Bitwig for composing

[a9k1tp]

Bitwig has the weakest piano roll now. Hope they work on it.

Combine the piano roll with note-grid, note fx, containers, modulators, operators, its pretty powerful stuff.

Yes, but not being able to see the changes real time on piano roll is a deal breaker. FL Studio, Cubase and Studio One does this pretty well. Hope Bitwig will catch up like Ableton did.

[_leras]

Tbh, I haven't deeply explored all the options like delays and strum note FX, I need to figure how to bounce out to new midi clips as this would seem more natural to me I think.

I use Bird's Midi Cap plugin to capture midi into clips. Until I found that, the process was on the tedious side for me. With it, it has dropped below the threshold where now I'm happy enough with the workflow. Of course others will have a different threshold.

Have to say, that and the rolling sampler also from bird things look like really handy little utilities!!

[pdxindy]

Have to say, that and the rolling sampler also from bird things look like really handy little utilities!!

Yeah... Rolling Sampler is also super useful!

[Funk Dracula]

I incorporate keyswitched orchestral parts in alot of my work, and have been a Logic user for 20+ years going back to the Emagic era. I recently tried out Bitwig about two months ago, haven't started a new project in Logic since then, and have pretty much settled on Bitwig as my new composing DAW. I'm not saying the piano roll is amazing, but it's fine, especially if you know what you are doing musically and don't need "beginner-esq gimmicks" like scale lock stuff and the like. Give me a piano roll with the usual suspects options and I can get to work.

It just took some getting used to, as different DAWS do things a bit differently of course.

There are some really nice features for composing, like the ability to see other tracks notes in the background as you focus on editing the current track, and you can swap between focusing them, or even bring them all together to be edited simultaneously. The operators and expressions per note are very useful at times.

A not particularly orchestral-centric feature yet, but could very well be as more VSTI's adapt to a CLAP format offering, is the per note polyvoice automation (it's more than MPE expression support that other DAWS and VST3 might have.) I cannot express how amazing it is to switch to micro pitch editing, and tell a single note within a chord to vibrato and pitch bend in a CLAP format synth like DIVA. I can have some notes in a chord pitch bend up, some pitch bend down, and some pan as they slide into to the next chord voicing. As far as I am aware, Bitwig is the only game in town on top of this, and every time I do something with this feature I find myself grinning ear to ear with the results. You'd have to open up 4-8 instances of a VST version of DIVA, each playing one note of a chord on their own track to accomplish the same thing without the per-note polyvoice automations that Bitwig offers in it's piano roll.

Add on to this the massive modulation options, note grid, and a bunch of other features. I really had zero issues switching from Logic to Bitwig, except just getting used to how different DAWS do the same thing in a slightly different way or order of operations yada yada. The switch was just the thing I needed and brought about a massive amount of inspiration and thinking of things differently. Again, not specifically orchestrally related, but the Polygrid, FXgrid, and Notegrid has been my new rabbithole and obsession haha. If you're the Hans Zimmer type who really leans into synth sounds married with orchestral sounds, Bitwig is absolutely the place to be IMO.

I will say Bitwig is definitely more "linear arrangement window" friendly than Ableton is when coming from the mindset of using other DAWS, you can pretend the whole clip launcher thing in Bitwig doesn't even exist and hide their view. I remember trying Ableton last sometime around 2012-ish, and thought to myself "I will never want to work this way" because it forced me into the whole clip thing haha.

Different strokes for different folks I guess, but in my specific case I loved the switch. Just download the trial and give it a whirl is the best answer for you methinks. You might hate it, you might love it.

Cheers

[pdxindy]

A not particularly orchestral-centric feature yet, but could very well be as more VSTI's adapt to a CLAP format offering, is the per note polyvoice automation (it's more than MPE expression support that other DAWS and VST3 might have.) I cannot express how amazing it is to switch to micro pitch editing, and tell a single note within a chord to vibrato and pitch bend in a CLAP format synth like DIVA. I can have some notes in a chord pitch bend up, some pitch bend down, and some pan as they slide into to the next chord voicing. As far as I am aware, Bitwig is the only game in town on top of this, and every time I do something with this feature I find myself grinning ear to ear with the results. You'd have to open up 4-8 instances of a VST version of DIVA, each playing one note of a chord on their own track to accomplish the same thing without the per-note polyvoice automations that Bitwig offers in it's piano roll.

+1

The PolyMod with CLAP plugins is great. It goes far beyond what the usual MPE can do.

Bitwig's Note Expressions are also one of my favorite features that few people mention. I use the Gain expression all the time. Want one chord in a clip to have each of the notes fade in slightly slower than the other, no need to make a separate track with different preset. Just draw an individual gain curve for each note and done.