired to hop on KVR and start flaming Bitwig about this problem. Dom if you're reading please add this to the list, I would hope the magnet zone for the end snap would be grid centric, perhaps an option for quantize to the grid and ignore this relative stuff (or perhaps it's really a bug).

Anyway now that I had that sorted, I happily went about my way loving the layered edit mode support. The workflow that initially ensued was:

On Arrange view:

1. Drag the raw clip to edit from Launcher to Arrange.
2. Duplicate the track.
3. Delete the duplicate clip copy
4. Hold 3 and drag on duplicate track to create a clip about the size I needed.
5. Double click the new empty clip to edit it in Edit panel.
6. Turn on layers (BWS remembered this after I toggled it once, good on you good guy Bitwig).
7. Lock the raw clip.
8. Press and release 3 to start drawing notes over top in a trace fashion aligned just to the grid as I want. In this way I had my raw capture as a guide for which notes I actually wanted, and I could easily SOLO that raw track to hear which ones I wanted most, and which were poor playing and safe to ignore.
9. Realize I need a different color for the source (the track I'm tracing) and change it in the Arrange view (first I tried to do the color change in the ghost editor window pane area since the colors were also shown there; I tried to click the little color chip on the left side thinking somehow it would be possible this way. I blame Studio One for this brainfart).
10. Happily pencil my new notes in.
11. SOLO the original and A/B my new version.

I went through this process about 3 more times until it occurred to me this was more work and micro editing than my current zone presence wanted to tolerate so I modified above by instead erasing the entire clip, moving existing notes in the duplicate and pressing Q a bunch of times to make them as grid-like as I could, and manually fixing those really short (HORRIBLY INTOLERABLY SHORT BUT BITWIG YOU ARE SO SEXY I LOVE YOU ANYWAY) notes by manually zooming in and dragging them out to the right. Thing about BWS right now is when it works it's absolutely a joyous symbiotic extension of myself but when it doesn't, man it really is frustrating because it's so close. It's sort of like having sex with the wife and being interrupted by your daughter who wants a drink of water the first time, a stuffed animal to sleep with the second time, and just before you get back to it and are so close to the climax coming in to interrupt you with absolutely no good excuse at all just because she's a little bored and can't sleep. OK bad metaphor, but it's like sex when it works and it's so good.

After editing the clips I dragged them back into the Launcher and replaced the original, and worked my way down the column Scene by Scene until I was done.

At this time I cleared Arrange, having all my edited clips raring to go, and then recorded some Launcher erm...launchings into the Arrange in the same way I did with Live. THIS worked exactly so, and it was a pleasure to use. However, there was a catch.

In Ableton I can create dis-contiguous selections of clips in the Session View and then use the ENTER key to launch them all in one go. I cannot do this in BWS and I desperately want to. I want to because I cannot manually click the discrete little UI click target areas fast enough in time with my zone based clip riffing. Yes I can map these things to MIDI, buy a controller, and so on to do it, but really this would be EXTREMELY appreciated if it were added. For example, I often would create dis-contiguous selections in Ableton that spanned many tracks, different scenes, and so on because I could be surgically precise. How I do it in Ableton is hold CTRL key on my computer keyboard and click with the mouse. That's it. Then FIRE them all just so with ENTER. It's beautiful because it really appeals to that programmer/OCD nature of mine and I love it and really miss this small thing in BWS. I hope this can be added because it's a real time saver. Anyway, I continued through this recording a few different takes of Arrange view recordings of all my clips, then finally was satisfied with the order I did them in and did some final editing in Arrange view using 1 and temporarily some 5 and a little bit of 2 held down to keep things lined up just right (I was off a few bars as a result of using mouse only and no multiple select->fire workflow).

In Bitwig this dis-contiguous selection is possible:


However, pressing ENTER ONLY fires the bright white outlined one (the last click even though it looks like it would fire them all).

So then I said, wow, this is a lot of fun. I don't really need Ableton anymore. Of course this is newlywed syndrome and I encounter it with every new host, but with BWS it's particularly acute because the GUI is SO DAMNED GORGEOUS and the workflow is like almost there to be so much more fun than live. I look at Live now, which BTW I love still but not the GUI as much as BWS as a sterile kind of operating room vs. a comfy sound-hacker lounge that is BWS.

At around this time I decided OK now I need to make my nest in this host, these core things out of the way that I can totally cope with to get things going and keep me mostly in the zone will no doubt improve over time. I spent the next few hours going through Kontakt 5, and creating presets for every one of my favorite multis, 3rd party things, etc. Since BWS does not support FXP or FXB loading or saving I decided I'd just suffer this and use the internal preset system WHICH BTW is quite GREAT! And guess what, after using it with K5 I didn't mind nearly as much that it couldn't do FXB/FXP because here's why: the lack of this feature forcing me to use the internal feature on offer made me be much more selective about what I would really use vs. what I would just collect and hoarde. This is a key subtle thing in a good creative tool: minimalism. I know it's goofy and contrary to think that less is more and I campaigned for FXB/FXP support on Q&A in beta, and have pestered everyone about it here and so on, and I STILL WANT IT, but man the preset system is really robust and well implemented. The browser support and the way it all ties together, the whole the sum of the parts, really makes a lot of sense to me. So after I went through K5 I did the same for Guitar Rig, then I did the same with Reaktor.

Now I ran into a problem with ReaktorFX here because I originally had all my plug-ins in different folders like so: 1 folder for FX, 1 for Instruments. Then inside there each of the DLLs in question. The reason I do this is because Abletons GUI representation for the icons are too similar for FX and Instruments in their browser, hence it's just a habit I got into to work around that design choice. What I found however, is BWS GUI is MUCH better at distinguishing what from what because of simple 1 color: orange. I LOVE ORANGE and grayscale BTW, so big props to the design team But this orange this tiny little decision made it so that I don't need these sub-folders it's easy to see the waveform orange plus plug orange icon is an FX and the white and orange is a instrument. WHITE + keys icon = instrument. Duh. Orange waveform = audio = FX in my mind. BRILLIANT!

Guess what happened next? Inspired by this minimalism I questioned my need for my plug-ins. Each one was looked at with a cynical critical eyeball and sized up for actual use (I go through this process when I migrate to a new host EVERY time, it's a real bore). What remained after this is just the bare necessities. Except that wasn't true because later I would go on to buy Molekular (with 0 buyers remorse I'll add that plug-in is ridiculously good) to "fill the hole that BWS has when compared to Ableton". This of course was my GAS addict talking here, the holes are imaginary and nearly everything on offer as default devices coupled with the unified modulation system and preset system totally is enough, I'm just a greedy glutton and I just got my tax refund (coincidence NI comes out with this must have plug-in around this time? I think not). After putting all the FX and Instruments into one plug-in folder, ReaktorFX worked fine no problem (note it doesn't work if you have ReaktorFX.dll and Reaktor.dll (ReaktorFX.dll is a stub dependent on Reaktor.dll) in separate folders and at the same time have Reaktor.dll in the one but not in the other and I think this is a plug-in ID thing, BWS says hey you have this Reaktor.dll plug-in in your instruments folder, you're not getting it twice, and maybe that confuses the stub, just a hunch no proof, but the single-folder-to-rule-them-all approach totally worked.

Anyway, after making all of these presets for K5, Reaktor, and GuitarRig, I found this hole MUCH MUCH smaller.

Here's what the browser looks like when I click on Reaktor5 at the top:


The perception of what I had on offer was immediate, I have tons of power with these 3 plug-ins plus BWS own stuff, and that's good enough. Add a little cytomic, a little sugarbytes, and a little bit of glitch2, nexus, permut8 (soniccharge rules), pianoteq, spire, sylenth1, and my beloved TP Sonitex-1260 (adore that one!) and I'm sorted. I am reminded of the scene in the movie The Jerk starring Steve Martin: "I only need this lamp, and this ashtray and this chair and that's all I need!" and he goes on to say "I only need this lamp, and this ashtray, and this chair, and this paperweight and this doorstop and that's all I need." continue this until he's literally unable to walk out the door fully encumbered by all his needs that quickly grew out of hand to immobilize him (hillarious scene that one!).

So long story short too late, hopefully some read this far. I spent my hard earned on Molekular (recalling how awesome NI plug-ins are and having a little GAS wanting to fill up my exclamation prefixed Reaktor synths and effects (these are the Reaktor Player ones - I put a "!" in front of them to pull them to the top of the preset browser; in this way Monark isn't buried by a bunch of Analogic Filter Box, and so on.

I spent about 30 minutes stunned and speechless by Molekular and threw this together.

40% heavy creative lifting by NI Molekular
10% the random looops I chose from the BBVSTi (beat burner a free plugin, google it) waveform content folder,
50% BWS workflow outlined above.

A GOOD TIME TO BE SURE!

I just simply cleared the Arrange view, knocked together a basic Vokoder patch in Molekular, watched the tutorial vids from Pointblank (really great videos guys!!!) to learn about pitch-snap and the ins and outs a bit of Molekular, and I was off back into the deep end of the zone. I recorded this in realtime, launching clips that I had edited into OCD goodness with my manual then Q mashing grid loving from just before, and dragged the first 8 loops into an audio track, plopped Molekular preset (which I did create and put into BWS browser so it was 1 operation drag the preset into blank Arrange area instant clip, instant plug load, instant reaktor loading of the player for Molekular instant erection). Then I recorded in realtime launching those clips, tweaking the knobs like a madman (really only one or two knobs, mainly the LEVEL controls pattern knob which I tweaked (and you'll hear it very obviously in the soundcloud shared track) pretending to be some kind of Fatboy Slim wannabe, after enabling the RECORD and WRITE automation.

Here's what I did to Molekular (thanks Point Blank for those videos!)


I was skeptical if BWS would properly capture my session in this way, since it was new and all and everyone has their pitchforks and flame tongues in hand on KVR. But I just trusted because that's what kind of guy I am, and I was rewarded at the end of it all with a perfectly captured session of spontaneous zone riffing through clips and a great workflow.

Here's what Arrange View looked like after capture:


The session output is definitely not everyone's cup of tea I'm sure but guess what:

1. I would have never made this without BWS.
2. I would have never made this without Molekular.
3. I am emotionally tied to the success of Bitwig and a huge fan and I cannot wait to see what happens next.

https://soundcloud.com/grymmjack/molekular-2

Hopefully someone finds value in this long winded journal. I am a firm believer in garbage in, garbage out. I hope that this helps, honestly, and I also hope selfishly that dom or the bitwig guys read this and extract my FR's and BR's

Cheers, KVR! You rarely disappoint me!

Here is the Polysynth patch:
download

[ThomasHelzle]

Wow, really epic but worth the read
Great stuff!

I didn't follow where you said that layered editing doesn't work for you with the clip launcher? I just tried and it worked for multiple selected clips?

The "Enter launch all selected clips even if not in the same scene" sounds like a good idea. +1

I just did something similar with creating Reaktor presets. I really hate this part of Reaktor but now it is so much less pain. Really worth the effort and a good way to extract "favorites" (and yes I want 5-Star-Rating in BWS browser ).

If you have the same vst twice in your library, the first one the plugin scan encounters is used and the second dismissed AFAIK. Actually makes sense IMO. This way I found out I had some plugins twice in different versions...

I agree that the layouts need to remember user choices. I have two monitors and they are arranged 2-1 (for technical reasons) and BWS always opens the windows inverted each time I switch presets.
I also think the presets need a bit of work, not much for my personal use, but a bit more flexibility would be great.

And yes, Molekular looks awesome

Cheers,

Tom

[dom@bitwig]

Great and extensive journal! Appreciated, nice to read about your "journey" and your thoughts!

[Lesha]

Great read, and a nice track, also

[bulusglo]

10-4
Here is something I made recently that I happened to be using BWS when I made it.
...

Thank you !
The music's length (13 mn) matches the post's length

[Costa Rica]

I can't find the vocals. You know.. the demo song

[SVideo]

My first track in Bitwig in Orchestral Cinematic style. (sorry for Audio Watermark)

[bulusglo]

First video on this topic, with BwS playing the tune.

Sooo good

Thank you.

[ThomasHelzle]

Nice!

Her voice should be a bit more cinematic too

Cheers,

Tom

[ElliottStanleyMusic]

Alright this is going to sound sound really bad after what you guys posted but I couldn't finish this due to computer problems (rendering took 3 attempts because my pc kept turning off). I only realised after I'd done this that the sub was miles too loud so while mastering the audio file I had to automate a highpass filter to make it sound listenable. Seriously the project is huge because of the way bitwig makes a process for each plugin. This is my first attempt at anything proper in bitwig (except some weird psytrance thing) so be gentle
https://soundcloud.com/elliott-stanley- ... re/s-rvktI
I also wanted to say that most of this is polysynth, again, for technical reasons. The main lead is polysynth and the growl is native external modulation. All the saws and other stuff is polysynth too. Only other main synths that aren't native are Massive and some atari emulator vst. oh yeah and way too much compression on the mastering, sorry about that :/

[ElliottStanleyMusic]

Doublepost, but I made some more decent loop thingys
https://soundcloud.com/elliott-stanley- ... twig-stuff
again, nothing special so I didn't bother with mastering. Sorry about the quiet.

[Fjorko]

2nd Bitwig Track up...

Again - basic tune, but its my second track made with BWS - even with all it's missing features, and my limited gear ! LOL !....

https://soundcloud.com/fjorko/midnight

Hope you like.