Replicating Bitwig's Delay Plus in the FX Grid

Tutorial | May 30, 2022

In this video, I explored the differences between the native Bitwig devices like EQ Plus and Flanger Plus, compared to the grid devices like Delay Plus and Polymer. I speculated that in the future, we may get container devices that allow us to build our own devices with DUI interfaces without having to hassle with the DUI designer. I demonstrated how to construct a Delay Plus-like device in the FX Grid, using a diffusion network, EQs, and a ducking knob. I concluded that while we can't replicate the Delay Plus exactly in the Grid, it is possible to create something similar in its place.

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Questions & Answers #

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

How do the new devices in Bitwig Studio differ in their interface? #

The new devices in Bitwig Studio have different interfaces depending on the type of device. The EQ Plus, Corros Plus, Flanger Plus, Laser Plus, and Delay Plus all have a native Bitwig look to them. The Polymer, however, has a container device in the background with a grid structure. This grid structure consists of modules such as an ADSR, filter, and wavetable, which can be replaced with pull-downs.

What possibilities does the FX Grid provide for constructing devices? #

The FX Grid provides the possibility to construct devices by combining different modules such as a feedback loop, diffusion network, low pass, and high pass. Additionally, users can use an oscilloscope to monitor the input and output of the device. Moreover, with the script page, users can adjust the amount and shape of the ducking of the audio signal, as well as adjust the gain and feedback of the device.

What is the difference between the Delay Plus and the Polymer device? #

The Delay Plus and the Polymer device have some differences in their functionality. The Delay Plus is

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] So I noticed something in the recent updates of Bitwig Studio. We got a lot of different devices.
[00:05.200] As you can see, we have the EQ Plus or Corros Plus, Flanger Plus,
[00:10.560] Laser Plus and Delay Plus and also Polymer. And when you look at these devices a bit
[00:18.240] closely, you can see there are some differences in the interface, right? So the
[00:23.040] phase of Flanger and Corros and EQ Plus look like kind of real native Bitwig devices, I guess.
[00:31.120] And Delay Plus and Polymer, they look more like they are made of grid modules, right? So
[00:42.640] we see some kind of container device in the background with some kind of grid structure.
[00:48.640] And in there is here, as you can see, a long delay and we have here modules from the grid,
[00:56.480] ADSR and the filter and the waste table module and so on. And you can even open up the polymer
[01:03.120] here to a grid structure and you can see how it's constructed, right? So you can see here the
[01:09.360] filters also in here and the waste tables in here. But you see more like how it's laid out and
[01:16.720] how all these modules are connected. And we have all the chain or for the Bitwig chain,
[01:23.120] we have here a special container, DUI interface kind of. And the first time I saw this, my first
[01:32.640] initial thought was that we actually get a container device instead for synthesizer.
[01:40.720] Which wasn't the case, we just got the polymer and we can open up this one in the grid structure,
[01:45.440] we can replace the certain modules by just using these pull downs here.
[01:51.600] But you can't really swap the waste table oscillator to this place and you can't swap the filter
[01:58.400] to this place or even get a different grid layout, right? It's not possible right now.
[02:05.120] But my thinking is that we may see in the future, maybe in the next main update or I don't know,
[02:16.560] I guess it's just my thought process. Maybe we get in some time in the future, a future we get
[02:23.120] some kind of container device where we can change the grid layout and can kind of build real
[02:30.160] devices for the chain itself without having to hassle with the DUI interface designer.
[02:39.760] So I could imagine this kind of hints for the future of the grid. So more like container
[02:47.680] devices where you can construct everything in the grid and for the users that don't want to
[02:53.360] interact with the grid, you can construct some kind of interface here with these container devices.
[02:58.960] Sadly, you can't open up here the DUI plus inside the grid at the moment. I don't know if it's
[03:06.400] possible in the future. For the polymer, it's possible and I think you can convert this to a grid,
[03:15.600] you add a convert this to a Poly-Grid. DUI plus it's also not possible here. But you can see it's
[03:23.200] it's just a long delay in here, right? So when we, for instance, create your fx grid,
[03:34.800] something like this and you can use it a long delay and switch this here to this mode.
[03:42.960] You can see it's the same module, right? But we have some other modules in here also too and some
[03:54.400] special interface things where I don't know if we get this in the grid too. Or what's the plan
[04:05.760] for this? But for me, it looks really like that we get something like this in the future where we
[04:10.400] can build devices. So I have no idea. So someone today on Reddit asked, asked how
[04:20.960] and how we get the delay plus into the grid. And my answer was delay plus is a grid device. So it's
[04:29.040] it doesn't make sense to bring delay plus into the grid because it's already made of grid modules,
[04:37.120] right? So phaser plus is available in here. I search for this, get the phaser plus in here
[04:46.160] as a special device because this is not a grid device in the background. So this is my thinking
[04:51.600] about it. So that's why we have grid module for that. So for instance, if you want to have
[04:58.960] here a feedback which we don't have on the long delay, you can build this for yourself so you can
[05:04.560] do maybe a blend in the front here and bring back the output of this, right? So we can
[05:12.480] kind of create here and yeah, feedback patch. And then we have here, or instance here,
[05:21.760] the space which is a diffusion network. And you bring this in, I think, into the feedback loop here.
[05:29.120] So you do another blend maybe. Put this over here. And then you bring in
[05:40.960] maybe an all pass, let's use two all pass devices here. And maybe go into go into the all pass here.
[05:50.880] So in this one, or maybe use stereo merge in split. So feel like this.
[06:02.800] This in there. So feel like this. And then you blend the dry signal
[06:13.840] with the wet signal, right? So I have like a diffusion network here separated from
[06:18.880] the process and you can blend this in. So this is this knob here then basically.
[06:28.800] Let me see if I can use this here mute all the devices here.
[06:34.400] So we have this. Maybe we need more of these devices here.
[07:05.040] So we have different networks here and I don't know how these networks are constructed.
[07:18.480] So you can only guess about it. But I think they are also probably constructed out of grid modules.
[07:26.960] So I think we have a lot of all pass patches in these different diffusion networks here.
[07:34.400] And but how they are exactly patched out or how they are connected. I don't know.
[07:40.640] It's hidden basically for us now. Maybe the future we can get the clans into the delay
[07:47.600] plus when they open up the grid structure behind it. So we get maybe also here a window like we have
[07:57.200] here on the polymer for the delay plus. But I don't know. But you can kind of construct the delay
[08:02.320] plus inside the grid to some extent. Maybe certain features don't really work that well. For
[08:09.040] instance here the update rate maybe or the paid crossfits when changing the late times. So maybe not
[08:17.200] that easy to realize what it should be possible in some way or the other. So let's actually finish
[08:28.080] this here a bit more. So we have a diffusion network and some kind of diffusion network.
[08:33.520] It's probably not the best one, but it kind of works. We call this here a diffusion
[08:43.440] and we call this here feedback. And we also have here some EQs, low pass and high pass.
[08:52.720] Low pass and I guess this is also used before actually when yeah let's use it here.
[09:16.720] So after it goes back basically to the input here of the delay. So we have these ones here
[09:26.320] high pass low pass and then we have a ducking knob. And in the beta 2 I think we got a change to
[09:37.440] that we duck actually the white signal only. We have the mix knob here. So we have still mix knob
[09:42.560] here implemented by the fx grid itself. So we can use this for the mix. And for the ducking here
[09:49.440] we just use a multiply. Multiply here. One stand by one. So this is basically just the same.
[10:08.320] It's just a non-change. So the input is the output. So there's no volume change
[10:15.600] only when I lower the volume. So then I need of course an envelope follower. Of course we need to
[10:25.680] follow the input amplitude here. Maybe we put this here. And then we use basically the constant
[10:39.600] here and subtract subtract from one because we want to lower the volume. So the shape of the
[10:50.560] input audio decides how much we subtract from one which is the zero volume or zero dB volume.
[11:00.240] And then we use here an oscilloscope so we can see. So the output here now is one
[11:10.320] which is no volume change. And when we input your audio signal. Then yeah you can see the audio
[11:22.880] signal basically lowers the volume. So we go into that here. And we can also use oscilloscope here.
[11:34.560] Maybe change this to green. Go to the lower setting. Go to that.
[11:47.920] You can see the green signal here.
[11:54.960] Green signal is lower in volume than the red signal which is the signal before we change the volume.
[12:00.320] And of course we need to change here the ducking which is the amount of ducking so we can use
[12:08.800] and attenuate. Put this in here. We can scale the output of the follower.
[12:17.680] It's the zero. You can see the green audio waveform fills exactly the red one.
[12:24.560] So there's no volume change. So no ducking. So we can use this here ducking.
[12:34.640] But even here in the script page we have more possibilities. Here we can only change the
[12:39.120] amount but here you can still change also the shape how it reacts to the audio input.
[12:44.400] You can use a rise and attack on decay basically.
[13:00.560] What else can we do?
[13:05.520] We can maybe also increase the ducking a bit more by multiplying.
[13:10.080] Constantly maybe by 5.
[13:21.760] So we have a more extreme ducking that's more like a compression on almost.
[13:33.920] That makes no sense. But yeah you can do stuff like this.
[13:44.400] So with the diffusion network we have also implemented here the high pass and low pass.
[13:50.400] We have the ducking. We have the feedback knob here.
[13:55.840] Well let's try out here.
[13:56.880] Yeah. Actually it's not right. The feedback is not right because we have your only
[14:02.640] a blend. We probably need to use here a sum like this and then use a game knob here.
[14:15.520] Because we want to go over 100% right so we want to have louder volume going in
[14:21.760] then it's actually going out. So we can do this with the volume so zero is basically exactly 100%.
[14:36.880] Yeah right so you can crank up your volume more and get more feedback out of it.
[14:41.520] Maybe we tweak here a bit the diffusion network more. Let's give it a try here.
[14:58.480] So this is the diffusion network 100%.
[15:03.920] Maybe we switch this here over this to that and this to that.
[15:10.000] So we have the opposite direction. So this is dry 100% dry.
[15:17.120] This is 100% wet.
[15:20.480] Okay nice. So now we bring in here maybe a small delay to change the pitch.
[15:28.400] That's a we have a kind of pitch modulation happening there.
[15:38.960] And instead of an LFO I go here for noise, make it stereo and use a stereo split.
[15:49.200] So we have to left and right channel different noise signals and of course we need a low pass.
[15:55.520] Bring this down and volume crank it up.
[16:05.920] We get kind of a more smooth signal.
[16:16.160] Right so when I increase here the low pass.
[16:18.880] So you have a lot of noisy signal basically and we reduce it here to over the lower frequencies.
[16:30.240] So we get a smooth or slower signal which is still random and also because it's stereo here we
[16:39.680] get different signals for left and right. Different noise signals on the left and the right channel and we call this random.
[16:54.480] This modulation here left and right.
[17:00.400] You modulate here maybe this.
[17:02.080] Oh let's modulate it to the fullest and then we can remove that and we can change the
[17:16.560] amount of the volume knob. Maybe also dial in the different number of 16 milliseconds maybe this is
[17:32.400] the same. We have a small stereo effect. We go here for the D3.
[17:52.640] So you can hear still there's a small little pitch modulation in there and it brings a lot of
[18:00.480] richness to the sound I think. I need to duplicate this here one time.
[18:10.160] What's it going to do here by let's get one one hundred.
[18:13.680] Okay so in the delay plus we have also got this nice stereo thing where we can
[18:30.400] make a difference between the left and the right channel by offsetting the channels.
[18:34.400] Maybe there's something I can do here with this. So we have here just in the right and we also bring
[18:49.280] this together here and then we can import here a small delay like this delay over here
[19:06.720] and then we do here a macro bipolar
[19:17.520] over here over just so dot I don't know if it's maybe two more to maybe also to match again.
[19:38.080] Like this as we can dial in basically different on the left and the right.
[19:50.560] I'll just call it here the tune. So we also do here a macro
[20:04.320] call this gain or this we call feedback. So we go slightly above here not too much.
[20:19.440] You know what happens. Maybe a bit more. Let's use a macro here for diffusion.
[20:49.920] It's a macro file.
[20:58.960] I cut and low cut your cut.
[21:01.120] Or maybe do it also that's why. This is low price. My price.
[21:19.920] So we have to use these two knobs here. We have the feedback knob.
[21:28.000] If the mix knob panning is missing we are ducking. This is down here. And we have a white knob.
[21:48.320] So we can use stereo with here at the end. We can crank it up to 200%.
[21:58.960] Yes.
[22:06.000] Or maybe go to bipolar so we can use it here as a double click thing 100%.
[22:13.920] So if you double click it's 100%. If you go down it's mono. If you crank it up it's 200% with.
[22:44.720] We can't replicate it in the face of the module inside here of the macro knobs of course it's not
[22:52.560] possible but you know just trying to make an example here.
[23:23.200] So it's basically in, yeah. How do I put it?
[23:30.880] A poor man's delay plus. So yeah I think that's it for this video. Thanks for watching guys.
[23:35.840] Leave a thumbs up if you liked the video. Subscribe to the channel. Maybe think about the Patreon
[23:40.480] subscription and you can download this preset of course in the description below. Have some fun with it.
[23:45.440] And I hope you learned something and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks for watching and bye.