Creating Looping Presets with Little Looper in Bitwig

Tutorial | Mon Sep 27 2021 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

In this video, I created two new presets for my Patreons called Little Looper Synced and Little Looper raw. I explained how they work and what you can do with them. Syncd is quantized to the project tempo, while Raw lets you start and stop recording anytime. I showed how you can use them with a synth line and how you can customize the settings, such as loop length, pan, start offset, and restart. I also showed how you can use them with a radio and for sound design, and how you can replace the steps with a random or dice module. I hope this video was helpful, so if you're interested, don't forget to subscribe to my Patreon or YouTube Membership to download these presets and let me know what you think in the comments.

You can watch the Video on Youtube - support me on Patreon

Questions & Answers #

Maybe you dont watch the video, here are some important takeaways:

What are the two presets mentioned in the video? #

The two presets mentioned in the video are called Little Looper, Syncd and Little Looper, Raw. The Syncd preset is quantized to the project tempo and is used to record loops in time. The Raw preset is not quantized to the project tempo and can be used to record loops in any rhythm.

What are the differences between the two presets? #

The main difference between the two presets is that the Syncd preset is quantized to the project tempo while the Raw preset is not. Additionally, the Raw preset allows for the recording of loops at any rhythm. The Syncd preset also has a page where settings such as the loop length, pen, and start time can be adjusted.

How does the Little Looper work? #

The Little Looper has four loop slots that can be used to record and playback loops. To use the Syncd preset, the loop button must be pressed at the start of a bar and the recorded audio will loop until the end of the bar. To use the Raw preset, the loop button must be pressed and released when the desired audio should be recorded and

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.
[00:01.600] Today it's about some new presets I created for my Patreons,
[00:06.000] and you need to be a subscriber to my Patreon to actually download these new presets.
[00:11.840] And there's also a button below this video,
[00:16.720] where you can subscribe here on YouTube called Membership.
[00:19.840] You can also download these presets, of course.
[00:22.800] Yeah, these two presets are called Little Looper, Syncd and Little Looper,
[00:27.600] wrong. And I want to explain you how it works and what you can do with it.
[00:31.680] And yeah, maybe it's also interesting to dissect these presets,
[00:37.520] because I invested a lot of time to actually get rid of some of the problems
[00:44.160] surrounding creating this preset.
[00:48.560] So yeah, let's switch over here to Bitwig.
[00:50.400] And I have here a police synth running, just random synth line,
[00:56.560] also here a note clip just playing some notes, nothing really important.
[01:02.240] So now we need to call here the Little Looper,
[01:07.120] raw or Little Looper Syncd. And I start here with the Syncd one,
[01:11.600] and it looks like this. So now we can start here playing back the synth line,
[01:17.680] and you can hear it's, you can't hear anything, this loop section here,
[01:22.960] a loop preset completely blocks the audio. So this is how it sounds.
[01:29.040] Fry. So nothing, nothing special. But now you can start and press your loop one.
[01:37.280] And when you press the button, it delays the recording until the bar is over.
[01:44.800] So it's quantized to the project tempo and your current project.
[01:49.760] So just press, and it also doesn't matter if you just press it and leave it on,
[01:54.160] or if you press it and switch it off instantaneously, it doesn't matter.
[01:59.360] It starts recording exactly in time on the bar, and it stops recording at the end of the bar.
[02:07.200] And then it starts immediately to loop this recorded audio.
[02:13.440] So now it's recorded this, and it plays it back, and you can switch it to the
[02:23.600] Polysnth off, and you can hear it's just playing the audio back here.
[02:30.960] So now we can go in here and maybe change the setting of the Polysnth,
[02:35.360] or maybe make this a bit scale of 50%.
[02:50.400] Maybe not too short, maybe 20%.
[02:53.360] Okay, so now we have a different loop here running in front,
[02:56.480] and record this into maybe loop 4, and again we can switch this off here.
[03:15.600] And now you can see we have two loops recorded into these two slots here,
[03:21.520] and we can play around with this, and we can just start to record this again at every time.
[03:33.920] Or maybe again switch here settings a bit.
[03:41.200] And also important, these loops here have different loop length,
[03:47.040] and my default settings are pretty much, this is I think exactly one bar,
[03:55.200] and this is half of a bar, and these two are here a bit uneven,
[04:00.720] so you can create some kind of pulle-rhythmic loops.
[04:07.040] So if you don't want this, and you want to have straight loops,
[04:12.080] then you can go into here this section and go to the scalars of each of these loop slots here,
[04:19.840] and can change the settings, and this will change the loop length.
[04:23.920] Okay, so if you want to customize this.
[04:32.960] Then we have here a second page where you can change the pen for each slot,
[04:38.880] and you can also change the start time, or the start offset,
[04:43.920] when you want to start within this bar, or within this project timing here.
[04:55.120] So now it's back to original.
[04:57.120] Ah, maybe you make this a bit shorter here again, and it's record this.
[05:12.160] Oh, it's a bit too fast.
[05:16.160] So as you can hear, this loop here is a bit uneven compared to these two,
[05:30.240] but it can be interesting sometimes when you sample percussions.
[05:35.120] So I hope this makes clear how this works.
[05:38.320] It's just a little loop station.
[05:40.800] You can record in time, quantize to your project tempo, and then it plays back the looping.
[05:47.840] And it's maybe interesting when you use vocals or an external synth,
[05:51.280] or when you play around on your u-ray rack,
[05:54.320] and you just want to record a small portion of the sound, and you want to loop it.
[05:59.520] Or maybe you make some sound experiments with your noisebox.
[06:02.720] I don't know.
[06:04.160] There are a lot of use cases for this.
[06:08.080] So this is little looper synced.
[06:12.800] And then we have here a little little looper raw.
[06:19.680] And this one is kind of the same.
[06:21.840] So let's make the sound active again.
[06:27.440] Double content.
[06:29.440] Oh no, actually scale it up.
[06:31.120] This one is a bit different.
[06:36.480] It has also four loop slots here.
[06:40.880] But here it's important when you press this button,
[06:45.760] and when you release this button.
[06:47.920] Because you can start anytime, and you can stop anytime.
[06:52.960] It's not quantized to the project tempo.
[06:55.440] So you can basically just hit record and immediately stop.
[07:00.000] And then also this time frame decides how long the loop length is.
[07:06.080] And this also decides then probably how the written sounds,
[07:11.520] or how fast the rhythm is.
[07:13.280] So I can record, record, record, record, record, stop, and then loop back.
[07:17.680] So you can just make a pretty short loop if you want to.
[07:36.480] So this is more like for when you don't want to synchronize everything to a song,
[07:42.480] or to a project, and you want to sync maybe to an external source.
[07:47.360] Maybe you have here instead of polycent, you have a radio, I don't know.
[07:55.680] Let's see, this is something chill from the radio.
[08:02.800] So you can just hit here.
[08:10.800] So you can start something in a different rhythm.
[08:31.520] And you can also turn this off here.
[08:32.960] It's completely now inside the grid.
[08:42.160] Okay, and then your the second page is also a bit different.
[08:45.680] Here we have also pan, but then we have your restart,
[08:50.480] which are also at the same time play button.
[08:52.800] So when you go with this here, it basically just stops to play,
[08:57.600] but then you can start to start the playback at any time.
[09:05.040] What this means is you can also restart.
[09:10.880] So if you hook this up here to an LFO,
[09:15.280] like this one here,
[09:16.160] so you can restart this here with an LFO.
[09:27.040] It's also possible.
[09:33.840] Also, the possible is that you go back here to page one,
[09:39.520] and choose maybe a step smart,
[09:41.200] and say I want to record here the first two bars,
[09:47.360] maybe go with the smoothing up here a bit.
[09:50.240] So we have just one gate signal, record loop.
[09:56.240] Use a different step smart here.
[09:59.840] Use an uneven number, maybe record this.
[10:04.000] Go here, record this.
[10:05.520] Or maybe go to 10, maybe record here.
[10:13.520] 9, something like this.
[10:15.920] And now you record basically here at different points,
[10:19.200] and you playback in different times,
[10:21.280] and how many steps you paint in decides how long the loop is basically.
[10:28.640] So this is a longer loop.
[10:32.400] This one is even longer.
[10:33.920] This is a short one.
[10:35.920] This one is super short.
[10:38.720] And then you get the end,
[10:43.920] something that's maybe usable.
[10:47.440] If you, it's kind of a weird delay effect,
[11:04.720] an uneven delay effect,
[11:07.040] and if you put here some reverb on it to diffuse the signal a bit,
[11:10.880] it can become a nice reverb, or delay reverb, or, you know,
[11:16.880] a nice tool for sound design.
[11:18.880] So it's basically just recording at different points in time,
[11:48.320] looping differently, playing back differently.
[11:52.000] You can also try to replace here the steps with the random or the dice.
[11:58.720] Much later, this can also work.
[12:02.720] But this is a pretty nice effect, you're also when you use your voice.
[12:07.600] I don't know, maybe use an audio thing here, put this on.
[12:12.720] Maybe just move this here.
[12:21.600] And this should be my voice here.
[12:29.520] So let's try this out.
[12:32.960] Out, try this out, try this out, try this out, try this out, try this out, try this out, try this out,
[12:38.160] try this out, try this out, try this out, try this out, try this out, try this out.
[13:00.640] You can also, of course, step in, and maybe dissect the preset,
[13:05.040] and learn something from it or replace some of the modules.
[13:09.120] And yeah, just have fun with it.
[13:11.760] So yeah, maybe tell me what you think
[13:16.680] down in the comments about these presets.
[13:21.920] If you have fun with it, if you have problems,
[13:23.840] let me know.
[13:24.520] Maybe I can update it over the week
[13:28.640] with some fixes, maybe there are some problems.
[13:31.720] I don't know, I tried this out yesterday
[13:33.360] and it works kind of nice.
[13:36.280] Also with the raw version here,
[13:37.920] I tried to get rid of all the clicks and pops
[13:40.320] when you start recording or playback, you know,
[13:45.360] not exactly at the zero crossing,
[13:47.680] so I implemented some ADS-Rs and there
[13:51.320] in some delays here and there,
[13:52.840] just to get rid of the clicks and pops.
[13:55.120] Okay, so that's it for this video.
[13:57.160] Thanks for watching.
[13:57.960] Tell me what you think, subscribe to my Patreon
[14:00.720] or here on YouTube with a membership
[14:02.560] and you can download this.
[14:04.000] Tell me what you think and thanks for watching.
[14:06.280] See you in the next video.
[14:08.040] Bye.