Trying to make the switch from cubase. Need some help with simple stuff

[Milkman]

20 year cubase user here. Definitely looking to broaden my horizons, and tired of the same old same old at steinberg. I have a 30 day trial of Bitwig and Im going for it.

Ive been on Bitwig 4(PC) for about 3 hours now, and Ive also watched about an hour's worth of video tutorial content from Bitwig's site and from a couple random youtubers. I have a large preexisting library of software and hardware, including hardware synths and I am skilled at cubase routing, template building, etc.

One major thing seems to keep stumping me. Im trying to simply connect a hardware synth, play midi notes / hear sounds. : /

I have already created instrument tracks and added VST instruments, routed them, and then played them back just fine. No prob. But I cannot get sound, and often cannot even get MIDI activity to/from my hw synths.

Im using a novation 61sl mk3 midi kb. Synths have all been defaulted to channel 1/1, testing them 1 at a time. (This all works on cubase and ableton and standalone.)

-new project
-created an instrument track in bitwig,
-connected my novation controller to the track in, set for any midi channel.
-added the "HW instrument" block to it.
-set HW instrument to channel 1, set my synth(Vector) as note in, also set as sound source at bottom
-the track is armed, I hit a key and I see MIDI activity at the bottom of bitwig next to the HW instrument, and if I hit record the MIDI is captured. I just hear no sound.
-Ive tried various midi sync settings for each test, all settings. Still no sound.
-my synth couldnt receive midi timecode from bitwig on any setting, but was able to send its own clock to bitwig.

I have tried 3 synths with the same result, but all send and record midi. All work fine with basic routing in cubase. I feel like Im missing something obvious, but I really want to get to know this DAW and Im hoping someone might see my problem. Thanks, if so! : )

[Masterofdisaster]

Going from cubase to bitwig is like going from filet mignon to processed meatballs.
Dafuq man how can you switch from the best daw to a crippled old man

[Children of our Stars]

...maybe it's just a matter of taste and workflow...?

[liquidsound]

...maybe it's just a matter of taste and workflow...?

Don’t mention “taste”
We are talking about Filet Mignon!

[Masterofdisaster]

...maybe it's just a matter of taste and workflow...?

... Maybe it's not...?

[Jac459]

Going from cubase to bitwig is like going from filet mignon to processed meatballs.
Dafuq man how can you switch from the best daw to a crippled old man

This remark shows your lack of maturity and knowledge.
You can say a lot about bitwig but not that it is an old man. It is 30 years newer than cubase and it shows... It lacks some maturity aspects of Cubase but it is also much more modern on some other aspects. It is a taste and use cases question of preference between the 2.

And I am quite pretty sure you have no clue what are the strength sand weaknesses of any of these 2 DAWs...

Edit: sorry, I shouldn't entertain these kind of off topic comments.

[Masterofdisaster]

Going from cubase to bitwig is like going from filet mignon to processed meatballs.
Dafuq man how can you switch from the best daw to a crippled old man

This remark shows your lack of maturity and knowledge.
You can say a lot about bitwig but not that it is an old man. It is 30 years newer than cubase and it shows... It lacks some maturity aspects of Cubase but it is also much more modern on some other aspects. It is a taste and use cases question of preference between the 2.

And I am quite pretty sure you have no clue what are the strength sand weaknesses of any of these 2 DAWs...

Edit: sorry, I shouldn't entertain these kind of off topic comments.

LOL sorry you took such an offense of me calling your favorite daw a crippled old man.
Forgive me for having an opinion! Surely you are much better than me. Calling me immature and dumb. Lol. The irony

[Beerhunter]

you might wanna check out videos from Mattias Holmgren : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkJWM8XiO7c

or this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JAyXCp58H8

hope this is helpful

[BobDog]

For the OP, what you are doing sounds perfectly right to me.

So it must be one of two things going wrong:

1. The midi is not getting to your synth.
2. The audio is not getting back.

Can you monitor the audio in another way, direct monitoring?

[Milkman]

Thanks for the serious suggestions. I'll take a pass on the other nonsense. I'm taking this seriously because as I said, I've been using cubase 20+ years. If you, too, are an experienced cubase user, you know exactly why I'd be looking to try out other DAWs. I've built 4 total hardware platforms to find the magic combo that works around most of cubase's multicore issues.

[Milkman]

For the OP, what you are doing sounds perfectly right to me.

So it must be one of two things going wrong:

1. The midi is not getting to your synth.
2. The audio is not getting back.

Can you monitor the audio in another way, direct monitoring?

So far it's confusing why the midi isn't reaching the synth or coming back from the synths. I have enabled direct monitoring on my interface and it is silent. If I plug my midi controller into my synth directly, It plays OK.

I really want to continue with bigwig. I've said I'm going to do this (learn another daw) 10x in the last 15 years, but have never done it because cubase is such a *instrument* for me. But from what I've seen in bigwig, I want to take it seriously. Looks good, has a work flow I understand and remotely resembles some of the project window from it.

And this morning, I created a new project again, added the same HW instrument, and this time set different midi in/out for my synth. Now its channel 1 in, 3 out. Suddenly my Vector Synth is working in Bigwig!! I'm not entirely sure... why it's working now, and sync'ing midi time code as well. Same config wasn't syncing last night.

My config is the same as last night, but with different midi in/out channels. I can run this either way in cubase. I guess if my synth is set to read/write to the same midi channel, bigwig doesn't like that.

Now it's on to my other synths and VSTs. I'm going to test them all for quirks and see how this goes. So far I appreciate bigwigs work flow more than ableton, that's for sure.

Thank you for the replies! I'll check out those videos above for some more deeper dives, and maybe I can have some music coming out of this thing by tonight.

[BobDog]

I'm not an expert in the HW instrument as I just do it with multiple tracks (Midi + Audio).

I think the midi channel you set in the HW instrument will map any midi entering the chain to that channel before sending it out via midi.

If you set it to "Keep Channel", with "Local Off" set on the synth, does that get you where you want to be?

Screenshot 2023-06-01 at 19.04.50.png

[Milkman]

I'm not an expert in the HW instrument as I just do it with multiple tracks (Midi + Audio).

I think the midi channel you set in the HW instrument will map any midi entering the chain to that channel before sending it out via midi.

If you set it to "Keep Channel", with "Local Off" set on the synth, does that get you where you want to be?

Screenshot 2023-06-01 at 19.04.50.png

Thank you for this. The way you did this above, was my first try. Coming from cubase, having an instrument track that is connected to an audio track made sense. That didnt work for me, so I fell back to just using the "HW instrument" as its own track, which at least got me sound.

Now that my "HW inst" tracks are working, I need to capture their audio and MIDI. MIDI is already captures, so Im assuming NOW I can make some audio tracks and connect their inputs to the outputs of these HW Instr tracks. Diving in now!!!

About relative volume:
Now I have 2 synths working, Vector and Microfreak, now its on to microKORG.

I notice the default instrument channel volume is -10db. When I raise that to -1, I can still barely hear my hw synths. Do I just need to stack some compression and maximizers? In your experience, in default config mode are your external instruments quiet? I also notice my software synth, pigments, defaults to very low sound volume, regardless if I bring the mixer to -1 so it isnt just HW.

My main synth (the Vector) is connected to analog ins, which have gain control set from there. This level of analog gain still doesnt make Bitwig any louder. If I crank it much more, Ill get hiss. Is there a trick to making things louder?? What just put a super maximizer on the main outs??? lmao

[Milkman]

Ive got all 3 of my hw synths working. Wooot!!!
Problem was that at least one of them needed different MIDI in/out channels (the Vector writes arp to diff channel than other midi and it NEEDED this), and then the second part of the problem was... user error, of course. When building the audio INPUTS on bitwig when I first started it up, I swapped the names of the KORG and MICROFREAK audio channels lmao! They werent identified, so I just guessed which was which. Once I renamed them, things made more sense. =P

Now Im wondering why everything is so... quiet?? Im about to crank it all up.

[BobDog]

Good stuff

Have you tried the gain and output in the HW instrument to boost things?