Bitwig DC-Offset Device - Fixing, Modulation, Audio FX, and Synth Experiments

[00:00:00] So the DC offset device of Bitwig Studio is fairly simple.
[00:00:03] It says offsets any incoming signal.
[00:00:06] Be careful, yeah, it's a warning.
[00:00:09] It's a fairly simple device,
[00:00:11] and it's used to offset an audio signal in one direction,
[00:00:14] in the positive range or in the negative range.
[00:00:17] And that's basically all.
[00:00:19] It's aimed at bad recordings
[00:00:22] when you record something from tape or from vinyl,
[00:00:24] and you have some DC offset in there.
[00:00:27] You can use this to counter it to correct it, basically.
[00:00:31] But inside Bitwig Studio with the modulation system,
[00:00:34] you can do a lot of things with this stuff
[00:00:37] because it's also very basic,
[00:00:39] and you can combine it with a lot of modulation modules
[00:00:42] or modulators, and then, yeah, get some different effects.
[00:00:46] And I want to show you some of them.
[00:00:49] So first, I show you what it's actually doing.
[00:00:51] So let's use...
[00:00:53] Yeah, let's use a polysynth, yeah?
[00:00:56] A polysynth and maybe also an oscillator here at the end,
[00:01:02] oscilloscope.
[00:01:03] And yeah, crank up the volume.
[00:01:08] So you can see here on the scope,
[00:01:15] we have exactly the same amount of positive values
[00:01:19] as we have as negative.
[00:01:22] It's fairly symmetrical.
[00:01:24] But then you can offset this here with the device.
[00:01:26] But just not right.
[00:01:34] So the positive values are representing basically
[00:01:36] your speaker cone going out of your speaker,
[00:01:40] and the negative values represent movement
[00:01:43] of the speaker cone going into your speaker.
[00:01:46] So the speaker cone is basically moving backwards
[00:01:49] and forwards all the time and producing sound.
[00:01:52] So it needs to do this in a symmetrical way.
[00:01:55] So it needs to go out in the same amount of,
[00:01:58] it goes in to have a fairly nice clean signal.
[00:02:03] So you want to keep it symmetrical,
[00:02:05] which means you want to keep the middle exactly,
[00:02:09] and we want to keep the waveform exactly in the middle here,
[00:02:12] also in the middle line.
[00:02:13] So if you have something like this, something is wrong.
[00:02:17] So if you watch your speaker cone with this,
[00:02:20] you can completely move the speaker membrane
[00:02:25] out of your speaker.
[00:02:28] You actually use some speakers and then move this out.
[00:02:32] You can really see the speaker moving out.
[00:02:35] It's really nice to see.
[00:02:37] So this means if you modulate this here with audio rate,
[00:02:41] you create sound.
[00:02:42] So use an LFO here.
[00:02:44] We can go or switch to kilohertz,
[00:02:46] which is audio rate, audible modulation.
[00:02:50] You can create a sound with this, right?
[00:02:52] You can also change the frequency
[00:02:54] to anything you like.
[00:02:57] Or you can switch here to pitch of current node,
[00:03:00] which means it uses the key input of your keyboard
[00:03:05] and changes the frequency to the current node
[00:03:11] you're pressing on the keyboard.
[00:03:13] So now we have here a constant sound
[00:03:16] because we modulate all the time.
[00:03:19] So we turn this down and use an ADSR.
[00:03:22] It reacts also to the keyboard or to the piano roll,
[00:03:24] whatever you want to use,
[00:03:27] or to the gate information of your keyboard.
[00:03:30] And we can use this ADSR now to modulate your amount.
[00:03:33] So every time we press a key, we produce a sound.
[00:03:36] And if you release the key on the keyboard,
[00:03:38] we also remove the sound.
[00:03:46] So this acts now as our VCA, basically,
[00:03:50] and this is our VCO in the Eurorack world,
[00:03:53] if you want to call it that way.
[00:03:54] So we have a basic monophonic synthesizer.
[00:03:58] So maybe we modulate this here by fairly amount.
[00:04:04] Maybe we can modulate all the way to one.
[00:04:08] If we do this, we create here.
[00:04:11] (guitar music)
[00:04:13] A nice signal.
[00:04:21] And we turn this down a bit
[00:04:23] because we want to play this polyphonically.
[00:04:25] So now this is monophonic.
[00:04:27] It just takes one note at a time.
[00:04:30] We can put this here into an FX layer with control and G.
[00:04:34] So we have multiple layers,
[00:04:35] but we convert this with a right click
[00:04:37] to an instrument layer
[00:04:39] and use another right click here
[00:04:40] and convert it to an instrument selector, right?
[00:04:43] So now we have on this layer here,
[00:04:45] basically the same DC offset as we had before,
[00:04:48] but we duplicate this layer
[00:04:49] in multiple times with control and D.
[00:04:51] So we have multiple of these layers
[00:04:55] and switch this here on the left side to a free Robin.
[00:04:59] So now you can press multiple keys.
[00:05:02] (guitar music)
[00:05:04] Right, you can see we play multiple voices here.
[00:05:09] So now the synthesizer is now polyphonic.
[00:05:11] So you can create your own kind of polyphonic synthesizer
[00:05:15] with the DC offset device, right?
[00:05:17] So this is just a hint at some experimentations you can do.
[00:05:20] And I also did a lot of videos
[00:05:22] about this early on when this came out.
[00:05:24] So yeah, just as an inspiration.
[00:05:27] Also back here to the DC offset.
[00:05:32] There's also some presets you can download
[00:05:36] from myself called here.
[00:05:39] I think this one is, yeah,
[00:05:41] this one is in the package of polarity, polarity tools.
[00:05:45] If you want to download this,
[00:05:47] you just go here to your packages, settings,
[00:05:51] settings, packages, artist collection, polarity tools.
[00:05:55] You can download here my small package
[00:05:56] of 34 megabytes of some presets
[00:06:01] for random devices inside BitX Studio.
[00:06:03] It's pretty old, fairly old, five years old or something.
[00:06:08] It's also fairly small.
[00:06:10] You get some nice presets here
[00:06:12] for the DC offset device here.
[00:06:13] This one is a raw FM synth.
[00:06:15] So you can play it on a keyboard.
[00:06:16] Mix in a different oscillator.
[00:06:20] (guitar music)
[00:06:22] Also you have a Tacticate Sustain Sousa.
[00:06:32] It's a small little monophonic FM synthesizer.
[00:06:36] You can do synthesizers with the DC offset device
[00:06:39] if you want to.
[00:06:40] Another thing you can do with the DC offset device
[00:06:44] is to use it for modifications.
[00:06:47] So let's create here a piano stage eight.
[00:06:52] So it's just playing a piano, make it a bit louder.
[00:06:56] (guitar music)
[00:07:01] So we have here an audio signal
[00:07:03] coming from the piano tech
[00:07:04] going through the DC offset device,
[00:07:05] doing nothing, and then the oscilloscope here.
[00:07:08] So we add here a chain with just a container.
[00:07:11] It's just an empty container
[00:07:13] where we can put in some devices by BitX Studio.
[00:07:16] You put in here the DC offset device and also a tool.
[00:07:20] And this tool just mutes everything.
[00:07:23] So we go down here to minus infinite.
[00:07:25] So now when we play something,
[00:07:27] you can see we can't hear anything
[00:07:29] because the tool device actually mutes the signal.
[00:07:33] What we can do now is we can add here
[00:07:35] to the chain device an audio rate modulator,
[00:07:38] which grabs the audio signal here from the piano tech.
[00:07:42] You can see here now we have this as a modulation signal.
[00:07:44] So we convert the audio signal into a modulation signal.
[00:07:48] We can take this audio modulation signal here
[00:07:51] and modulate the DC offset device with this.
[00:07:54] (guitar music)
[00:07:58] So now we can hear the piano again
[00:08:00] because we use the modulation signal here,
[00:08:02] completely skip the tool device
[00:08:04] and replicate the same modulation here on the DC offset
[00:08:07] and convert it back to the audio signal.
[00:08:09] (guitar music)
[00:08:12] The audio rate modulator itself, you have some options.
[00:08:15] So you can grab the left channel or the right channel,
[00:08:18] the mid channel or the side channel.
[00:08:20] You can also apply here a cutoff or a low pass
[00:08:24] if you want to.
[00:08:25] (guitar music)
[00:08:27] (guitar music)
[00:08:30] Also rectify it if you want to.
[00:08:35] Rectify basically means to put the negative values
[00:08:39] back to positive.
[00:08:41] So we have only positive values.
[00:08:44] It sounds a bit like distortion.
[00:08:45] Kind of like this.
[00:08:49] (guitar music)
[00:08:51] (guitar music)
[00:08:54] So what you can do now
[00:09:00] is we can grab the middle signal here,
[00:09:02] which is the left and the right channel together, I guess.
[00:09:06] And instead of modulating the DC offset device,
[00:09:11] we remove the modulation here
[00:09:13] and use a polynome modulator.
[00:09:16] So now we modulate with the audio rate modulator
[00:09:19] here, the polynome by let's say one, okay.
[00:09:24] And now when we play, you can see the audio rate modulator
[00:09:29] modulates here, the polynome.
[00:09:32] Then we can take the output of the polynome
[00:09:34] and modulate DC offset device.
[00:09:37] (guitar music)
[00:09:39] What we can do now is we can change the modulation signal
[00:09:43] here with the polynome in certain kind of ways
[00:09:47] and alter the modulation signal
[00:09:49] and then replicate the modulated,
[00:09:51] or the altered modulation signal
[00:09:54] and replicate the DC offset device.
[00:09:56] We can create some kind of audio effects.
[00:09:59] (guitar music)
[00:10:01] So it's kind of a saturator
[00:10:17] because you are forcing the audio rate modulation
[00:10:22] to a certain type of curve or alternate path here
[00:10:27] and you create some overtones with this
[00:10:31] or the cause of that, right?
[00:10:33] So this is one way of creating saturation effects
[00:10:38] or distortion effects.
[00:10:40] So something you can try out.
[00:10:42] You can also use, for instance, a quantizer, yeah,
[00:10:44] a quantizer modulator.
[00:10:46] And then modulate with the audio rates modulator here,
[00:10:52] this quantizer.
[00:10:53] And then with the quantizer output,
[00:10:56] you modulate the DC offset device
[00:10:58] and you kind of create a bit crusher with this.
[00:11:00] (guitar music)
[00:11:04] You increase the resolution, you get more details.
[00:11:08] (guitar music)
[00:11:13] Let's switch here to modes.
[00:11:15] (guitar music)
[00:11:17] It's actually pretty soft
[00:11:22] and sounds more like a texture on top of something.
[00:11:25] That's probably nice for lo-fi music, lo-fi beats.
[00:11:32] (guitar music)
[00:11:36] (guitar music)
[00:11:38] You can see it on the right side.
[00:11:53] It looks like pretty fairly bit crushed.
[00:11:56] So this is also something you can do.
[00:12:01] So you can modify
[00:12:03] because we have now here the audio signal
[00:12:06] as a modulation signal.
[00:12:07] You can use all the modulators you have in Bitwig Studio
[00:12:11] because all these modulators support audio rate.
[00:12:14] You can modify the signal in any shape or ways you want to.
[00:12:21] And then use the output of this
[00:12:23] and bring it back to our audio signal
[00:12:25] with the DC offset device, okay?
[00:12:28] So this is possible now with this.
[00:12:31] We can also modulate here directly the DC offset device.
[00:12:35] Let's say by just go only to nine, zero dot nine.
[00:12:40] And now this means the signal
[00:12:44] actually never crosses this line,
[00:12:46] which means we just implemented some kind of clipper.
[00:12:51] (guitar music)
[00:12:52] Let's use your tool device.
[00:12:54] (guitar music)
[00:12:58] Let's see, we never go across zero dB.
[00:13:06] So it's also something you can use
[00:13:08] to limit the modulation amount.
[00:13:11] And while you are limiting the modulation amount,
[00:13:14] you also limit basically the waveform peak
[00:13:19] or the maximum peak of the waveform.
[00:13:22] So you just implemented some kind of clipper with this.
[00:13:27] So this is also possible
[00:13:28] because we have here the audio rate
[00:13:30] inside of the modulation system.
[00:13:33] So the DC offset device is a pretty interesting device
[00:13:36] because it's so rudimentary and so easy
[00:13:39] and so simple he can do a lot of things with us.
[00:13:42] So also here we have only a mono signal so far
[00:13:46] because we use the mid signal.
[00:13:48] We can also say we only want to grab here the left side
[00:13:52] and replicate here the left side so we can call this left.
[00:13:57] Put this in a FX layer with control G
[00:14:02] duplicate this and call this right.
[00:14:05] That's also right here.
[00:14:08] So we don't want to modulate here with the left audio rate.
[00:14:14] Don't want to modulate the right side.
[00:14:16] We want to duplicate this,
[00:14:19] take here the right side
[00:14:21] and modulate this oscillator with it.
[00:14:24] Well, let's see, zero dot nine, zero dot nine.
[00:14:27] Okay.
[00:14:29] So now we modulate with the left audio rate modulator,
[00:14:32] the left side, and with the right audio modulator here,
[00:14:35] the right side.
[00:14:36] So now we replicate basically the stereo signal.
[00:14:39] But we need to also pan the right side to the right side
[00:14:47] and the left side to the left side.
[00:14:48] So now it's stereo.
[00:14:50] Basically the same signal.
[00:15:00] It's a bit, it sounds a bit different in loudness,
[00:15:03] but you get the idea.
[00:15:06] So yeah, it's a fairly interesting device.
[00:15:09] You can do a lot of things with it
[00:15:11] and it's not just for correcting wrong recorded audio stuff
[00:15:16] from vinyl or from tape.
[00:15:19] Okay.
[00:15:20] So I think that's it for this video.
[00:15:22] Thanks for watching.
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