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Bitwig Segments Modulator - Draw Complex Custom Envelopes for Modulation

Bitwig Guide | Apr 13, 2023

Segments is a versatile multi-stage envelope generator that lets you freely draw custom shapes, define sustain phases, and choose from multiple play modes like one-shot, hold, repeat, and ping-pong. It features flexible time settings synced to project tempo, smoothing options, polyphonic or monophonic operation, and easy shape manipulation with copy, paste, and snap features. This tool can be used at both standard and audio rates for advanced modulation possibilities, making it perfect for creating unique envelopes in any sound design workflow.

You can watch the Video on Youtube

Short Overview

I love using Segments because it lets me draw my own unique envelope shapes, giving me full control over how my sound evolves. It works like a classic envelope generator with attack, decay, sustain, and release, but with the added flexibility of defining custom shapes and looping or replaying sections in different ways. The easy modulation options, preset shapes, and seamless syncing to my project tempo make it really intuitive and powerful. Whether I want smooth, organic movement or sharp, complex modulations, Segments fits perfectly into any setup.

Introduction to Segments

In this video, I introduce “Segments,” a multi-stage envelope generator. Unlike traditional envelopes with fixed parameters for attack, decay, sustain, and release, Segments allows you to directly draw your own custom envelope shapes. It’s a versatile and flexible tool that goes far beyond conventional ADSR envelopes, giving users the ability to fine-tune and experiment with modulation curves on a very granular level.

Drawing and Shaping Custom Envelopes

One of the standout features is the ability to simply draw your envelope shape. This means you are not reliant on standard curves or segments, you can freely sketch complex modulation patterns. There’s a dedicated space to edit these shapes, with controls for resizing, moving, and snapping to grid divisions for precise edits. You can also use a pencil or predefined shapes to start your design, allowing both freehand and structured editing.

Play Modes and Playback Behavior

Segments includes several playback modes:

You can select the sustain phase and even control how the sustain is handled during playback. This adds expressive possibilities, making your modulations respond naturally to key presses.

Envelope Triggering and Polyphony

You can trigger the envelope using a keyboard, pressing a key plays through the cycle. There’s a toggle to switch between polyphonic (multiple notes simultaneously) and monophonic (one note at a time) behavior. In monophonic mode, a single trigger option determines whether overlapping notes re-trigger the envelope or simply continue playing.

Timing and Synchronization

Unlike traditional envelopes that only run at a fixed timing, Segments allows you to set the playback speed in bars, beats, or even absolute seconds. This means you can synchronize your envelope timing with your project tempo, or set precise time-based playback. You can select values such as one bar, half a bar, or eighth notes to match your modulation to the rhythm of your music.

Modulation Amount and Polarity

There is an amount slider which sets how strongly the envelope modulates the chosen parameter. This can be set in percentages for accurate control. You also have an option to set the modulation as bipolar, so the envelope can affect its target both positively and negatively, not just in one direction.

Smoothing for Cleaner Modulation

A smoothing control is provided to eliminate clicks or abrupt changes that can result from sharp envelope edges. This is vital for both musical modulation and preventing audio artifacts, especially with complex custom-drawn shapes.

Envelope Management and Workflow

You can open and save envelope curves, and even copy and paste between envelopes or devices. This makes workflows more efficient since you can quickly replicate, tweak, or share envelope shapes between different modulation sources within your project.

Audio-Rate Capabilities

A unique feature is the ability to run envelopes at audio rate, effectively turning them into custom waveforms driven by MIDI pitch. This is unusual for envelope generators and opens up creative sound-design options typically reserved for low-frequency oscillators (LFOs) or wavetable synths.

Comparison to Traditional ADSR

While traditional ADSR envelopes have fixed stages (attack, decay, sustain, release), Segments allows you to redesign every stage or even go beyond the concept of discrete phases. This flexibility means you are not limited to generic fades and can instead create evolving, rhythmic, or uniquely-shaped modulations for any parameter.

Conclusion

Segments is a powerful, multi-stage envelope generator that brings years of wish-list features into a single device:

It’s an envelope tool that goes beyond the basics, providing everything needed for animated, responsive modulation in modern music production.

Full Video Transcription

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by Whisper, so it might not be perfect. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.
You can also click on the timestamps to jump to the right part of the video, which should be helpful.

Click to expand Transcription

[00:00:00] Segments is an envelope generator or a multi-stage envelope generator.
[00:00:06] It's a normal envelope with attack, and decay, and sustain, and release, and so on.
[00:00:14] The big difference is that you can actually draw in your own shape.
[00:00:20] Besides that, it's a normal envelope.
[00:00:22] You can trigger it with a keyboard, so when you press a key, you play through the cycle
[00:00:28] of the envelope.
[00:00:29] We have here a sustain phase that you can define.
[00:00:34] And you can also define how this sustain phase behaves.
[00:00:38] So you have different play modes here below that.
[00:00:41] So one shot, right?
[00:00:43] Place just a whole sequence, one time, you have hold.
[00:00:48] So it stays at this point here and holds the value.
[00:00:53] Then we have repeat, and you can see here this blue little section is repeated then.
[00:00:58] Then you hold the key until you release the key, and then you play the release section
[00:01:04] here.
[00:01:05] Then we have here also ping-pong, so place back and forth, right?
[00:01:11] And so on.
[00:01:12] So we leave this here on one shot.
[00:01:13] So we have here the space where we can define our own shape, and we get to this in a minute.
[00:01:20] We have also here a small little folder where we can open up a predefined curve, something
[00:01:26] like this here, confirm it, or yeah, do something like this.
[00:01:33] Then we have here the amount slider, and this is the modulation amount.
[00:01:36] When you apply your modulation to a certain knob, you can change here the amount in percentage
[00:01:42] if you want to.
[00:01:43] You have also your bipolar settings, so we can also have positive and negative values
[00:01:48] instead of just positive values.
[00:01:51] This is also possible.
[00:01:53] Then we have here also a rate setting, which is kind of weird for an envelope, but it makes
[00:01:57] sense because we want to change maybe how fast this envelope is played back over time,
[00:02:04] right?
[00:02:05] So here we have dialed in one bar, so this whole segment here is played back over the
[00:02:12] curse of one bar.
[00:02:13] If you want to play this back even faster, then you can dial in here, of course, 0.5,
[00:02:19] so it's just a half a bar, and then the playback is much, much faster than just one bar.
[00:02:26] Or you can dial in here seconds, if you want to define this playback speed in seconds,
[00:02:33] if you want to.
[00:02:39] Or you can use your predefined time-based settings that synchronize to your project
[00:02:44] tempo, right?
[00:02:45] Half note, eight note.
[00:02:47] So eight note is basically this at one, one, eight note is the whole segment is played
[00:02:52] back within one, eight note, so pretty fast, or fairly fast.
[00:03:00] Then we have here down the smoothing option.
[00:03:04] It's the same like on the Curve LFO, where you can smooth out certain edges when we have
[00:03:11] drastic changes here, and we should use a lot of pops and clicks.
[00:03:15] Then we can just dial in here a bit of smoothing or even disable it to get rid of this.
[00:03:22] Then we have a pulley and a monophonic toggle here, so we can use the LFO or the envelope
[00:03:30] with multiple keys at the same time, so polyphonic mode.
[00:03:34] That's time-based, and yeah, that's basically it.
[00:03:37] Also in the inspector, we have a single trigger option.
[00:03:40] So when you have this mono mode, so this is disabled, then this becomes active, as you
[00:03:46] can see, right?
[00:03:48] So single trigger, and this means keeps overlapping notes from re-triggering the envelope.
[00:03:53] So this means if you press one note, and then you press while holding the Alt key, another
[00:03:58] key, the envelope is not re-triggered.
[00:04:02] It keeps playing, basically.
[00:04:05] If you disable this and you hold one note, and then you press another note while holding
[00:04:10] the Alt key, it's re-triggered, right?
[00:04:12] It starts from the beginning again.
[00:04:14] So this is basically the re-trigger behavior when in monophonic mode.
[00:04:20] Okay, so we attach this here to a pulley synth, and in here we have all the options I just
[00:04:26] explained.
[00:04:27] Maybe increase the sizing, and we can, as before on the curve, LFO we can edit this here
[00:04:35] by just clicking on the space, and we close this down by also clicking.
[00:04:39] We can also right-click on this and load the curve, predefined curve, something like this
[00:04:44] here, or we can right-click and save the curve, copy the curve, paste the curve.
[00:04:49] So when we have multiple of these segments or curve LFOs, we can just copy and paste
[00:04:55] different shapes, right, from one LFO to the other, or from one segment to the other.
[00:05:02] So this is possible.
[00:05:04] So just click in here and we have this editor, we can resize or move this around, and then
[00:05:12] also use here the Alt key and the scroll wheel and control key on the scroll wheel to move
[00:05:18] and size, and we can draw in freely here with this pencil, or we can use these predefined
[00:05:26] shapes here and draw in these, yeah, segments.
[00:05:29] We can also change the segments by changing here the grid size, the snapping, 12, maybe
[00:05:35] eight would be useful, one bar, this is one bar, one bar, okay.
[00:05:42] So we divide basically one bar into eight equal segments, right?
[00:05:48] So this is one eighth note, one eighth note, and so on.
[00:05:52] So we can use this here to draw in a nice envelope to that, or we use these shapes here
[00:05:58] is also, also easy to use, right, maybe put this down to four, and then have here one
[00:06:07] big saw, or maybe a reversed one, something like this.
[00:06:13] And now it works exactly like before, only now we have in, we drawn in a custom shape,
[00:06:21] can trigger this, you can see here, it's, it stays here at this point because we haven't
[00:06:26] actually changed here our sustain phase, so we can loop here at a certain point, something
[00:06:34] like this, right?
[00:06:35] So we define this section here as our sustain phase.
[00:06:39] So we switched here to ping pong.
[00:06:41] So it should loop here while we are holding, holding the key on the keyboard.
[00:06:48] Then it just repeats in ping pong shape, ping pong playback, it's also possible, and we
[00:06:58] can modulate of course something with it.
[00:07:13] Let's use here these, these things.
[00:07:17] And we can also draw in some slopes by just holding alt key, and then dragging here these
[00:07:22] lines, double clicking to remove, double click, double click, and just draw in some nice slopes
[00:07:31] here, so it's a normal envelope, exactly like the ADSR here, ADSR.
[00:07:59] Here we have a predefined wall stage, shape, attack, decay, sustain, release, it's basically
[00:08:10] the same, but here we can draw in our own shape and, you know, get more modulation, more movement
[00:08:17] into something, into modulations.
[00:08:21] This also works here at a audio rate, so you can use the pitch here, pitch of current note.
[00:08:28] So it plays back basically at the frequency of the key you are pressing.
[00:08:34] It's not really audible, yeah, pull this down to 0.25.
[00:08:50] So, also this envelope works at audio rate, which is pretty interesting, and you can draw
[00:09:05] in your own shapes.
[00:09:06] It's a perfect multi-stage envelope generator a lot of people want for years now.
[00:09:12] Same big studio, polyphonic, and you can attach to any device how many you want, fantastic.
[00:09:21] [BLANK_AUDIO]