Replacing Kick 2 in Bitwig Studio
Tutorial | Apr 17, 2023
In this video, I show how to replace Kick 2 with basic grid patching in Bitwig Studio. I demonstrate how to recreate the functions of Kick 2 using the grid, including the oscillator, envelopes, click sound, EQ, distortion, and more. This offers more flexibility and customization options compared to using Kick 2, allowing users to create their own unique kick drum sounds.
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In this Bitwig tutorial, I demonstrate how to create a kick drum sound in Bitwig Studio's Grid, as an alternative to using the VST plugin Kick 2. The main steps include:
- Grid Setup: I use a Poly Grid in monophonic mode.
- Sine Oscillator: A sine oscillator is set to G0 for the desired low frequency.
- Amplitude Envelope: A segments envelope is used in one-shot mode, set to an 8-note length, to shape the kick's amplitude.
- Pitch Envelope: A duplicated segments envelope modulates the pitch, starting high and pitching down for a punchy sound. An attenuator is used to adjust the starting pitch.
- Adding Click Sound: A noise generator and sampler are used for additional click sounds, blended with the main signal.
- Distortion and Modulation: Various distortions and modulations are applied for tonal variety.
- Customization and Experimentation: I emphasize the flexibility of Bitwig Studio, allowing for extensive customization and experimentation beyond the capabilities of Kick 2.
This tutorial showcases Bitwig Studio's versatility in sound design, highlighting how users can replicate and extend VST plugin functionalities within the software. The preset used in this video is available for free download, compatible with the current beta version of Bitwig Studio 5.
Questions & Answers #
Maybe you dont watch the video, here are some important takeaways:
What is the purpose of this video? #
The purpose of this video is to show viewers how they can replace the Kick 2 plugin using basic grid patching in Bitwig Studio. The video mentions various reasons why someone might want to do this, such as not liking the Kick 2 interface, wanting to use a device with a Bitwig-like interface, or using Linux. Ultimately, the main reason is to have fun and practice using the grid in Bitwig.
What does Kick 2 look like and how does it work? #
Kick 2 is a kick drum generator that includes an oscillator, multiple multi-stage envelope generators for pitch, amplitude, and click sound, EQ, distortion, overdrive, compressor, sub oscillator, and volume control. It is designed specifically for creating kick drum sounds. The video demonstrates the different components of Kick 2 and how they can be replicated and customized using grid patching in Bitwig.
How can Kick 2 be replaced using grid patching in Bitwig? #
To replace Kick 2 using grid patching, the video suggests using a sine oscillator in monophonic mode, a segments envelope in one-shot mode for the amplitude envelope, and additional envelopes for the pitch envelope. The video demonstrates how to connect and modulate these components to create a kick drum sound, including adding a click sound and applying effects like distortion. The video also mentions the ability to customize and experiment with different parameters to shape the kick drum sound.
Why is Bitwig Studio a valuable tool for recreating and customizing plugins? #
Bitwig Studio offers the ability to recreate and customize plugins using its native devices and modules. This adds value to owning Bitwig Studio because it allows users to replicate and extend the functionality of existing plugins to suit their own preferences and creative ideas. Additionally, Bitwig Studio's grid provides a powerful and flexible environment for designing and shaping sounds, making it a valuable tool for producers and musicians.
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.
[00:00:00] Hey folks, welcome back to another video. I want to show you in this video how you can replace
[00:00:04] kick 2 with some basic grid patching. Maybe you want to replace kick 2 for a long time because
[00:00:12] you don't like the interface. Maybe you want to use a device which has more like a bitwig interface.
[00:00:18] Maybe you want to share it with your friends. Maybe you want to use it within Linux. There are
[00:00:22] multiple reasons why you want to do that. But the best reason is of course we want to have some
[00:00:28] practice and we want to have some fun in the grid. So I'll show you here how kick 2 looks like.
[00:00:33] Kick 2. So here this basically is a kick drum generator. We have some kind of oscillator
[00:00:44] in here. We have multiple multi-stage envelope generators for the pitch envelope. That's the
[00:00:50] pitch here. Then for the amplitude, then for the click sound, which is basically just a sampler
[00:00:55] playing a click on top. Then we have here the click slots where you can load in the samples.
[00:01:02] Then we have here an EQ, distortion, overdrive, compressor and a sub oscillator and some volume
[00:01:08] control. And that's basically it. So it's easy to replace in the grid. I'll show you here how this
[00:01:16] works. So instead of kick 2 we use of course a bully grid in monophonic mode. On the left side
[00:01:24] it's on monophonic. So in here we need of course a sine oscillator. And the sine oscillator is
[00:01:32] yeah it's not using here basically the kick or the keyboard input. So we disable the pre-chord
[00:01:40] and use a basic pitch input here, static pitch input. I'm going for G0. This is basically the
[00:01:48] lowest frequency we want to use. And I use G0 because that's usually where I want to tune
[00:01:54] my kick jumps to. You can of course go lower maybe to C0 or something like this. It's up to you.
[00:02:01] Go in here and then we use of course a segments envelope. And the segments envelope we disable
[00:02:09] here the sustain looping because we don't need this and switch this to one-shot mode. And we
[00:02:15] probably want to go to 8-node because we don't want to have this envelope too long. So one-eighth
[00:02:20] note is perfectly fine for kick drum I think. And we draw in here an amplitude envelope.
[00:02:26] Something like this. For the kick drum. Okay. So now we have this on 8-node here. And we have also
[00:02:35] the speed slider here where we can change basically how fast this envelope plays. At the moment it's
[00:02:41] one. So one-eighth note and 0.5 is basically faster. It's 16-node. Then we have two, which is two
[00:02:53] eight-nodes. So it's longer. So it takes a while, but I show you in a minute how it sounds.
[00:02:58] We use an audio out here and just try this out here. So keyboard input. Okay.
[00:03:08] [Music]
[00:03:14] Right. And we can't change the pitch because here the pitch record is disabled and we can
[00:03:21] change the segments, how fast plays or the scaling of it with the snob, which is really nice.
[00:03:26] And then the second, let's call this actually an envelope. And now we need the pitch envelopes.
[00:03:35] We duplicate this here and call this pitch envelope. And we don't need the audio input here. We only need
[00:03:43] the signal output. And if you watch this here on an oscilloscope, you can see when we trigger this,
[00:03:50] we get here basically the shape of this as a signal out. Right. So this is exactly what we want to
[00:03:59] add this to the initial pitch here. So we bring this back here. Right. So when the signal here is
[00:04:06] basically down here, it's the value zero, the value zero. If you add value zero to the initial pitch,
[00:04:14] you end up on the initial pitch, which is G zero. But everything here basically gets added up to
[00:04:22] the initial pitch. So we pitch down from somewhere. We probably want to dial in here 32 grit to 32.
[00:04:31] And we want to pitch down here, then lower pitch. So we get this typical pu sound.
[00:04:40] Right. You can shape this here to wherever you want to your liking.
[00:04:49] But you can also stay with this. It's pu sound and then use it to scaling.
[00:04:54] You can see we start pretty high with the pitch, which is maybe not what you want.
[00:05:06] So we use an attenuate to scale the signal here before we go back in here. And we call this
[00:05:14] upper pitch. And now you can see when we pull this down here,
[00:05:21] we start basically at the lower pitch. We start at the lower pitch to pitch down basically.
[00:05:31] But sometimes it's exactly what you want to have this nice
[00:05:39] clicky attack. It depends on what kind of kick drum you want.
[00:05:44] Okay, nice. So now we add just some kind of noise to that as a click sound.
[00:05:53] Let's put this in here and blend it in.
[00:05:58] Yeah, blend it in the original signal.
[00:06:05] Right. So now we have basically click on top. This is the noise only.
[00:06:14] So you can change also the loudness or if you don't want to use a blend,
[00:06:19] you can use an amplitude or ring modulation for that.
[00:06:22] Which is also nice. It scales here a bit differently.
[00:06:30] You can use pink noise, make the noise stereo.
[00:06:33] Then we can add some distortion at the end.
[00:06:40] And we can use your pitch envelope maybe to bring out the attack phase out of the distortion.
[00:06:55] Right. So we pull this down or bring it in.
[00:07:01] So we leave basically the attack phase out of the distortion or
[00:07:07] don't distort that much. So we have more like a clean, clean attack.
[00:07:15] Or maybe use this envelope here.
[00:07:21] So this is possible. If you don't like to use noise here,
[00:07:31] you can also use a sampler of course.
[00:07:34] Something like this. And then maybe load in a sample here like this. I don't know how this sounds.
[00:07:43] Then just replace this.
[00:07:50] This is a knock sound here. Or maybe exchange here this for a blend.
[00:07:55] But this one here takes in the pitch input. We disable this.
[00:08:01] So it stays on the original pitch.
[00:08:06] So you can see we blend in here basically a sample on top of our
[00:08:12] generated kick drum and it adds up pretty well because we have also a distortion on the end
[00:08:18] which kind of glues it together.
[00:08:21] And we can shape the pitch sound or the pitch envelope.
[00:08:35] So all kinds of different possibilities you can use to shape your kick drum.
[00:08:54] Another possibility is to use also the envelopes here or maybe create another envelope for that
[00:09:01] and shape here some things on the oscillator for instance the default.
[00:09:06] Or maybe I use this envelope here.
[00:09:10] All right. This is also possible. Or maybe use the output here of the sample and face modulate
[00:09:20] the sine oscillator. Also maybe use here this envelope for that.
[00:09:31] So you can blend or glue basically the sample with the main oscillator a bit better together.
[00:09:37] So you can experiment in all kinds of directions. That's what I want to tell you.
[00:09:41] You have so many possibilities to shape your sound that's not possible within kick 2 because kick
[00:09:49] 2 has basically a focused use case and if it's not in there you can't do it. But in Bitwig you
[00:09:56] can. You add all your devices you need add stuff on top modulate stuff with different devices and
[00:10:03] then you get different results. You can also replace the distortion which you kind of do
[00:10:10] use in kick 2. So we can replace this here with a new transfer device right where you can draw in
[00:10:23] where you can draw in your own distortion sound.
[00:10:28] It's also not possible in kick 2. It's an original sound.
[00:10:36] Right. It's also nice to do sometimes. Get some overtones out there.
[00:10:48] But sometimes here using distortion is pretty fine. Maybe a wave folder could be also nice.
[00:10:56] Let's try this out.
[00:10:58] Yeah, also nice hard clip.
[00:11:07] It gets you all different sounds to different places.
[00:11:13] And you can always shape here the pitch envelope.
[00:11:17] Yeah. You can download the preset as you can see it in the background for free in the description
[00:11:35] below. No strings attached. Just click the link, download it and use it in the current beta version
[00:11:42] of Bitwig Studio 5. And that's just one example of the power of Bitwig Studio basically that you can
[00:11:50] recreate certain VST plugins with Bitwig native modules or devices. Which in my opinion adds up
[00:11:59] to the value of owning Bitwig Studio because you not only can replicate it or rebuild it.
[00:12:08] You can also extend it and customize it to your own liking and come up with some different ideas.
[00:12:15] Whereas when you own the plugin you are stuck basically with the interface. You are stuck without
[00:12:20] the plugin works. And that's basically it. The only basically drawback we have in Bitwig Studio is
[00:12:27] that we can't build custom interfaces. Which is the only power of VST plugins that are left
[00:12:36] basically. But when we have some kind of interface designer maybe in the future somewhere,
[00:12:41] we can build custom interfaces and you can completely go wild with all this stuff. So this
[00:12:48] is just one example. This is basically kick 2 for me in the grid. And I probably never use kick 2
[00:12:54] again because I can just use this and I can tweak it to my likings. But I also created a lot of
[00:13:03] different tutorials on different devices I created inside of the grid. So something like RC20 by
[00:13:10] XLN Audio or DSEQ3 by TBPro Audio or Soothe, GainAIM or something like Auto Gain by Hornet,
[00:13:20] Textures, Infiltrator by DVS Machines, something like Stutter Effects or something like Glitch
[00:13:28] at the Glitch VST or something like Grain Delays or Cluster Delays or the Morph EQ by Minimal Audio.
[00:13:36] So a lot of things I already did in the grid to some extent to replicate these kind of devices.
[00:13:43] And it's much fun. It's a lot of practice actually also to learn how these devices work and how you
[00:13:50] can replicate it and come up with certain different paths along the way and branch out in different
[00:13:59] directions. It's sometimes really interesting. And yeah, that's basically the value of Bitwig Studio
[00:14:05] also that you can do this. That's it for this video. Thanks for watching. I hope you learned
[00:14:11] something. Don't forget to click like and subscribe to the channel of course. And thanks for watching.
[00:14:17] See you in the next one. Bye.