Bitwig NAMM 2019 videos

[pdxindy]

What I meant is if that's a separate environment, then they need to maintain & develop 2 modular environments, which - considering the size of dev team - wouldn't be preferable.

You already know the answer

the Bitwig Devs are too smart to develop 2 separate modular environments... one is obviously a subset of the other...

[SLiC]

Some cool stuff in that last video - grid scaling (will be great for 4K and MS Surface etc) and block colour coding.

Some cool quotes from the video-

Q- How big can the grid get
A- Yes!

I also liked that he was unapologetic about making music being 'fun' and that the grid was about the 'workflow' to keep the music playing whilst you tweak and create....From Live clip launching/arranging to now Live sound design!

[operator]

Some cool quotes from the video-

Q- How big can the grid get
A- Yes!

hahahahaha ... thought the same thing.

[Yokai]

I like it a lot... this will be major fun working with. But like Antic asked a few posts up, I would be curious aswell, If we could change the already present native devices, now or in the future. (if I understood Antic right...) I would love to recreate the Multiband Dynmics from Ableton (wihtout using the MultibandFX). And i would like to create a similar UI (if possible)

You can already create a fairly close imitation of Ableton's Multiband Dynamics by plopping down a Multiband FX-3 device and then putting one Dynamics device in each container. The general functionality is identical. The only difference is that Ableton's version allows you to set some more extreme values for each "dynamics" device. So for example, it's hard to get the exact sound of OTT out of a Bitwig version, because you can't push the Dynamics devices in Bitwig to the the same extremes.

[pdxindy]

Some cool stuff in that last video - grid scaling (will be great for 4K and MS Surface etc) and block colour coding.

Some cool quotes from the video-

Q- How big can the grid get
A- Yes!

I also liked that he was unapologetic about making music being 'fun' and that the grid was about the 'workflow' to keep the music playing whilst you tweak and create....From Live clip launching/arranging to now Live sound design!

I'm much more enthused about it now after seeing it in action than I was when the first announcement came. Overly complicated modular environments that are tedious to work with just don't interest me that much.

This however, looks like it fulfills the 3 F's... fast, fun, fluid!!

[operator]

You can already create a fairly close imitation of Ableton's Multiband Dynamics by plopping down a Multiband FX-3 device and then putting one Dynamics device in each container. The general functionality is identical. The only difference is that Ableton's version allows you to set some more extreme values for each "dynamics" device. So for example, it's hard to get the exact sound of OTT out of a Bitwig version, because you can't push the Dynamics devices in Bitwig to the the same extremes.

Yes I know... and IT IS possible to create the exact same Preset. It sounds exactly the same as the OTT (when you closly finetune it with the same values)... I even think the dynamics is a exact replica of the ableton one... because it even had the exact same value-steps at ceratain parameters (ratio for example didn´t stepped in 0.01 values at least at the early days of bitwig [without shift + click]) when i recreated the preset and had Ableton opended side by side, I saw that the Parametrs stepped/rastered at the exact same values in both DAWs... which made the coping much more easier for me...

but like I wrote, i would like to avoid using the Multiband FX-3... you always need to go into the low, mid or high band, rather i would like to make a device where you have all 3 visible like in ableton...

EDIT: Sorry for the overuse of the word "exact"... .. still in the process of waking up after a rough night...
AND SORRY for hijacking the thread... let´s get back to NAMM videos...

[Yokai]

You'd think they'd have something more impressive to show than a this generic OSC-Filter-StepSequencer thing. Does this show anything that's not already possible with the current modulators?
Anyway still hyped for this ...

Which of their current synths allow you to drop a waveshaper in before or after the filter?

I'll make the sweeping generalization that most good synth instruments are relatively boring-looking under the covers, and that like 80% of what makes us love one synth over any other synth is the user interface and the type of workflow and visual feedback that the UI provides.

Clearly, the first version of The Grid is focused around that boring but important part. And we might never, ever really get a nice UI layer for The Grid. Or at best, they'll give us scripting and metadata hooks to go off and build our own custom UI graphic elements (ala some of the more professional 3rd-party Max for Live UIs we've seen).

I've never built devices in M4L, but when I look at how NI tries to provide some building-block UI elements for Reaktor, let's just say I'm less than impressed, and it's incredibly difficult to build the type of UI you really want. For example, I recently built a full emulation of Ableton's "Erosion" effect in ReaktorFX, and the UI panel itself turned out to be some incredibly non-intuitive for controlling all the important aspects of the Erosion effect. And buggy. Buggy AF. It was basically unusable for anyone else but myself, so I never even tried to share it around like I originally envisioned. I ended up just building it a different way in a standard Bitwig rack (preset) format, using Bitwig modulators and devices plus some key 3rd party plugins like Pro-Q3, MNoiseGenerator, MUtility, ReplicaXT, and so on. Building it in Bitwig rack-style, I could work around the shitty panel UI issues in Reaktor and condensed the important controls into one shortcut panel, and only need to use one of the key instances of Pro-Q3 as the "draggable bandpass filter" for the effect.

All this is to say that I'm doubtful Bitwig could ever come up with any better approach to the UI part of the puzzle. The UI part is in some ways the hardest part of building audio effects and instruments. Look at why so many people love Serum or Pigments, but turn their nose up at other great synths that are less intuitive or provide less visual feedback.

But here's hoping that Bitwig can prove me wrong!

[Yokai]

The main, number one thing I'm hoping that Bitwig squeezes in before final release of Bitwig 3 is a noise oscillator. I've seen enough videos now showing their set of oscillator modules and it's too barebones. I can live without a wavetable or sample or granular oscillator (for now), but IMO a noise oscillator is critically important for making modern instrument sounds out of basic analog-wave oscillators. I wish I could see a comprehensive list of their filter types too, because modern instrument sounds also rely on a wide array of interesting filter types.

And we know they have the bones of a wavetable, sample, and granular oscillator already, because they're key elements in the new 2.4 Sampler. So I would imagine it wouldn't be that difficult for them to expose those osc types in The Grid.

[Yokai]

Also, has anyone noticed a ring-modulator module yet? IMO this is another must-have in the early version of The Grid. For example, I want to use a filtered wavetable output to audio-rate modulate a filtered white noise generator. Or I want to use a filtered noise-generator to ring-modulate a granular/sample/wavetable generator. And so on. This lets you go WAY beyond what you can do with the four basic analog waveform modulators they have right now.

Like, as an example of what crazy sounds you can get by using noise (and other waveforms) to ring-modulate a more sample-based oscillator, go download the free MRingModulator from Melda Productions. Drop that onto the output of any patch in Serum, then twiddle that "Main Shape" knob (and the "Depth" knob) while you're looping some MIDI clip through Serum. IMO The Grid *must* enable us to do stuff like this internally.

[Jhowas]

Hi
According to you, it will be possible for an envelope to module itself? (like to modulate the attack with the envelope itself, because, in the video, it doesn’t seem possible to do).
Other thing, I think that it will be necessary to add a couple of modules, like a complex waveform generator, and a complex movement module, with EOR EOF EOC, that can interact with itself with multiple shapes and time possibilities. I say so because it seems to be like my dream modular software...and just with these adds, I can consider myself satisfied

[Enrize]

The main, number one thing I'm hoping that Bitwig squeezes in before final release of Bitwig 3 is a noise oscillator. I've seen enough videos now showing their set of oscillator modules and it's too barebones. I can live without a wavetable or sample or granular oscillator (for now), but IMO a noise oscillator is critically important for making modern instrument sounds out of basic analog-wave oscillators. I wish I could see a comprehensive list of their filter types too, because modern instrument sounds also rely on a wide array of interesting filter types.

And we know they have the bones of a wavetable, sample, and granular oscillator already, because they're key elements in the new 2.4 Sampler. So I would imagine it wouldn't be that difficult for them to expose those osc types in The Grid.

[Yokai]

Awesome! Thanks for catching that! I wonder why they don't have that Osc type listed in the OSC section of module types?

[Enkerli]

Also, has anyone noticed a ring-modulator module yet?

Yes.

[Enkerli]

The part of that video which caught me off-guard is when Dave said that it’d take up to a month before we got access to the beta. Not surprising, come to think of it. But something made me think that it was really imminent, like right after NAMM.

A general point from this and many posts here and elsewhere is that, with no offense to anyone involved, it sounds like communicating with the wider community isn’t Bitwig’s forte. Sounds like a “company culture” thing, not a personnel problem. And it might not matter much, in the end. But it “explains a lot” if I think of Bitwig as an organization with a “comms problem”.
This includes the way demos sound. Some people might really enjoy them, but they don’t sound like an efficient way to showcase what BWS can do. There have been several comments to the effect of “if BWS can do such cool stuff, how come the company’s demos don’t sound so cool?” Some of this is a question of taste but other parts are about the company focusing on developing its flagship product, not impressing people through performance. (Imagine if they had someone like Andrew Huang do their demos…)

Again, it’s probably more of a difference in emphasis than something which could be solved in one tweak.

For instance, I really enjoy how laidback and factual Dave is, in those videos. Very nice attitude and he’s very knowledgeable. That’s pretty much what we want when he interacts with people who report on NAMM without being too prepared. (Many questions in each of these videos could be answered from the official announcement.) Sure, in the other videos, Dave made it sound like the new version will be free to anyone who currently has an active plan instead of people who will have active plans in Q2 when the official release happens.
My sense is that the problem is upstream from Dave’s interactions. Clear messaging might even prevent the question from being asked and could even help Dave (or whoever else) answer in a way which makes it clear.
Again, it shouldn’t be the company’s priority.

You'd think they'd have something more impressive to show than a this generic OSC-Filter-StepSequencer thing. Does this show anything that's not already possible with the current modulators?
Anyway still hyped for this ...

Fair enough. And that’s pretty much the “comms problem”. What we’re hearing so far is relatively mundane but The Grid is about doing crazy stuff. That’s kind of a contradictory messaging.

Changing the order of modules within a device is a good example of something we can’t currently do. But it’s also about exposing different parts of the sound design workflow and encapsulating things in our own ways. That part has been shown enough to inspire people who pay attention.

A whole other part which may not sound that important to most people but ends up being impactful is about “appropriating” devices: making them our own and making them appropriate for our contexts. Some of this is simply learning. But it’s not about abstract knowledge about the difference between ring modulation and frequency modulation, to be tested on an exam. It’s an increased capacity to do the things we want to do, developing skills which are directly useful, right now.
There are many things we can do right now which require quite a bit of time and a fairly significant cognitive load. It’s also relatively hard to discover many of them on our own. We just don’t know what can be done until we’ve either done it ourselves or observed someone else do it. Sure, there are some people who’ve already developed a lot of these skills and understand quite a lot about what can be done. But even they could come up with crazier things if they were able to play with the internal modules for some of these devices.
With The Grid, Bitwig users will be able to build up their understanding of quite a few things, from the ground up. For instance, building up from a simple math module as an oscillator. Starting from something relatively complicated and tweaking a few things is easier to do when you have the whole layout. Breaking Phase-4 apart would be just so interesting. Sure, we could reproduce many parts of it. But imagining if we could have a “preset-compatible” version of Phase-4 as a grid, without having to reverse-engineer the whole thing. That’s actually a pretty cool aspect of Reaktor, which is somewhat surprising given the fact that NI sells its Reaktor-based synths. Since Bitwig isn’t selling plugin versions of Sampler, Phase-4, Polysynth, etc. (and since they don’t support ReWire), one would think that they wouldn’t run the risk of cannibalizing sales by giving us access to the internals.

Speaking of plugins, one reason for me to be excited about The Grid is because of Linux. Haven’t done much with Bitwig on my Ubuntu MATE laptop, in part because I end up relying on plugins which are only available on Windows and macOS. There are cool plugins for Linux, but it can be difficult to install and manage everything (what with different plugin formats). The existing synths in BWS 2.4 do come close to my needs (especially Sampler with its wavetable and granular modes). But what I want is sometimes simpler and sometimes more elaborate. So, creating my own grids on Linux might make me forget all about plugins.

[pdxindy]

I'll make the sweeping generalization that most good synth instruments are relatively boring-looking under the covers, and that like 80% of what makes us love one synth over any other synth is the user interface and the type of workflow and visual feedback that the UI provides.

That is indeed a pretty sweeping generalization.

I love Bazille for the sounds I get out of it. And in general, it is the sound quality and character of a synths sound that most decides for me. If the workflow is bad in some way, that might mean I am not pleased with how effectively I access that sound.

So for me, 80% is not the user interface