How to Persist Longer Pad Sounds in Bitwig

Tutorial | Mar 28, 2022

In this video, I showed how to use the Note Grid in Bitwig to make sure that multiple small notes close together are recognized as one note. I demonstrated the problem of re-triggering the sampler when a clip is looped, and then showed how the Note Grid can be used to solve this. I also showed how the Note Grid can be used to continuously hold the gate signal even when the pitch of the sample is changed.

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Questions & Answers #

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

How can I prevent my sampler from triggering every time I loop through a clip? #

To prevent your sampler from triggering every time you loop through a clip, you can use the Note Grid. This is a tool that can detect when two notes are close together, and tell Bitwig to recognize them as one note. To do this, you can compare the gate signal with the signal one millisecond earlier. This way, any gap bigger than one millisecond will be recognized as a new note, and any gap smaller than one millisecond will be recognized as one note.

How can I use the Note Grid to persist longer pad sounds? #

To use the Note Grid to persist longer pad sounds, you can set the sampler to re-trigger mode in mono. This will ensure that the gate signal is continuously held, even when you change the pitch of the note. Additionally, you can set the Note Grid to Robin mode and specify how many voices you want to use. This will allow the grid to round robin through the voices and ensure that the same voice is never triggered twice in the same instance.

What is the difference between using the Note Grid and the re-trigger option in #

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 folks, welcome back to another video. Today it's about telling Bitwig that multiple small little
[00:06.480] notes close together are actually one note. Keep watching. The first I show you the problem. So
[00:13.680] imagine you make a some kind of ambient tune, you have some kind of drone sound here, you put it
[00:18.240] into Bitwig into a sampler, and then you maybe decide to use a loop here because it want you want
[00:25.840] to loop in this sample endlessly or infinite. And it may be also used here some fade-in fade-out
[00:34.800] fade-outs. And then you create a clip in the clip lounge, for instance, or maybe also in the
[00:39.600] range on, doesn't matter. You have this short note here, and then you hit play, or maybe in C3.
[00:58.240] You can see your three triggers basically, every time we hit the start or we loop,
[01:02.800] through the clip, and every time we hit zero here, or the first beat again, or you come back to
[01:12.240] the first note, we three triggers the sampler. That's not what we want. What you usually do is maybe
[01:18.320] you make the the clip a bit longer here with scale it up to 200%, and then again and again,
[01:23.600] or make just, you know, make this clip longer and longer. But the problem persists, every time you hit
[01:31.440] back to the start, you re-trick out the sampler. And it's maybe not what you want.
[01:36.720] So my solution for this was basically to tell Bitwig, when there's no gap between the end and the
[01:44.800] start of a note, or if you have two notes close together, and there's no gap between the notes,
[01:51.680] please recognize it as one note. You can do this with the note grid very easily.
[01:58.080] To use a note grid, there is. And you get the gate signal here with the yellow line.
[02:10.800] We take the oscilloscope here. You can see how it looks like.
[02:19.120] As you can see, our three triggers are happening here. That's basically the gap between the notes.
[02:24.800] So what we do is we compare just the signal, the gate signal, with the or,
[02:34.800] and we compare it with the signal just one millisecond earlier. So it takes either the signal before,
[02:46.480] before the gap happens, or after the gap happens. And what this means is basically everything,
[02:55.840] or every gap that's bigger as one millisecond is recognized as a new note and everything below
[03:02.560] is basically one note. So you can use the signal here as a gate signal, hit play.
[03:08.000] You can see there's no re-trigger.
[03:22.000] So with this trick, or with this note grid type of thing, you can persist notes
[03:27.840] over a great amount of time. This also works if you use your multiple notes in there.
[03:33.360] And you say this is just one note. And you can re-trigger by just making the gap bigger than one millisecond.
[03:44.880] Then it re-triggers again.
[03:51.120] The only problem I saw is with multiple notes when you play like chords.
[03:56.960] And you do it like this, right? And then you go here into voices mode and say like three voices.
[04:07.840] And every time you have a new note, we trigger basically a new voice with the new ID.
[04:14.160] And the grid basically never gets the same note again for the same voice instance.
[04:22.480] So that's kind of a problem. So I think this doesn't work.
[04:33.040] So now I have the same problem as before. What I found out, it's best for that is using this in
[04:39.600] mono mode and putting then the grid into a note of x selector here and using then three voices
[04:49.840] or three robin. And I said exactly how many voices you have in this instance here, two voices.
[05:00.080] Then it works. But as soon as you start, we have more voices, three or so. Then the first voice
[05:07.280] that triggers in the second voice is then the third voice and the third voice is then the third
[05:11.920] first voice. So it round robins basically through the voices and you never get the same voice twice
[05:17.120] in the same instance of the note grid. And this doesn't work as you can see.
[05:24.640] But if you have exactly the same number of voices here as you have for the layers, then it works.
[05:38.960] So just as a tip for how you persist longer pad sounds, if you do ambient and if you want to use
[05:46.640] the clip launcher for ambient and you have this problem that the three triggers the samples all
[05:52.400] the time, I think this is a pretty simple solution. So if you have something like this here,
[05:58.640] then you can use inside the sampler here to re-trigger mode. If you have it in mono,
[06:03.920] you can say never re-trigger. So this only works when you overlap basically the notes here.
[06:11.440] But even then in three triggers at the start of the clip, just to give you just an insight
[06:19.440] because I see already people commanding that they can use here to re-trigger option.
[06:24.240] So this re-trigger only works in mono mode and it also only works for overlapping notes.
[06:29.680] So as soon as I start here putting notes closer together,
[06:33.840] just re-trigger, even though re-trigger is on never. So it's not the same as using the
[06:42.000] note grid. So there's a difference there. Also if you use the note grid here, like I told you earlier,
[06:50.080] I have the same. You can also change the pitch of the note of course,
[07:07.680] while you are persisting the key or by persisting the gate signal.
[07:12.800] You can see we changed the pitch even though we play the same sample continuously.
[07:30.320] But even when you change the pitch, you can continuously hold the gate.
[07:35.680] Thanks for watching the video and I also noticed that a lot of you are actually not subscribed
[07:41.040] to the channel. So please, the subscribe button. It's pretty important for YouTube or for me,
[07:45.600] actually for the channel. So thanks for that. Like the video and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.