this is how easy it is to start a track - Bitwig Ambient

Tutorial | Nov 21, 2022

Small recap over the last videos. Auto Leveler and Loud Split in action to clean up and normalizing the signal. Sampler & Reverb for Ambient Fun. download the leveler preset.

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Transcription #

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[00:00.000] Hey folks, welcome back. Today I want to recap a bit over my recent videos making this auto leveler
[00:08.160] and also using the loud split because you can use these two devices together to make great sounds.
[00:14.960] So first we need an audio track here and I want to record my voice again. I also made a video
[00:20.800] about this how you can use your voice in the sampler and make sounds with it. But today I want
[00:26.240] to record another video, another voice sample. So what I usually try to do is sing in higher octaves
[00:33.200] because I really like to pitch down the sounds afterwards. So I'm muting here the audio track
[00:42.000] and switching on my microphone. You can see you have some level and then I try to
[00:47.040] sing a tone in a constant pitch. It doesn't matter which pitch it is. We can correct this
[00:52.960] afterwards. In a constant pitch and I also try to bring in certain type of vowels. I open up my
[01:00.880] mouth and close it down so I have different tonalities or different overtones in there.
[01:06.560] So that's what I'm trying to do.
[01:07.840] And you can really bring out your beautiful voice in all kinds of colors if you want to.
[01:24.240] You can correct this afterwards and it doesn't matter really. If you put reverb on it,
[01:29.680] it sounds beautiful. So this doesn't sound beautiful here. Yeah, it's my voice, right?
[01:43.200] So I'm using the loud split here and I'm only using the loud portion of this device. So I'm
[01:49.760] switching it to mono or to a solo and then I'm trying to go down. Only selecting certain
[02:02.160] partials and also leaving out all the noise from the microphone. I'm only collecting basically the
[02:08.000] important partials, the fundamental frequency and also certain overtones. Right. And then I need to
[02:22.160] normalize this audio sample. As you can see, it's not, yeah, it's a certain level, but it's not
[02:28.000] really balanced. So I'm using my auto leveler reset. I showed you in some of my recent videos.
[02:34.880] I'll do this here is a bit more logic involved. So it doesn't blue out my speakers. I probably
[02:43.360] put a link in the description of this so you can download it. And yeah, I have this on here.
[02:54.240] So now we have basically normalized signal and I use this and call this your vocals.
[02:59.760] All we have to do now is balance basically here, the important part. Let's let's actually do it
[03:10.080] this way, right click and bounce postfader. And then you can see we have a nice normalized
[03:17.200] wave file here. You can delete the first one, use a sampler and just put everything into the sampler.
[03:25.840] And here we can right click and detect wood key. And it should be very easy for a bit
[03:34.800] back here to find this because we removed all the noise and only left in the important partials,
[03:40.560] right off the vocal sample. Let's try this out to play this on the MIDI keyboard.
[03:59.920] So this is nice. We can switch this here to textures mode and maybe also enable freeze. So we
[04:05.360] can change the position. Although it's basically like a wavetable synth now and we scan through the
[04:12.640] wavetable here. So maybe we put a random thing here. You can also decide if you want to use
[04:32.320] your MIDI keyboard, you can change on the MIDI keyboard to the key, maybe the position. Here
[04:37.520] I'm just using a random mod. I'm changing the position for each key we are pressing here randomly.
[04:46.960] And pretty slowly, also free. It should be nice.
[04:51.600] Maybe too fast. Maybe go for five bars.
[05:05.280] Maybe also modulate here the panning a bit, not too much. We need to have this a bipolar
[05:11.440] because we also want to modulate to the left side.
[05:28.080] Okay, fine. So now that we have this, all we need to do now is to use a reverb. So we can do
[05:35.440] an easy reverb processing here. So we use a chain inside the chain. We use a delay plus
[05:44.080] because the delay plus has this nice diffusion setting here. So we use space, of course.
[05:50.480] We increase here the delay time to 600 milliseconds or maybe h100, maybe better.
[05:57.280] Open up the EQ here all the way and ducking us down, not too much feedback
[06:02.240] and mixing 100% probably. And we want to increase here the difference between the delay times on
[06:10.640] the left and the right channels. We have a bit of stereo delay. Maybe we introduce here also
[06:15.760] chorus plus in the beginning, just mix it in a tad slow modulation speed depth also not too much.
[06:23.920] And eight voices. That's what I really like on as a algorithm here. And then after this use maybe
[06:32.880] a delay to just to add some additional delay tabs and also very long delay tabs here.
[06:39.920] I really like to have a big open reverb and then to not only build up or build up a lot of mid
[06:49.440] and content or mid range content. I use an EQ. Before we go into the reverb thing here,
[06:58.560] I'm dialing down 500 hertz here bit minus 10 dB. Because you have all this reverb and feedback
[07:07.440] thing evolving over time and you build up in the important most of the times you build up a lot of
[07:14.400] content here around 500 hertz. So this kind of tries to prevent this or under act this. So let's try it.
[08:01.520] So this would be a nice starting point for ambient track maybe.
[08:06.240] Let's pull this down at the speed. Maybe we got some patterns there.
[08:45.040] A little bit play here.
[08:48.400] So just to make clear in what kind of
[08:52.320] scale we are. Maybe pull this a bit down even more minus 12. Just a mid range.
[09:10.720] So now we have nice drone in the background playing some notes.
[09:14.240] So what we can do is we can add here some polysynth sounds to it.
[09:22.160] Just have some synthesized stuff in there.
[09:24.560] Sounds ugly but you just copy your over our reverb to this part. Maybe slow out here with the attack.
[09:43.360] Just record something here.
[10:29.840] So something like this. Maybe I leave a bit of room here at the end. It doesn't repeat all the time.
[10:35.520] Maybe we can select all the notes here and dial down the probability to maybe 40% or something
[10:43.840] like this so it doesn't play all the time. Whoops. And just hit here play. And then we have some random
[10:53.840] licks in there. Maybe a bit quieter. And probably we can add some
[11:07.920] some arpeggiator here in the right key.
[11:12.240] Maybe the root note here a bit lower something like this.
[11:29.120] And then we put an arpeggiator on there with a nice little maybe this one.
[11:37.360] A shorter dial is down. Don't need this. Don't need this.
[11:48.960] We need more notes.
[11:49.920] A bit longer.
[12:00.640] And here we need of course a delay.
[12:13.360] Maybe a bit of unison.
[12:26.080] And a lot of modulation. Actually not a lot. Just
[12:43.920] a bit here.
[12:51.680] And a bit of panning.
[13:10.400] And we can also try to bring in more of the bass. See all the sounds.
[13:48.800] Yeah this is nice.
[13:53.760] So you can see you can go from zero basically just recording your voice put a bit of reverb on it
[14:00.560] and create kind of a nice basement for a track.
[14:11.280] Maybe a bass here with the polysynth.
[14:26.000] And this needs to be mono of course.
[15:26.400] And then you have a nice bass line here.
[15:40.720] All you need to do is maybe add some drums to it or something.
[15:45.040] But yeah that's that's basically how you can progress and create a sound or create a draft
[15:52.240] on that for our track just by recording your vocals using the loud split to select certain
[15:58.720] partials put an audio level on it to get a nice normalized signal put it in the sampler
[16:05.440] use all the modulation possibilities of bitwig to create nice movement create a reverb here
[16:11.440] with some stacking some devices then advance here with some kind of synth lead synth on it.
[16:19.440] Now Pitch Eater and then a bass line.
[16:30.880] Maybe kick drum and just one note.
[16:40.480] And the repeater.
[16:41.360] Or a clit.
[16:57.200] Maybe go to the wood key.
[17:09.040] That's too loud because it adds up with the bass but yeah just an example.
[17:33.280] Yeah I think that's it for the day I want to give you a nice inspiration for how to
[17:37.360] start a track and yeah recap a bit over the last videos. Thanks for watching leave a like if you
[17:43.600] liked the video and leave a comment if you have some questions. Thanks for watching until next time bye.