Bitwig Polyphony and Voice Stacking Explained in Detail

[00:00:00] So voice stacks, what are voice stacks?
[00:00:02] And before I explain what the voice stacks are,
[00:00:04] I maybe also explain what Polyphony is
[00:00:07] inside Bitwig Studio and how it works.
[00:00:09] So we have this whole complex of voices
[00:00:12] in just in one video.
[00:00:14] So when you select an instrument,
[00:00:16] you have in the top left corner here in the inspector,
[00:00:19] you have some options for voices and voice stacking.
[00:00:22] And you also have a display for active voices.
[00:00:25] So at the moment the synthesizer is a monophonic mode.
[00:00:30] So you can only play one voice.
[00:00:32] You can also change this here by clicking and dragging
[00:00:35] and can increase the possible voices.
[00:00:37] You can see down below we have active voices zero
[00:00:40] from five possible voices.
[00:00:43] So back to mono and in monophonic mode,
[00:00:46] you can only play one voice or one note at a time.
[00:00:50] And you also have there an option
[00:00:52] between true and digi mode.
[00:00:54] The true mode here is basically exactly one voice.
[00:00:58] And this reflects basically
[00:01:00] in how certain envelopes behave.
[00:01:03] And I'll show you this in a minute.
[00:01:04] And there's a digi mode here
[00:01:06] where you alternate between two voices.
[00:01:09] There's only one voice active,
[00:01:11] but it's, you know, you're alternating between these two.
[00:01:14] And this also has an effect on envelopes.
[00:01:16] And I show you this in a minute.
[00:01:17] So we have true mode here active
[00:01:19] and we have a slow envelope for filter and amplitude, right?
[00:01:23] So this is how it sounds.
[00:01:24] You can hear the note or the sound slowly fades in.
[00:01:31] And then it slowly fades out.
[00:01:41] So now when you really start and implement your second note
[00:01:45] while the other note is playing,
[00:01:47] while in monophonic mode
[00:01:50] where only one voice can be active,
[00:01:53] you guess probably what happens.
[00:01:55] We play this note and then this note comes in,
[00:01:58] this note comes in and then this note stops from playing
[00:02:02] and this note takes over.
[00:02:04] But there's a difference in digi and true how this behaves.
[00:02:09] So watch, just listen to it.
[00:02:11] Can you hear it?
[00:02:18] It slowly fades in here, but when we play this note,
[00:02:21] we basically take the current state of the envelope
[00:02:25] of the amplitude and the filter
[00:02:28] and just switch the pitch
[00:02:30] without actually re-triggering the envelope
[00:02:33] because there's only one voice.
[00:02:34] So because we have one voice,
[00:02:44] this envelope is still active
[00:02:47] and this amplitude here envelope is also still active.
[00:02:51] We just take it over and clone it over to the second note.
[00:02:54] So the only thing that changes within the voice
[00:02:57] is the pitch, everything else stays the same.
[00:03:00] So sometimes this is not what you want.
[00:03:02] You want to re-trigger your envelope
[00:03:05] when a new note comes in.
[00:03:06] So this is where you switch to digi mode.
[00:03:09] So listen to this.
[00:03:10] (guitar music)
[00:03:13] Okay, so it's the same behavior.
[00:03:18] We still play just only one voice,
[00:03:21] but when you switch from this note to this note,
[00:03:24] we re-trigger the envelope,
[00:03:26] the filter envelope and the amplitude envelope
[00:03:28] because we switching to a second voice
[00:03:31] and disabling the first voice.
[00:03:33] This is basically the digi mode
[00:03:36] where we have two voices or alternating between two voices
[00:03:39] and also says here the description.
[00:03:42] Monophonic playback with two alternating voices,
[00:03:45] envelopes will always re-trigger from zero
[00:03:47] and note input is required to make each voice sound.
[00:03:50] So this is the two different modes between true and digi.
[00:03:56] And when you switch it to polyphonic mode, of course,
[00:04:00] this goes away and now we are able to play two voices
[00:04:04] at the same time because we dialed in your two voices.
[00:04:07] (guitar music)
[00:04:10] You can see we have two voices active here
[00:04:16] from two possible voices.
[00:04:18] So when we paint in the third note here,
[00:04:20] of course, the first note will be disabled
[00:04:23] and the third note takes over.
[00:04:24] (guitar music)
[00:04:27] Okay, to make all three notes playing at the same time,
[00:04:37] we have of course to increase the voices to three.
[00:04:41] (guitar music)
[00:04:43] Okay, this is basically how polyphony works
[00:04:55] in Bitwig Studio across all instruments.
[00:04:57] You can go up here to say 64 voices at the same time.
[00:05:04] This of course uses a lot of CPU so be aware of that.
[00:05:09] And you can also change here basically how much CPU
[00:05:13] you want to spend on your polyphony
[00:05:15] because sometimes you press a lot of chords
[00:05:17] and then you can save CPU by just going down
[00:05:21] and voices possible voices and then disabling automatically
[00:05:25] all the notes while playing new notes.
[00:05:30] Okay, so back here to maybe three polyphony voices.
[00:05:35] So now the interesting part is
[00:05:36] with the whole modulation system of Bitwig Studio,
[00:05:39] you can add here a random modulator
[00:05:43] and this one is polyphonic.
[00:05:44] That's why it says your poly.
[00:05:47] And when we now modulate just something like the cutoff,
[00:05:51] it basically says that every note you play at the same time
[00:05:59] gets a different random modulation from this modulator.
[00:06:03] And you can see this reflector in dots that show up here.
[00:06:08] (guitar music)
[00:06:10] So each note is basically a dot here
[00:06:22] and this dot shows what modulation each voice gets
[00:06:25] from this random mode.
[00:06:27] This is basically a nice way of bringing in a lot of movement,
[00:06:32] a lot of modulation to your sound
[00:06:35] by just using a polyphonic modulator in Bitwig Studio
[00:06:39] on multiple voices.
[00:06:41] And you can also watch always here this active voices,
[00:06:45] how many voices are currently active by Bitwig Studio.
[00:06:48] So if you have a long release time here everywhere,
[00:06:52] then it takes a lot of time before the voice gets disabled
[00:06:56] or deactivated because as long as there is a sound
[00:07:01] on this voice active, Bitwig leaves this basically on.
[00:07:06] (guitar music)
[00:07:09] You can see it's still active here.
[00:07:16] It takes a while.
[00:07:18] (guitar music)
[00:07:20] Then after a while it gets disabled
[00:07:32] and it all depends on your release setting here.
[00:07:36] So you can see when you pull this up,
[00:07:38] it gets instantly disabled.
[00:07:41] Okay, so this is how this works.
[00:07:45] Now to voice stacking, what is voice stacking?
[00:07:47] Voice stacking is basically that you increase the voices
[00:07:52] on each voice itself.
[00:07:54] So when we increase here, maybe this to four,
[00:07:58] means this voice plays this patch four times
[00:08:02] at the same time.
[00:08:03] So we basically multiply all these notes here by four
[00:08:09] because we increase the voice stacks by four.
[00:08:13] And this looks like this.
[00:08:16] (guitar music)
[00:08:19] So here we play two notes at the same time
[00:08:22] with voice stacks off.
[00:08:23] We increase the voice stacking to five.
[00:08:27] (guitar music)
[00:08:32] And we play for each of these voices five stacks.
[00:08:35] (guitar music)
[00:08:40] So to recap this, we have here three notes.
[00:08:45] We have the synth here in polyphonic mode
[00:08:49] with three voices, we can play this.
[00:08:51] (guitar music)
[00:08:53] You can see we have three voices active
[00:08:56] from the three possible voices.
[00:08:58] And then we also can increase voice stacking here
[00:09:01] by two, three, four, five.
[00:09:04] And you can see we have now three times five stacks each
[00:09:09] on each note.
[00:09:10] So five here, five here, and five here.
[00:09:14] Okay, so we have basically 15 of these polysynths
[00:09:18] playing at the same time.
[00:09:20] And the only problem is that each of these polysynths
[00:09:24] basically plays the same sound.
[00:09:27] So this is where the voice stack modulator comes in
[00:09:29] on your polyphonic modulators comes in
[00:09:33] because with the voice stack modulator here,
[00:09:36] you can say, well, I want to change stack one
[00:09:41] to maybe that the cutoff is open.
[00:09:44] And stack two, maybe I want to have it all the way
[00:09:47] to the right end.
[00:09:48] The third voice or the third stack is on the left side.
[00:09:52] Right, something like this, this is something I can do
[00:09:56] to make basically a difference between each stack,
[00:10:00] to make it kind of unique to all the other stacks,
[00:10:05] basically to distinguish these stacks.
[00:10:10] And yeah, this is why the voice stack modulators
[00:10:14] basically very handy for that.
[00:10:17] And you have also your global mode,
[00:10:19] instead of using each of these modulator handle outputs
[00:10:22] here to modulate something,
[00:10:24] you can just say, well, I use the global modulator here.
[00:10:27] And the mode is here minus one to plus one,
[00:10:30] which is basically bipolar mode.
[00:10:32] And you can modulate, for instance, with this here,
[00:10:35] the panning on the right side.
[00:10:37] So you modulate this by one.
[00:10:40] And what we now did is basically,
[00:10:42] we modulated stack one to minus one,
[00:10:46] which is on the left side.
[00:10:47] Stack two is minus 15,
[00:10:50] which is halfway to the left side.
[00:10:53] The third voice takes on the middle position.
[00:10:58] The fourth is on the right,
[00:10:59] so slightly to the right,
[00:11:01] and five is all the way to the right.
[00:11:03] This is what you can do just with one modulator handle
[00:11:06] and this mode minus one to plus one.
[00:11:08] So you spread basically the modulation
[00:11:11] in the panning and across all these voice stacks or stacks.
[00:11:19] And this is basically true for each voice stacks
[00:11:25] here on these nodes.
[00:11:26] So this one does basically the same as this
[00:11:30] and this and this.
[00:11:31] So, yeah, to distinguish between these nodes,
[00:11:36] also you have to use polyphonic modulators.
[00:11:40] So the easiest modulator would be the random modulator
[00:11:43] because it creates a different seed
[00:11:45] for each node automatically.
[00:11:48] So we go to Hertz, we go to polyphonic mode
[00:11:50] and we can modulate stuff here.
[00:11:52] And see when we hit play now,
[00:11:54] we have a lot of dots here representing the voices.
[00:11:57] These are basically 15 dots
[00:12:03] because we have for each voice,
[00:12:06] for each voice and for each of these stacks
[00:12:09] for each voices, a different seed, modulation seed.
[00:12:13] So you modulate basically all the stacks
[00:12:15] and all the voices at the same time differently
[00:12:19] with the cutoff.
[00:12:20] If you want to be a bit more specific,
[00:12:27] then you can use the channels.
[00:12:29] So we can select a node
[00:12:32] and say this is maybe channel two,
[00:12:36] this is channel three.
[00:12:38] Then you can use it channel 16 modulator.
[00:12:41] And then you can target here different parts
[00:12:45] of the policing.
[00:12:46] Maybe you want channel two, which is the second node here.
[00:12:51] Want to have the cutoff open.
[00:12:53] But when you open up the cutoff here,
[00:12:55] you also open up the cutoff on each of these stacks
[00:12:59] of this node, right?
[00:13:01] So to target this,
[00:13:03] you probably have to insert here another voice stack modulator
[00:13:07] and switch this to manual mode.
[00:13:10] In manual mode, you can decide how much modulation amount
[00:13:14] you want to change for each of these stacks.
[00:13:17] So you can say I want to have on stack three
[00:13:20] on all of these nodes cutoff open,
[00:13:25] but then you use channel two here
[00:13:28] and increase only this part, right?
[00:13:32] So it only opens up basically the cutoff on this node
[00:13:36] and on all of these stacks of this node, okay?
[00:13:40] So you have to think in multiple dimensions.
[00:13:43] It gets a bit complicated,
[00:13:44] but when you get the idea how all this relates
[00:13:49] to each other, then it makes more sense.
[00:13:54] So it can be really specific sometimes
[00:13:57] with this channel 16 here and dial in what this node
[00:14:00] and only for this voice stack
[00:14:02] on a specific voice stack something
[00:14:05] with this manual mode here
[00:14:06] and yeah, using multiple channels for these keys.
[00:14:11] So this is also possible just to show you this
[00:14:13] that you can do this if you want to.
[00:14:16] And it's also not a problem to use multiple
[00:14:18] of these voice stack modulators in different modes.
[00:14:21] There's also value mode here, minus one to plus one.
[00:14:24] So you can use multiple of these voice stack modulators
[00:14:28] and modulate different things differently.
[00:14:30] So when I showed you here with the minus one to plus one
[00:14:33] modulating basically left to right bipolar parameter here
[00:14:38] and you want to modulate for instance here, the mix,
[00:14:42] the oscillator one to two,
[00:14:44] then this makes no sense here, right?
[00:14:46] Because negative would be go into below zero here.
[00:14:51] So we need a unipolar modulator here.
[00:14:54] So we can switch the second one and say this one here
[00:14:57] is in the mode zero to one,
[00:15:00] which is a unipolar modulation.
[00:15:02] And here you can use this
[00:15:03] and spread it across all voice stacks evenly.
[00:15:07] So no problem to use multiple voice stack modulators.
[00:15:12] I hope this is clear.
[00:15:13] Maybe I make some refinements to this video in the future
[00:15:16] when people ask certain questions.
[00:15:18] But for now, I think that's the best explanation
[00:15:20] I can give you.
[00:15:21] And before I close down this video,
[00:15:23] I want to tell you that you can use voice grids
[00:15:26] not only on instruments of Bitwig Studio,
[00:15:29] you can use it also on the Node Grid
[00:15:31] and I have a lot of tutorials on my main channel
[00:15:33] how to utilize this.
[00:15:35] Also the newest clapp version inside Bitwig Studio here
[00:15:38] with the search XT, clapp, plug in,
[00:15:43] you can also use voice stacks here
[00:15:45] as you can see at the left side.
[00:15:48] And also FX Grid in Bitwig Studio also uses voice stacking.
[00:15:53] So you can create interesting voice effects,
[00:15:55] reverbs, corals, delays, et cetera.
[00:16:00] So a lot of stuff.
[00:16:02] It's also on my main channel.
[00:16:03] I put the link in the description below
[00:16:05] so you can see some practical examples of all of this.
[00:16:09] [BLANK_AUDIO]