Exploring Bitwig 4.1 with Creative Tips and Inspiration

Tutorial | Thu Nov 25 2021 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

In this video, I shared some tips on how to use the new Bitwig 4.1 FX Note-FX devices. I showed how to use the note-repeater device to create an interesting sound, how to use the arpeggiator to get different rhythms and timing settings, how to use the ricochet device to modulate panning and tremolo, and how to use the multi note device to get different triplet rhythms using velocity.

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Questions & Answers #

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

What is Bitwig 4.1 and what new devices does it include? #

Bitwig 4.1 is a digital audio workstation and music production software. It includes a range of new devices such as the Note FX, Ricochet, and Exchange. The Note FX device is a MIDI controller that offers note repeat and pitch shifting capabilities. The Ricochet device is used to create unique sounds by sending balls into a virtual room that trigger note expressions when they hit the walls. The Exchange device is a sampler that allows users to quickly switch between different sounds.

How can the Note FX device be used to create interesting sounds? #

The Note FX device can be used to create interesting sounds by using the note repeat function. This allows users to input a note with a MIDI keyboard or piano roll and the note will repeat at the exact frequency. Additionally, the Note FX device can be used to convert a chord progression into rhythms by dividing the note frequency multiple times.

What is the Ricochet device and how can it be used to create unique sounds? #

The Ricochet device is used to create unique sounds by sending balls into a virtual room. When they hit

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] Hey guys, welcome back to another video in today's video. It's about Bitwig 4.1 of course and the new Bitwig
[00:06.960] FX note FX devices and I want to share some inspirational content video to give you some ideas
[00:13.200] What you can do with these devices? It's more like you know tip after tip after tip and then at the end you maybe have some
[00:21.080] Some ideas popping up in your head. Okay, so let's go
[00:24.000] Did you know that the note repeats device and go up to audio rate when you switch here to pitch of current note
[00:35.520] So when you input the note with your MIDI keyboard or with the piano roll it plays exactly the frequency
[00:42.880] in note repeats so you can
[00:46.880] Use your e-kick which is a device that doesn't use any pitch input at all
[00:52.680] It just triggers the whatever tune you dial in here, but you can play the e-kick now here in
[01:00.360] Multiple notes and it sounds interesting. So for instance when we went in here to find a first sequence
[01:07.160] Something like this
[01:31.160] It's just you know separate individual kicks, but you can use it like a synthesizer
[01:43.960] Which is maybe not that helpful, but it's interesting and
[01:48.360] Yeah, you get some weird sounds out of this sometimes. It's more like a fun fact
[01:54.040] Another interesting idea is to take rhythm for instance, this kick drum here
[02:02.680] And this kick drum plays in a certain
[02:07.480] frequency and
[02:09.480] It's in a such a low frequency. It's basically like an LFO place in a rate that you recognize it as a rhythm
[02:18.960] But when you speed it up and go into audio rate it becomes at some point some kind of pitch or sound
[02:38.000] But down here it's rhythm
[02:41.680] But then you can convert maybe form your chord progression here and take the root note and convert it into a rhythm
[02:51.840] by just you know
[02:53.680] Divided multiple times. So you take basically the pitch the frequency and convert it into ppm
[03:01.520] And it's something that's not not really easy to you need a some kind of calculator and
[03:07.440] It would be nice to have this actually integrated into the ppm section here where you can just type in a note maybe
[03:18.640] see minus five or something like this and then it converts into ppm setting
[03:24.240] This could be interesting and you see here. I have one of the three dots one two ppm
[03:30.480] Which is exactly the speed of a minus five or a minus four or something
[03:36.160] and
[03:38.400] Yeah, you can play basically the same rhythm here
[03:41.600] What the kick as you have for the root note just you know having the same frequency divided multiple times
[03:48.160] And this can be interesting to have this yeah combined basically the rhythm
[04:07.360] Using kind of Poly rhythms and your chord progress because you can also combine then here
[04:12.720] um just with other notes for instance we have your a and then we have your an e
[04:19.280] So you can combine here
[04:21.760] Oh switch this up to an e
[04:24.640] And I have to combine
[04:27.840] Right we have to have like a different kind of Poly rhythm
[04:30.320] Or use another percussion element here maybe it's on or some random sample
[04:47.600] So this can lead to interesting results is something you can maybe try out
[04:51.920] It's not easy to do but with the calculations here to get your
[04:56.560] um root note frequency into a ppm setting
[05:01.040] Um, but it's possible
[05:04.160] Something I already showed in a youtube shot is that you can take your chord progression here
[05:17.760] And use for instance arpeggiator
[05:19.760] And this gives you of course in kind of a sequence
[05:33.280] But in 4.1 the arpeggiator got updated so every time you change the tempo here um
[05:40.560] The arpeggiator retrigger is basically or updates the rate every time a step happens
[05:47.520] So this makes it now possible to modulate this timing setting here without getting
[05:55.280] You know out of the rhythm so we can use the step smart
[06:00.240] Here and this is also new we can switch between bipolar and unipolar settings
[06:04.880] We have only positive values here
[06:07.120] Hit the die simple to get you know a random pattern
[06:11.200] Maybe go to eight notes here
[06:13.200] Go back to one fourth which is pretty slow
[06:20.160] But now we can modulate here maybe by two
[06:25.360] And every time the steps modulate the tempo we get a kind of different rhythm
[06:31.200] You can also go a step further here and maybe use the second one
[06:47.360] And say at the end of the sequence we want to go here to dotted notes
[06:51.760] Something like this
[07:01.760] If you want to for my taste it sounds way too off most of the times but you can also switch up between different settings here right we have a lot of different modes and we can do this here too
[07:32.320] And get some different starting points or interesting new rhythms
[07:48.080] And then you can put this here into um note of x-layer
[07:52.160] And have like one layer playing this sequence duplicating this to a second layer
[07:56.320] Yeah maybe pitch here the notes up one octave
[08:01.760] So we playing a different yeah pattern
[08:04.640] Let's see how this sounds
[08:22.640] And maybe we change us some settings
[08:39.920] The ricochet device sending out balls here to the walls of the room and triggering our note each time
[08:47.600] You may be wondering um
[08:49.600] What's this specialization it's lighter here right get this brightness in the background
[08:56.400] And when you hit here f1 you can see amount that each balls position in the room modulates its note expressions
[09:04.160] With the horizontal position applied to panning and the vertical position map to tumble
[09:09.440] And yeah you don't need to randomize these two expressions basically when you use the size
[09:16.960] So you can just increase your the specialization slider and get this for free
[09:24.480] So we have here maybe some kind of sequence that's been in here something
[09:32.720] Um
[09:34.720] My chalkboard and maybe
[09:52.480] Want some like this
[09:54.480] And
[10:01.760] And now we have
[10:05.120] You can hear it the panning is modulated randomly or not randomly. It's actually where the position of the balls in the room
[10:15.360] But we can also use now the tumble here this expression and modulate something
[10:20.320] Um, maybe the case setting here
[10:26.160] Um, let's see
[10:28.160] So
[10:30.160] So you get the space the cliff of three year and when you increase the room or rotate the room you get different results
[10:55.600] Always nice to use the quantize here after this ricochet and dial in some quantization
[11:26.080] So in this example, you have just um, you know a beat made with XO just to kick drum a snare
[11:33.840] A high-hat nothing special died in your some kind of swing. This is how the beat sounds
[11:45.200] Bit of unfiltered here also hot clip on there just to make it louder
[11:50.080] And then on this track here
[11:52.080] I have a sampler and
[11:56.240] The exchange is not not really important
[11:59.120] Um
[12:01.520] In the sampler I have a moody sample and
[12:06.720] Yeah, I've just loaded in here as you can see on the right side just selected a bunch of bass sounds
[12:15.520] Something that's
[12:17.280] Something random that lies around on my hard drive just dragged in here and then I selected all the
[12:25.840] All the key sounds here and spread it out over the select so um, this report select equally, right?
[12:32.080] So you can select each of these samples here with the select button
[12:36.160] And then I using here a modulator a step smart
[12:39.920] You just step
[12:41.440] Who all of the sample randomly or just, you know with this pattern here
[12:48.640] And then every time I trigger basically a note
[12:51.920] C3 for instance, I just play a different sample
[12:59.360] So it plays a different note every time a note comes in or it plays in
[13:04.800] the selected note here out from this
[13:06.880] Uh, steps on and then I'm using note repeats here
[13:12.880] At four times and you can see I'm modulating here the repeat time with an LFO that sounds like this
[13:30.560] And you can select your whatever you want with fields right for you or can use a different
[13:35.120] LFO or modulator
[13:38.080] and
[13:39.600] Then I'm using a quantize here to quantize this to 16th notes, but not every time as you can see
[13:45.040] I'm dialing in the forgiveness back and forth. So I'm switching between completely free
[13:49.760] Uh, repeating completely free and quantizing to the beat grid. This is how it sounds here
[14:06.560] So you can go in the clear chop direction pretty easily just with this small setup
[14:23.520] And then if it's too random for you, right then you probably can just re-sample it, bounce it down to a track and then it did it further
[14:32.160] But it's a nice little, you know, chain setup for getting these random bass shots or
[14:40.800] Clutch sounds. It can also be a select different
[14:45.680] bass sounds of course and you know
[14:49.120] develop it further
[14:52.400] So in this setup here, I'm using the same trump as before
[14:55.360] But this time here, I loaded the preset from the from the bitric library, which is called
[15:05.440] Forgot's electric bass thing at fat and I just use this
[15:11.600] Yeah
[15:12.960] This preset here
[15:14.960] Um, but this time I'm using also here to quantize which is modulating or modulating here to forgiveness
[15:21.600] um
[15:23.600] And the note repeats here also modulating to speed. It's the same as before
[15:27.600] But this time here, I introduce the randomize device with the pitch up to 12
[15:34.480] So I'm getting random pitches
[15:37.040] And then I'm using the key filter here to
[15:39.760] Quantize these random pitches to scale, right
[15:42.560] So instead of playing the space, you're pretty pure, which sounds like this
[15:55.760] So this is the original bass line
[15:58.080] Um, I'm using note repeats
[16:05.200] To bring in a bit of funk
[16:06.800] Then I'm using the quantize here to quantize the the bpm
[16:17.920] And then bring in random pitches
[16:27.040] Which sounds already pretty fine to me or random bass
[16:30.640] Uh, but then you can introduce the key filter to quantize to a scale
[16:50.640] So you can create this kind of square-pasha, um, bass lines, you know from back in the days
[16:56.480] Uh, maybe bring in an aemon break um
[17:01.440] And then you're good to go
[17:03.440] Okay, uh, the last tip is just a small one
[17:07.040] Um, when you have like a note here that goes into a multi note
[17:13.440] So this is the note
[17:15.440] Go into multi note
[17:17.440] So you have like a chord and then you put in a triple here. That sounds like this
[17:29.840] So the triple is basically um, tripling all the notes at the same time in the same rhythm
[17:38.000] And to separate these
[17:39.520] Individual notes from each other to have like different triple rhythms you have to use velocity
[17:48.000] So when you use your randomize
[17:52.080] And turn up the velocity here you can hear now
[17:54.960] Each note has a different rhythm to the triple
[18:10.720] So the velocity decides where at which height you start basically to drop the ball to the bottom
[18:17.200] But you don't need to use the randomize
[18:25.440] If you use the multi note here you can also use the new parameters here um velocity offset
[18:34.480] So you can offset basically the velocity of each note
[18:37.280] Right, or you go with the spread parameter, which is a I think a random
[18:48.880] random parameter
[18:50.880] So the velocity can spread
[18:53.840] At 10% in the positive or the negative range at random for each note now or 20% for this one here
[19:09.680] And of course you can use 0 to 0
[21:10.320] You
[21:12.320] Yeah easy