If you want a full explanation of how phasors/oscillators work in Bitwig from the ground up, I've written a more comprehensive explanation of phasors in the Grid a little further down the thread which might help viewtopic.php?p=7914320#p7914320. This is just a quick guide to get people mangling wavetables immediately.
The first step is to stop your Wavetable module running on its own - to do so, we set the numerator to 0. You should see the pitch elements grey out - this means we can drive the wavetable ourselves.
Next, add a Phasor module and connect it to the Phase input of the Wavetable module, then set phase modulation to 100%. This will be the device which gives us our pitch, and drives the Wavetable for us. If you haven't used it before, it's basically just the 'pitch section' of the full oscillators, but separated out on its own. The advantage of doing things this way is that we can manipulate our phase signal before it reaches the actual waveform generation/lookup stage, allowing for some serious sound mangling.
So far, your patch should look like this:
Next step is to add some phase manipulation between the Phasor and the Wavetable module. Here's a quick gif run through how some of them work:
⌀ Shift allows us to choose the starting phase of the current wavetable (make sure you have retrigger enabled on both the Phasor and the Wavetable module for this to work properly).
⌀ Bend is similar to Serum's Asym +-.
⌀ Formant is effectively pulse width modulation, except unlike Serum's it's bipolar (which can get a bit noisy...)
I'm not sure ⌀ Skew has a Serum equivalent, but it's basically a vertical warping of the waveform.
⌀ Sync emulates what would happen if you synced your Wavetable oscillator to another oscillator running at a higher pitch (up to 48 semitones allowed by the module)
Currently I don't think you can emulate Serum's Bend+- mode (without a really messy chain of modules and some careful modulation), but I've put in a request for a symmetrical phase bend module (i.e. bends a phase signal around 0.5) which would let us do that too. If someone can think of a simple way to do that with the existing modules, please let me know
Now what about phase modulation? This is actually trivial to implement in the phase domain - just add whatever signal you want to use as the PM source to your phase signal using the Math -> Add module (or Sum, if you want to do phase modulation with more than one oscillator...):
Now, the huge advantage we have over e.g. Serum is that we're in the modular domain here, so there's no restriction on how many of these processes we apply in one go. You could apply bending, skewing, then phase modulation from two other wavetable oscillators if you like! Changing the order of the processing can have dramatic effects on the resulting sound too, when you're applying more than one manipulation to the phase signal. All the demonstrations above were just using a sine wave for clarity, but obviously all of this works with whatever wavetable/waveform you want to use.
Also just to clarify - you can do all this stuff with the other Bitwig oscillators too (except the Sampler... yep that's a request if you're reading this Bitwig
). Once you dive into the Phase realm there's no going back - it's a lot of sound design potential at your fingertips.
