Misha Clone - Eurorack-Inspired Sequencer in Bitwig
Tutorial | Jan 24, 2023
In this video, I'm going to explain how I recreated the Eurorack module by Eventide called Misha in Bitwig Studio. I'll explain how it works, how to download the patch, and how to recreate it from this video. I'll also demonstrate how to use the keyboard, trigger buttons, and sequencer to control it. Finally, I'll show you how to transpose and use the key filter to create different scales. So, stay tuned and I'll show you how to make your own Misha clone!
You can watch the Video on Youtube - support me on Patreon
In this video, I discuss my recreation of the Eventide Eurorack module Misha within Bitwig Studio. Key aspects of this tutorial are:
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Background: The project started as a Patreon request and was revisited and completed recently.
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Functionality Overview: Misha allows stepping through a pre-set scale using buttons. In my recreation, the scale is set to C major within one octave.
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Control with Virtual Keyboard: I demonstrate using the virtual keyboard to navigate through the scale, highlighting the ability to reset to the root note and move up or down in the scale.
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Customization: Users can change key mappings and scale types. I included a transpose function to shift the output to different keys.
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Chord and Wrap Features: The preset also includes chord generation and a wrapping feature to keep notes within scale and octave.
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Sequencer Addition: A sequencer is added for recording and playing back melodies, although it's a secondary feature.
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Technical Challenges: I discuss technical challenges like holding the current note and iterating through scales using feedback loops and the merge module.
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Availability: The preset, named "Misha," is available for download to my Patreon subscribers and YouTube members.
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Encouragement for DIY: I encourage viewers to try recreating the preset based on the video instructions.
This video showcases my process of replicating a complex hardware sequencer in Bitwig Studio, emphasizing the software's flexibility and my creative problem-solving approach.
What can you do with this tool? #
Users can use this tool to create complex musical sequences in their digital audio workstation. They can step through a musical scale, use a virtual keyboard to control the sequence, record sequences, set rhythms and gate lengths, transpose sequences, create chords, and hold notes. Additionally, users can create their own scales and mappings to control the sequence. Furthermore, users can download the patch from Patreon with the lowest tier subscription.
Whats the benefit of the tool? #
The benefit of this tool is that it allows you to play around with scales, chords, and sequences, and create interesting melodies and progressions. It also allows you to quickly transpose and filter notes to create different sounds and textures, making it easier to experiment with different sounds. Additionally, it has a built-in sequencer, which can be used to record patterns and play them back in a loop.
How can you use it? #
This preset can be used to create interesting melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. You can use the buttons to step through the scale and the virtual keyboard to control the root reset, current note, and transposition. You can also use the sequencer to record and playback sequences, as well as adjust the gate length and key filter. Additionally, you can use the wrapper to keep notes from the chords within the scale. With this preset, you can create some really cool and unique musical ideas.
Transcription #
If you don't want to watch the Video, or search for a specific topic, here is the transcription of the video with links to video markers:
[00:00.000] Hey folks, welcome back today, it's about this preset here in the background.
[00:04.520] It's called Misha, and it's a recreation of the Eurorack module by Eventide, looks like
[00:12.160] this here, and it's out for quite some time now, and someone last year asked me this on
[00:20.920] Patreon here, Alexander, I was wondering if it's possible to recreate the behavior of
[00:26.440] this new Eventide sequencer Misha.
[00:29.760] So this was around last year, May 2022, and I tried to give some support to actually recreate
[00:38.480] this in the grid, and I built something in the grid, and I sent it over, and then I completely
[00:43.360] forgot about it to actually finish it and flesh it out.
[00:49.160] And last week, a friend of mine, Skyance, told me about this Eventide module here, and
[00:58.040] I remembered that I did something like this some way back, and I loaded up the preset and
[01:04.600] saw that it's not finished, and yesterday or over the weekend, I just finished it up.
[01:11.080] And that's it here basically, and I want to explain you in this video how this works,
[01:17.500] and also you can download this patch on my Patreon with the lowest tier, so you need to
[01:22.280] invest one buck to actually become a Patreon, or maybe just subscribe here on YouTube with
[01:31.000] the membership option, there's a button below this video.
[01:35.080] So you can download this patch then, but I also explained it in this video how it works
[01:39.280] and what I did, so you can recreate it basically from this video if you want to.
[01:44.280] And I also see here a buck, so this is a wrong name, so this is where you can play the current
[01:54.400] note.
[01:55.480] So how this works is, like I said, you can step through the scale of a dialed in scale,
[02:04.840] and you can use these buttons here to actually skip through it or step through it.
[02:10.880] So inside here, you always play the scale of C major, so everything in here is dialed
[02:18.520] in to or tuned to C major.
[02:22.160] So you can reset the note here, and there's also a virtual keyboard here at the top, you
[02:26.680] can see what's happening, or actually you can't see what's happening because the gate
[02:33.080] length is too short for this keyboard, so we have to dial in here the latch so it holds
[02:37.480] the note.
[02:39.520] So this is the current note, or the root reset, where you bring back the current note to the
[02:50.240] root note, and then you can use these buttons here to skip through the scale, or you can
[03:06.640] use two, and you can already see we stay within one octave, so it never exceeds one octave,
[03:25.920] and this way it's easy to build this way.
[03:31.400] On the original Misha, you actually can go up higher, you can go to, I don't know, three
[03:40.000] octaves higher or unlimited octave higher, but within this preset here, you always stay
[03:47.240] within one octave.
[03:48.680] I don't know it's a feature or it's a bug, at least for me I found it easier to implement
[03:55.200] that way because we just wrap around here with the merger module.
[04:08.920] So then you can also not press only this trigger buttons here, which is not really nice to
[04:15.520] do, but it's nice to actually use it to feed the sequencer here, which I explain later,
[04:22.200] but you can also use the keyboard to control this thing.
[04:26.680] So instead of using my external MIDI keyboard, I'm just using also this virtual keyboard,
[04:35.360] so you can see what I'm doing.
[04:38.200] So this is the input keyboard, basically this is what you can use as your external keyboard
[04:43.320] or your MIDI keyboard, and you can play here to root reset something, you can see we have
[04:49.760] to play D sharp three, which is this one here.
[04:56.560] And then we play the current note in the scale because you can skip through the scale, so
[05:01.080] we can play the current note, which is this one.
[05:06.280] And then to go plus one, we use here F three, so it's this one, right?
[05:13.000] So this is the current note plus one, minus one, plus two, minus two, plus three, you
[05:20.720] know, and so on.
[05:21.720] So it's completely symmetrical.
[05:23.360] So that's, I think that's also the original mapping of the event Titan Misha.
[05:30.440] That's when you basically connect the MIDI keyboard and it works exactly the same way.
[05:34.600] If you don't like this mapping, you can change it to whatever you want.
[05:38.680] So you can see here, I'm using G three for plus two, right, so you can dial in anything
[05:44.880] you want here.
[05:46.200] So you can recreate or create a different mapping if you don't like that.
[05:51.080] So but for the default setting here, current note plus one, plus one, plus two, plus three,
[06:00.120] plus four, and so on.
[06:07.880] And the big benefit of using the keyboard as an input is also that you can change the
[06:13.040] gate length.
[06:14.040] So you can just hold a note and hear these few meters basically tell you what key I'm
[06:31.720] pressing on the keyboard.
[06:34.680] And yeah, because the scope gate length is because I'm using the gate length of the keyboard
[06:43.760] input here as an output.
[06:46.080] But when you press these trigger buttons here, it just gives you basically a very short
[06:51.480] burst of one and most of these virtual keyboards here don't recognize this as a note.
[06:59.840] So you have to use a gate length here at the end, maybe make this a bit longer.
[07:06.280] And then it gets recognized, right?
[07:12.280] So yeah, so you can use the keyboard, you can use these buttons.
[07:16.080] And then you can also use the sequencer to just record something.
[07:22.960] So maybe close this down.
[07:25.880] I'm using a reset button reset basically resets the right index right to one.
[07:34.200] So you start at the first step of the sequence.
[07:37.720] So just press this two times here with there's no single press in Bitwig Studio for some
[07:42.600] reason.
[07:43.600] I don't know why.
[07:45.520] And then you can press record here and then it gives you basically this view meter here
[07:55.400] as a symbol that it's recording.
[07:58.200] And then you can start and press some notes.
[08:03.840] And then I think you can just play it and it doesn't work because I have to fix it.
[08:19.800] I will fix this here.
[08:21.320] But you can start to record then and can play back the sequence.
[08:25.600] You can also change here the sequence gate steps for the rhythm here for the trend.
[08:31.320] So we can.
[08:33.800] So it's my usual triggers used with the clock one ties to a 16 note grid.
[08:41.920] So you can change here the number basically here and get some nice rhythms out of this.
[08:49.720] The sequencer is just a small addition.
[08:52.840] It's I don't know if it makes sense, but I just wanted to have this in there to just
[08:59.800] record some small 16 step sequences.
[09:02.560] But you can also just record the media output here of this preset and write it into a clip,
[09:11.560] which is probably better to do.
[09:15.640] Another thing I did was to actually transpose everything.
[09:20.620] So like I told you in the beginning, everything in here is in C major.
[09:25.520] So you can say I want to transpose this maybe to D sharp major, right?
[09:31.280] So everything that comes out of here is still C now.
[09:34.920] But in the post fx, I just transpose it up by three semi tones.
[09:39.520] So now the root note here is D sharp.
[09:47.560] This one here, or you can go up to E, right?
[09:52.600] So this is now the root note.
[09:54.000] So everything is transposed up.
[09:56.480] And then I found it pretty easy to just then implement here a key filter after that.
[10:03.760] So you can use them different scales.
[10:07.200] I haven't checked if this is actually working correctly, but I think it should.
[10:13.760] So instead of major, now we have natural minor.
[10:18.320] And then we can skip here through the scale.
[10:26.320] Maybe go back into D sharp.
[10:31.280] You can see we pay perfectly here the D sharp minor scale or back to major, right?
[10:46.520] So you can change this to the internal workings are basically the same.
[10:53.320] I thought about maybe just changing here the intervals when you change the mode.
[11:00.320] It's, yeah, the patching would be then much more complicated to do that.
[11:07.240] But so you know, you can also dial in your own scale.
[11:10.080] So what I dialed in here is basically the major scale.
[11:15.280] So it's zero, right?
[11:16.440] There's no, so zero pitch alternation here, then two semi tones up, four semi tones up,
[11:23.800] five semi tones up, and so on.
[11:25.280] So you can dial in your own scale if you want to, or maybe change the scale on the fly.
[11:31.840] So this is also possible.
[11:33.160] So this is, yeah, so you know, this merge and these transpose modules are basically
[11:40.000] the scale.
[11:41.120] And I skip through this merge module here with these buttons.
[11:46.440] So that's basically all I'm doing.
[11:50.720] And after the module, we have also chords, so we can hit this and then you play basically
[11:56.600] major, major chords, but the transpose and the mode or the key filter is after the chords.
[12:08.480] So these chords are also then corrected and changing when you change here the intervals.
[12:27.400] You can see we skip up here and then the chords change when there should be a minor chord
[12:31.800] and so on.
[12:33.760] So this also works, then there's a wrapper in there, this is my wrapper preset.
[12:39.200] I also showed you on this channel.
[12:41.480] So the wrapper tries basically to keep the notes from the chords within the scale.
[12:49.760] So it looks like this, oh, just.
[12:56.960] So basically when the upper note goes beyond or exceeds the scale or the octave, then it's
[13:08.960] wrapped around to the lowest or one octave lower.
[13:15.240] So this is also something you can do.
[13:21.160] And what else do we have?
[13:22.600] Yeah, there's also a latch here, so you can hold the chords if you want to.
[13:28.160] So just press the note once and then it holds the note until you press another note.
[13:43.520] So I think it's not hard to get what it's actually doing.
[13:48.560] And yeah, I have to fix the sequencer here.
[13:51.920] Basically it's also not really important to have the sequencer, but it's, you know,
[13:57.600] again reset it, then record the sequence after 16 steps, then it stops recording and you
[14:03.480] can hit play and then it plays the note sequence over and over again.
[14:08.760] And it's synchronized to the project tempo.
[14:11.640] So this is basically my Misha clone here for Bitwig Studio.
[14:16.480] It's a bit more complicated than it is actually.
[14:20.960] I needed to get around certain things in the grid.
[14:25.800] So for instance, holding here to current note with the long delay.
[14:29.760] So I basically using your feedback for the notes.
[14:32.720] So I'm playing a note, then I hold the note, feed it back, then I add additional plus one
[14:40.080] plus two right to this, to this current hold signal and then add it up so I can iterate
[14:48.720] here through the merge module easily.
[14:53.320] Yeah, like I said, this is available on my Patreon for one buck, which is the lowest
[14:59.640] tier.
[15:00.640] I spent a bit of time over the weekend on this.
[15:03.240] So would be great if you're actually subscribing, but you can also try to rebuild it from this
[15:09.920] video here.
[15:11.440] Or like I said, you can also subscribe to the YouTube membership thing here below the
[15:17.120] video, it's also possible, so I also share it here on YouTube.
[15:22.080] So that's it.
[15:23.480] Thanks for watching, leave a like if you liked the video and hit me up with the questions
[15:27.400] in the comments.
[15:28.400] Thanks for watching and see you in the next video, bye.