How to Synchronize Loop Length with Song Tempo in Bitwig Studio
Tutorial | Apr 27, 2021
In this video, I demonstrated an easy workflow to define the loop length inside a sample in Bitwig Studio. This can be helpful when you want to synchronize the loop length with your song tempo. I showed how to copy the length of a region to the loop length, as well as how to subdivide the loop length using the quantizer. Finally, I mentioned that it is important to change the loop length on the beat grid in order to avoid any timing issues.
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Questions & Answers #
Maybe you dont watch the video, here are some important takeaways:
What is the purpose of defining the loop length inside the sample of Bitwig Studio? #
The purpose of defining the loop length inside the sample of Bitwig Studio is to synchronize the loop length with the song tempo, as well as to easily subdivide the loop length into smaller, equal parts using the quantizer. This can be helpful when creating music tracks or when editing sounds.
What is the loop method in Bitwig Studio? #
The loop method in Bitwig Studio is the way a sample is looped or repeated. There are three loop methods available in Bitwig Studio: no looping, single direction looping, and ping pong looping. No looping plays the sample once and does not repeat, single direction looping plays the sample from beginning to end and repeats from the beginning, and ping pong looping plays the sample from beginning to end, then from end to beginning, and repeats from the beginning.
How can you synchronize the loop length with the project tempo? #
You can synchronize the loop length with the project tempo by using the loop length setting in Bitwig Studio to set the exact loop length. You can also use the quantizer to subdivide
Transcription #
This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by AI, 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.
[00:00.000] Welcome back to another video. I want to show you a small little trick or easy workflow
[00:05.000] how you can define the loop length inside the sample of Bitwig Studio pretty easily,
[00:10.000] which is also sometimes helpful when you want to synchronize the loop length with your song tempo.
[00:17.000] It's pretty easy to do in Bitwig and I want to show you how it works.
[00:21.000] So we use just a pad sample, something random,
[00:25.000] and we have your drag speed of 120, you can choose anything you want, maybe 130, it's not important at all.
[00:33.000] And then you have your loop method and you can select your no looping,
[00:39.000] we have single direction looping and we have ping pong looping where the player basically plays back and forth at the same time.
[00:47.000] And then you have of course your loop length here, right?
[00:51.000] And sometimes you want to loop this region exactly on time.
[00:56.000] So maybe in this, or we have to see on the master, it's no sense, right?
[01:02.000] Maybe you want to loop this region exactly or you want to have this length of this loop,
[01:07.000] exactly the length of this one of this region.
[01:10.000] You want to loop this all the way through until the end, right?
[01:14.000] So what we can do is we have here a loop length of 50 seconds, so we can go to here,
[01:22.000] place this playhead, maybe here, and you can see then here a number.
[01:27.000] And it says it's one second and eight hundred milliseconds.
[01:31.000] So we can double click this and just copy this over here to this one, double click in here.
[01:37.000] And you can see we can input your seconds.
[01:39.000] So we can select everything and just paste it with control and V.
[01:44.000] And just remove here the first padding zeros to have your one second at eight hundred forty six milliseconds.
[01:55.000] Press return.
[01:56.000] You can see this is our loop region now.
[01:59.000] And this is exactly the length from here to here.
[02:06.000] It's one second one hundred eight hundred forty six.
[02:10.000] So when we start to loop this here, we have of course use to use your clip.
[02:16.000] And put here this just a long, long note.
[02:21.000] And when we start to play back here, you can see it's exactly repeating in this time frame here.
[02:32.000] You can see it's looping back and forth exactly here at the mark of two seconds.
[02:39.000] And you can do this with every position.
[02:50.000] And you can maybe also go to here, which is just nine hundred milliseconds.
[02:55.000] So we can use this and put this here, the loop length of zero dot nine two.
[03:03.000] And now we can play back.
[03:12.000] And this way you can synchronize your loop length to your project tempo and also to the length of your audio clips or MIDI clips.
[03:23.000] Another trick is that you can divide this loop section here now into different chunks or different smaller subdivisions of this whole bar or of this whole time frame here.
[03:35.000] So we have your loop length slider.
[03:37.000] And you can see it's in percentage.
[03:40.000] So we have one hundred percent, fifty percent is basically just a half, half region from here, from here to here.
[03:53.000] So this should be repeating from here to here and then it goes backwards and so on.
[04:14.000] Pretty fine actually.
[04:24.000] And the quantizer just steps basically the values to a resolution.
[04:30.000] And we want to subdivide maybe this maybe go to here, this is one one second eight hundred double click this here.
[04:51.000] So we want to subdivide basically this in eight equal parts, right, we can do this with the quantizer. So we put in here eight.
[05:02.000] And then we use a macro and we modulate here the input.
[05:07.000] So now we can basically quantize the input which is one whole step or one modulation value or one unit of modulation into eight equal parts because we use your resolution of eight.
[05:25.000] And it's also equal because we are using the mode of linear. You can also change it or increase it over time when you use log or exponential here.
[05:37.000] So now you can see when we turn this up here it's quite a step because it's the resolution is eight.
[05:47.000] And now we can modulate with the quantizer here now the loop length. We go here to zero.
[05:57.000] I can see when we turn up here this macro you have now a one two three four five six seven eight equal parts we can subdivide this loop length here.
[06:12.000] We can change this over over the course of our track here.
[06:30.000] And it's also important of course when you change here the loop length that you do it on time or on the grid. If you change it off grid then you could end up probably within loop that's not looping exactly on on time or on the beat grid.
[06:48.000] So it's also important when you change here the loop length and this should then maybe happen like I said exactly here on the beat grid maybe you can modulate this here.
[07:06.000] That's it for this video. Thanks for watching. Someone asked me this yesterday on Reddit and I thought maybe it's a great idea.
[07:30.000] That's it for this video. Thanks for watching. Someone asked me this yesterday on Reddit and I thought maybe it's a great idea to make a video on it for everyone because it's a workflow.
[07:41.000] Maybe you don't need every time but sometimes you need exactly that and it's just another tool in your tool set.
[07:48.000] So thanks for watching. Please leave a thumbs up if you liked the video and I'll see you in the next one. See you and bye.