Bitwig Workflow

[ecsmix]

Hi everybody?

How are you?

I hope you and your family are safe and sound.

I would like to know how you guys manage loops with swing and how to put all loops and midi on the same swing?

Like so, audio 10 loops with different swing( hats, perc, etc...)

1. Split onsets and move the pieces to match midi/audio position on other audio/midi loops and other loops or
2. Split to drum machine then use the general midi swing on bitwig?

Which one sound the best in your opinion? Like keep the same sound quality of the original loop.

The repitch algorithm on drum machine is good enough?

Or would you use third party solution like Geist the export it's midi to bitwig?

Thanks.

[antic604]

1. Split onsets and move the pieces to match midi/audio position on other audio/midi loops and other loops or
2. Split to drum machine then use the general midi swing on bitwig?

Bitwig really isn't ideal for working with grooves, I'm afraid:
1. You can't easily match say audio loop to MIDI, because the actual notes won't be moved in the MIDI clip, as "groove" is applied during playback, so it's invisible
2. Drum Machine uses Sampler to contain the slices and Sampler doesn't have any time-stretching, which might be fine for drum loops

But of the 2 I'd definitely go with 2nd option and just manually tweak the pitch & sample playback rate in Sampler if necessary.

[pdxindy]

1. Split onsets and move the pieces to match midi/audio position on other audio/midi loops and other loops or
2. Split to drum machine then use the general midi swing on bitwig?

Bitwig really isn't ideal for working with grooves, I'm afraid:
1. You can't easily match say audio loop to MIDI, because the actual notes won't be moved in the MIDI clip, as "groove" is applied during playback, so it's invisible
2. Drum Machine uses Sampler to contain the slices and Sampler doesn't have any time-stretching, which might be fine for drum loops

But of the 2 I'd definitely go with 2nd option and just manually tweak the pitch & sample playback rate in Sampler if necessary.

Yeah... groove is not Bitwig's strong point! (and that is being kind)

You can render midi with groove applied to another track to get a midi template containing the groove for aligning audio...

[ecsmix]

Hi Guys, thanks for your feedback.

I understand the limitations of Bitwig regarding this, but I was wondering your workaround to that.

[JHernandez]

My workaround is to never use pre-made loops.

But if I did I'd probably use this :https://accusonus.com/products/regroover

That said, Bitwig should get on that groove stuff pronto, both of audio and midi. It's kinda silly it's not in there. Come on man! -Joe Biden

[u-u-u]

For a whole project it might* be possible to automate global shuffle amount. (*might = I tried once and if I remember correctly it worked)
You could do that from a launcher clip on master track and you could set the loop length to a bar maybe even shorter. This way you can have different shuffle per beat. Set up multiple clips like that -> you have different "grooves" for different sections of a song / live performance.
Also you can disable shuffle for some other launcher clips. This way you can at least have some clips playing straight and some following the global shuffle/"groove".

[ecsmix]

Hi Guys, I would like to let you know, that the BEST solution, even better than Ableton is FXPANSION'S GEIST, Simply brilliant and overrated.

You can can transform audio loops to midi, with perfection and superior sound quality than BW, and use the general groove in BW or extract groove from other loops and apply, export the midi, and everything else you need to apply groove to.

The best and fastest workflow.

[horizon7]

BWS is great for any groove or beat making, but when it becomes to swing there is only one global swing feature.
I wish the next update could afford this since swing per track definitely makes difference.

For creating beats you can re-arrange specific loop but to be honest I feel it’s daunting when arranging different parts of the audio (from the audio editor) I rather go directly to slice them via drum machine it’s more practical & clear.

Also you can slice audio via multisample but it’s still not comfortable I think the scroll bar at piano keys GUI needs to be thiner & duplicating the mapped sample needs to be automatically moved beside the 1st mapped sample.

Hope that helps,

[ecsmix]

Hi horizon7, thanks for you input.

I was wondering the majority of people using Bitwig don't use groove at all, 100% straight 1/16 Q?

I would like to hear from you and others how you deal with groove/swing in your music using Bitwig.

How much of the global? 5,10,20,30 %?

I just saw a Chris Lake video where he uses 6 different swing grooves on his music, each part has a different groove or percentage. PML has a groove course that demonstrates that as well.
https://youtu.be/6LbjrN22t5o?t=2805

since almost all daws have some kind on audio swing feature, but Ableton is the easiest and best.

Geist 2 is cool, maybe the only one in the market, was developed with slicing audio loops in mind, so you can export midi and use the global groove from BW, works great and have several other features efx, etc...I don't think Maschine has that.

[u-u-u]

What I don't like in BwS is that when I have shuffle active and record shuffled notes from my MIDI keyboard (playing the same shuffle I hear from the song that's already there), for those new notes, the shuffle isn't compensated. That means quantizing them afterwards is harder (some notes might be shifted to the right instead of to the left). Also for the new recorded clip, the shuffle is active by default so they might be shuffled even more.
I understand that for recording MIDI from external sequencers that aren't shuffled that might be the desired behaviour but for recording manually while monitoring the song that isn't cool and that's why I don't use the Shuffle feature in BwS personally.

[JHernandez]

Yes life would be easier with some kind of groove engine. Currently I play stuff *live* until I get it right. For more program style stuff I use the abandoned fxpansion Tremor as a sequencer ahead of a device, it has it's own swing.

[mosska]

well, i have to say that if they dont implement proper groove options into bitwig then...im not going to stop using BW of course.. but what the hell then ???

[ecsmix]

What I don't like in BwS is that when I have shuffle active and record shuffled notes from my MIDI keyboard (playing the same shuffle I hear from the song that's already there), for those new notes, the shuffle isn't compensated. That means quantizing them afterwards is harder (some notes might be shifted to the right instead of to the left). Also for the new recorded clip, the shuffle is active by default so they might be shuffled even more.
I understand that for recording MIDI from external sequencers that aren't shuffled that might be the desired behaviour but for recording manually while monitoring the song that isn't cool and that's why I don't use the Shuffle feature in BwS personally.

Did you try increasing the time grid 1/128 1/512 1/1024 or more?

After than quantizing to those higher grid values?