Using Bitwig Studio 4.1 Note FX Devices: Ripple, Ricochet, Quantize, Band, Note Repeats and More

Tutorial | Fri Nov 05 2021 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

In this video, I explored the new Bitwig Studio 4.1 Note-FX devices, including Ripple, Ricochet, Quantize, Randomize, Band, Note Repeat, and Sampler Release. I showed how to use them to create interesting rhythms, textures and soundscapes, as well as to constrain notes to a specific scale. I demonstrated how to use the devices to transform simple note clips into complex and expressive rhythms and melodies.

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 is the new Note FX device called Ripple? #

The new Note FX device called Ripple is a device that launches a kind of a ball from up in the air and then it bounces back from the ground and it can change the friction in the air. This allows you to add some kind of synthesizer after the Note FX device and then you can change the damping to remove the friction and create unique sounds.

How does the quantize device work in Bitwig Studio 4.1? #

The quantize device in Bitwig Studio 4.1 works by taking the output of a Note FX device and synchronizing it to a 16th note grid. You can also dial in your own level of forgiveness, which defines how closely the output is synchronized to the grid. The quantize device can also be used to quantize note on events, note off events, or both, giving you more control over the resulting sound.

How do you create a kick drum using the band device? #

To create a kick drum using the band device, you need to set the pitch to a different note than the current pitch of the node. This will cause the band to bend from the starting note to

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. Bitweek Studio 4.1 is actually currently in the beta phase.
[00:05.600] You can download it now when you have a running license. And they added a lot of new note
[00:10.640] FX devices. And I want to show you in this video what they are and how they work and some practical
[00:15.840] approaches. And this one is basically everything I learned about this video is everything I learned
[00:21.360] in the yesterday's stream. And I tried to compress it a bit down to a smaller video. It's still
[00:27.200] quite long but I think it's quite enjoyable. So let's start. The first addition to the Note FX
[00:34.320] device is the device called Ripple or how I would call it Bounce. So it starts to launch a
[00:47.360] kind of a ball from up in the air and then it bounces back from the ground and it can change the
[00:54.640] friction in the air. So it slows down the bouncing. So all you need to do is to add some kind of
[01:03.440] synthesizer after the Note FX device of course. And then you need an input which is a note
[01:10.960] here in the piano roll it's C3. And you can hit play. And then you get a
[01:24.320] you can change it damping. So we remove the friction.
[01:40.720] And you can see when the note starts here or the note start or the note on
[01:45.920] retriggers the effect. It's also not a polyphonic effect when you input multiple notes.
[01:50.960] It basically adds the same bouncing effect to all of the notes. And there's also no way to
[01:59.840] add polyphonic modulations to different notes. At least not at the moment. Or you can start lower here.
[02:21.600] And maybe this effect is too random because it's it's slowing down. It's not synchronized to the
[02:27.840] beat or to your BPM setting here in the transport section. But you can quantize this here with the
[02:35.680] new addition of the quantized device. It looks like this. And you can say quantize every output of
[02:44.640] this one to a 16th note grid. And this is something I do a lot in the grid itself with the
[02:51.680] clock quantize modules. And this sounds much more musical, musical-y.
[03:06.800] So this is without. This is with quantize. And you can basically dial in your
[03:24.640] end of a forgiveness, which is hard to describe. But like if you have it at zero percent,
[03:33.680] then it's completely straight quantized to the grid. But when you dial in forgiveness,
[03:39.120] then it's a bit sloppy around the edges. So it's not exactly on the grid. So you can still
[03:45.520] preserve some kind of groove or some non-linear speed change to the rhythm.
[04:05.840] And you can see you can also include the note of. So when you have a note on and then you have a
[04:20.880] note length and then at some point you have a note off. You can decide if you want to
[04:26.240] quantize a note of as well or the note on or only the note on. So you can decide if you want to
[04:36.080] include this here. So sometimes this can be handy and sometimes it's not so useful. So you have
[04:41.440] to try out what's what's best for you or for for the groove or for your melody or for your pattern
[04:46.960] you input into the quantizer here. But as you can see, the triple here itself creates some
[04:54.000] non-linear rhythms. And with the quantized second addition to the note effects devices,
[05:00.880] you can kind of make it more musical or more useful in in some songs structures where you have
[05:08.480] like more like a straight rhythm. You can also go here down to a millisecond so it's not really
[05:21.200] quantized to anything or at least the starting the first first bounce where it starts right so
[05:28.560] you can say I started 100 milliseconds. Another addition to the effects device is this device
[05:52.400] called ricochi and I hope I pronounced this right. And it also launches some kind of balls
[05:59.040] to the corners or to the walls of this room. And you can influence the room size here,
[06:04.400] how many corners you want, the rotation, the specialization and also the friction, how fast you
[06:11.840] want to launch the balls. And if you can switch it to different launching modes or random is
[06:19.440] just launching balls at random or passing here. So every time we have your note in the note clip
[06:30.640] you launch a ball for each note and then you can influence here the room settings and then
[06:37.920] it changes the behavior and also every time the ball bounces back from these walls you generate a
[06:43.760] note. And this sounds kind of random and it is but it's also kind of a bit predictable because
[06:54.720] you know what happened to these balls. Okay maybe pendant your more notes like this.
[07:17.680] And you can also go here full speed. So this sounds kind of random and sometimes this is
[07:31.440] exactly what you want because you probably want to create some textures, some ambient drawings
[07:37.120] here and there. And you can do that with this device on a note basis which is interesting because
[07:45.600] you can also add different other bitwig fx devices, note fx devices to influence this even more.
[07:55.440] So you can say well this sounds rhythmically too random so we can introduce here again a quantize
[08:03.600] device and say and can say everything that comes out of the ricochet synchronizes to 16 note
[08:11.520] beat grid and then we get a much more rhythmically synchronized or usable result.
[08:32.000] So just having here these notes painted in super straight super simple
[08:38.560] using this device you bring in and randomness and then using the quantize to synchronize everything
[08:44.400] to the beat grid makes it super interesting for me because you can introduce or make a lot of
[08:51.840] experiments in front of this quantize device create a big mess basically and then say
[09:00.480] please quantize sort everything out for me bring order to the chaos and then we can use it
[09:06.720] in a song context or in a track context where we need more like straight notes and straight rhythms.
[09:14.320] You can also dial in your forgiveness I think also explain this a bit so you can make the rhythm
[09:21.120] or the quantization a bit more sloppy so you preserve some of the randomness some of the
[09:28.640] wonky flavor of this ricochet output here. Okay so let's start over and maybe I try to make
[09:36.640] some kind of a practical example where if you're a lot of notes in the scale of D sharp minor
[09:43.360] is triggering the ricochet here and now we use a cooly synth and let's trigger this one.
[09:55.200] So like this maybe reduce the friction so we get a kind of drawn
[10:08.480] heel, groany feel, decrease the speed, initial speed or increase the speed
[10:31.120] even like a kind of a pet.
[10:45.680] Okay so now add some randomization which is also another new addition to the note of fixed devices
[10:54.080] with this one we can introduce randomized pitch velocity, timber, pressure, pan gain for each note
[11:02.480] that's been generated by this device here so this could be interesting because when we use
[11:08.880] your timber or timber and pressure we can use it expression and modulate maybe the kind of
[11:17.600] frequency here but the timber and the pressure is changing the oscillator mix. Okay so now we
[11:28.480] increase the pitch maybe to around 0.20 just to get some small variation there
[11:38.320] the more velocity randomization this is to cut off, timber is modulating the cut off,
[11:48.000] pressure is modulating the mix of oscillator mix and the panning, nice.
[12:10.000] Yes then we can introduce here humanize and humanize has a chance slider which reduces when you
[12:21.600] pull it down to 0% reduces the chance of the notes being played so sometimes you want to have
[12:28.480] like a sound that's not so it has not so many notes or it's not that that expressive for instance
[12:39.360] in the intro you want to have probably less notes so you want to only let some of the notes
[12:50.080] through then not all of them so can use this as a kind of an expression slider I would say
[12:59.840] in this set up here maybe introduce some humanization to the timing and the velocity here
[13:15.520] maybe increase the voices
[13:25.920] so there's no beta version here right so we have some crackouts in the sound here it's probably fixed
[13:46.880] in the release version but now I have some major issues here also with the audio engine crashing
[13:52.000] on windows but I want to make this tutorial nonetheless because I think the devices are pretty
[13:59.680] great and a nice addition to bitwig and I really love them and yeah so we have this humanization
[14:06.240] here introducing some randomization to timing and the chance and now we can say let's quantize
[14:17.040] this a bit to the beat grid and we have this forgiveness slider here also
[14:27.600] so you can morph between having no quantization at all and straight quantize to the grid so you
[14:36.960] can morph between the two fluidly which is interesting right so you can start in the intro maybe with
[14:51.440] totally chaotic behavior of all the sounds and then slowly morph into more rhythmic feel then
[15:00.080] in the main part this is solving I want to explore and yeah this just this this slider is pretty
[15:13.600] pretty great actually so yeah we have these two now and what you can do also is introduce your
[15:21.600] a band a band device which is also new and this band device is basically giving you the option
[15:30.720] to band from a different pitch than the current pitch of the node is so when the pitch is see
[15:38.880] three for instance a new dial in here last one then it bends down from C sharp down to C just
[15:47.440] one semitone right you can also change the slope of it and the band is so fast you can even create
[15:53.920] kick drums with it so you don't need to modulate in here the pitch if you want to create kick drums
[16:00.160] you can do this with the band and also I think in the stream I try to create some kind of 808
[16:07.200] bass drums and you can move between the bass itself without an attack or
[16:14.400] pitch modulation attack and a kick drum so you can move between the two just with the band here
[16:30.000] and also the finia in milliseconds how long the band is so it's pretty fast it goes down to 10
[16:35.600] milliseconds so this is the band device another new device
[17:04.640] is called note repeats looks like this and what it does it just repeats the notes but you can
[17:15.440] influence this also with modulation not only modulation also automation so that's paint in
[17:22.560] here one note and maybe use a sampler for this let's use the kick drum I don't know it should be nice
[17:36.800] and now it repeats just this one note here and you can change the speed
[17:51.200] or can switch the beats off so you can just use your automation
[18:22.000] and you can hear it it goes even to pretty high rates
[18:32.160] something like this
[18:40.400] you can also switch it to a clip mode a lidian mode
[18:43.200] right so you have this pattern and you have still this speed up or multiplication option here
[18:55.040] and it's also synchronizable to the grid and you can also use the quantize the
[19:02.080] end you want to so we have your 16th notes and sounds like this
[19:16.640] so it's perfect perfect for drums for percussion for high hats you can play around with this
[19:23.680] and in combination quantize forever and you can create so many interesting rhythms just with
[19:28.960] these two devices it's mind bogging how great this is you don't need to paint in here a lot of
[19:36.560] notes and offsets and you know edit it you just paint in one note and then you go to the device
[19:42.640] chain here at these note repeats device and quantize device add some modulation to it and
[19:50.720] that's it and you have so many possibilities just with this
[19:53.920] I see a lot of people complaining about the piano roll that they want to have a new features
[20:01.040] in the piano but the piano roll is not that interesting in Bitwig or at least in the Bitwig
[20:05.680] universe you paint in here a pretty basic pattern and then you make it interesting by adding
[20:13.360] devices and modifying these notes inside the device chain and it's so easy to do that in Bitwig
[20:22.800] then in all the other doors where you have to go into the piano roll you know and then you use
[20:27.920] a tool for some random chord progression some random rhythmic add-on and sequencing stuff
[20:36.160] you don't you don't need to do that in Bitwig in Bitwig the note clips are super simple you paint
[20:42.400] in one two three four five notes and then you add in all the variation inside the device chain
[20:51.200] with these modifiers okay so let's create some interesting percussion so I'm searching here in my
[21:01.120] sample library for some random
[21:06.480] bunker files right and we probably need your drum machine
[21:11.360] make and drag your all these samples into the drum machine to have a cell or each cell has a
[21:18.560] sampler with a sample in it and what we can do now is we can paint here a note clip
[21:28.160] and then paint in here notes for all the
[21:34.720] for all the samples maybe do it a bit longer
[21:40.640] something like this and they just trickle once so this is a normal default behavior
[21:46.960] and we can go now into each cell here and add maybe a note repeat
[21:56.160] and switch to the burst or a clean in mode here let's see change the density of this one
[22:07.120] and then drag it over to this cell here change the density
[22:13.760] all right so you can see it creates easy
[22:43.920] nice little grooves
[22:50.160] it's over here and there you can also rotate this a bit here maybe let's see
[22:58.000] yeah
[23:16.960] change the speed. Maybe also FTR-1, 16 notes forgiveness, just a bit.
[23:32.160] Okay, so you can create easy rhythms here with the drum machine and just these simple
[23:48.160] notes here, just painting and long notes for each of these cells. And of course you can go
[23:56.160] in here and just then humanize a thing, change the chance here with the timing, the velocity,
[24:06.080] right, and copy this over to each cell, which is a bit cumbersome, but you can do it first and then
[24:14.240] you know, lower it to each cell. Maybe over here, over here. Doesn't need to be everywhere,
[24:26.400] but oh, it's already over everywhere, yes. So now we have this image.
[24:45.840] So right, you can create interesting rhythms just for this. Okay, that's one way of using
[24:54.160] the Euclidean note repeater. So something I showed already yesterday in the stream is that the
[25:01.760] sampler now has a release box here, what this means is, when you have a sample in the sampler
[25:10.560] and you play the sample, everything that's in that release box here gets triggered when the gates
[25:21.600] off. So we can put here another sample in this one in this box. So the sampler inside the sampler.
[25:29.520] So every time this one is done playing, this one starts. Oh, it's the, you can see it's the gate.
[25:42.480] So this is the first sample and the second sample starts here.
[25:53.680] So you can combine multiple samples and also do this here kind of in a separate way.
[26:04.080] I did this also yesterday in stream.
[26:05.600] Also new is you can now change the color palettes. Usually you select the color here for the track
[26:14.560] and the clips here on the left side. Now you have this small arrow here, you can change different
[26:22.480] palettes you want to. And you can also use your own images. You can drag in here just one image,
[26:31.680] a J back here for instance, drag it over here. And then it says import as palette and then it,
[26:38.240] yeah, creates this new palette you can select then over here. Okay, so you have prepared something.
[26:47.920] It's a simple, it's a simple node clip. We have here three nodes.
[26:54.000] And these nodes are going into this device chain here. So first up, I'm creating multiple nodes
[27:00.400] from one from these one nodes here. So when the D sharp goes into this device here, I'm creating
[27:08.240] multiple nodes of the root node, which is D sharp. So it stays the same node. Then I get your
[27:14.240] plus plus 15, which is the minor third and the perfect fifth here, then an octave lower,
[27:22.480] but the base node and then your five semitones up. And I also dialed in your chance of 50%
[27:29.360] being played off this node. So I already created here a chord from this. So sometimes when I play
[27:38.640] different nodes here on the piano rule, not every chord in this key is a minor chord. So sometimes
[27:51.120] it's a major chord, right? So the key for those sorts this out here, I say, I want to be in the
[27:56.400] scale of the sharp minor. So every node that goes in that's not in the scale is corrected.
[28:04.960] So we have for each chord the right mode. So it's minor or major. So I'm having here basically a
[28:14.240] nice diatonic chord progression already just by using a simple node clip with a pattern,
[28:21.440] creating multiple nodes from it and then constraining it to a scale. And then here I have a node
[28:28.080] fx layer. So I splitting up basically these chords into two paths or two layers here.
[28:34.720] The first layer, I'm transposing the chord up one octave, okay? And then I'm using the strum.
[28:44.320] And the strum uses then these multiple nodes and place it back like a slightly delayed.
[28:50.240] When I disable this here, this lower layer here, can hear how it sounds.
[28:59.200] So it's placed like the late. When I disable this, I have just quads.
[29:09.120] Right? When I introduce a strum,
[29:11.920] I get this nice slowly strumming playback of these piano chords. And I also can dial in here
[29:27.200] that basically I'm switching or toggling between strumming up or down. So first the high node
[29:34.800] then until we get to the lower node and twice further. So up, down. We can also change it
[29:44.560] a speed of the playback of the strumming. Okay? So what we do now is we automate this here
[29:59.680] and on the clip itself we say we want to start maybe a bit faster here or this.
[30:14.800] And then a bit slower.
[30:15.840] So I feel like this.
[30:24.960] So we can also use the quantize for this. So we delaying some of these nodes and we can say
[30:49.840] just quantize it a bit more so it's more rhythmically correct. So when I switch on here to metronome.
[31:04.000] Or you can keep it completely free. More unquantized.
[31:22.160] And then I'm using at the end the randomize. So I'm randomizing a bit the velocity. So each node
[31:28.080] in the chord is a bit differently from the velocity. So it feels more organic and human.
[31:40.880] And then here in the bottom layer I'm using node repeats without the transposition. So it's
[31:47.200] and it's an octave lower basically playing an occlidean pattern. So this sounds like this.
[32:03.120] You can increase the density here.
[32:19.920] So it's basically repeating the chords or the nodes of the chords in an occlidean pattern.
[32:25.360] It sounds like an bass rhythm.
[32:33.760] So remember disable everything. This is basically my initial node clip here.
[32:50.000] And this is painted within I don't know two seconds and then I create this whole device
[33:06.320] chain here modifying all the keys and creating something like this.
[33:10.880] And of course you can save this as a preset, this whole chain here. Maybe introduce here a chain
[33:22.160] device and then put all the stuff in here into this chain. Save it as a device as a preset.
[33:31.840] And you can reuse it in your tracks. And also yeah you can add some macros here
[33:39.120] and change some stuff here with some macros or modulators of course and bring in more interesting
[33:46.800] variety here. Maybe bring in more nodes here.
[34:16.800] We'll collect this.
[34:46.800] But I think it's very interesting to play something like this way, it's a different
[35:14.440] approach.
[35:15.440] If you can't play the piano pretty well, then this is peanuts for you.
[35:21.280] But if you are some kind of nerd, musical nerd, you know, like this approach, then this
[35:27.320] is valid too, and it's fun, and it's a different approach, and you get different results,
[35:32.600] and yeah, it's fun to do.
[35:37.000] Okay, so another example where I use note repeats probably a lot is baseline patterns.
[35:45.160] And baseline patterns are sometimes in electronic music, maybe simple, but they need to be
[35:52.440] groovy, right?
[35:54.160] So what I'm using here is just a kick drum to get some feel for the rhythm.
[36:04.440] Let's go with this.
[36:10.240] And let's create some base to it here, let's go with the pace 4, all you enter is crashing
[36:17.640] a lot, but it's beta stuff, you know this.
[36:25.840] So let's go with the base note here, and I don't paint in a pattern or reason of course.
[36:35.440] And I'm using note repeats to in front, a chlidean note, because I like it, and you can
[36:50.360] already hear it, it's pretty groovy.
[37:09.080] Let's go to a monophonic synth, so I have something like this, can change the dance
[37:32.520] T.
[37:45.240] What you can do is maybe introduce your transpose, no transpose, at the step mode, and maybe
[37:54.560] say at the end here I want to pitch it up by 5 semi-tones, let's try this, or maybe
[38:10.040] you thought two steps, so collect this, bring in variation, and change the dance
[38:28.400] T, right so you get a nice rhythm just by doing this, you can also use your hi-hat,
[38:46.640] just using the same notes here, because the pitch doesn't matter for the hi-hat, also
[38:55.440] clone this note beats to the hi-hat, maybe quantize, or before it crashes, okay so
[39:21.960] let's try this, nice, also randomize, randomize the velocity here a bit, maybe you can
[39:43.840] add you also the expressions, use timbre for the VK link, and let's try this again,
[40:06.560] you can add you, so you can create easy Euclidean rhythms, or at least create some interesting
[40:26.800] Ruby patterns, or we can also pop it over here for the clap, and then pop it over here,
[40:38.120] let's deep down, maybe on in two of these, let's see if this works.
[41:07.400] If you want to change the rhythm, you just go into this device, change the density, or
[41:12.160] you create some macros for your MIDI keyboard, and then you just turn the knobs on the keyboard
[41:18.320] and change the rhythm pretty easily, and it's still in the grid, right, pretty straight,
[41:45.800] not the rotation is basically where it starts, or where you start with the first initial
[41:51.000] hit, so you can go with 0, so it starts exactly at the first kick, as you can see here,
[41:58.600] or you delay it a bit, so it starts basically here, or you can change also the length here,
[42:09.960] maybe on to 7 or 8, so you can create all kinds of different groups, and if you think it's
[42:21.880] too straight, then bring in the humanization device, or the randomization device, and
[42:28.960] you know, make it more a bit more sloppy, or not even a bit more funky.
[42:37.600] So what do you think about the new device additions of Bitwig Studio 4.0, tell me in the comments?
[42:43.200] I think they are pretty fantastic, and as you can see, I'm using the piano roll basically
[42:48.200] just as a sketching board, drawing in the rough information of pitch and position in
[42:56.240] the time frame of the project, and then using all these note effects devices to shifting
[43:04.720] and quantizing and offsetting, and so on, to create much, much richer results in the end.
[43:12.720] So that's it for the video, thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.