Sweep and Filter+ - Bitwig 5.1 Tips and Tricks

Tutorial | Oct 23, 2023

In this video, I discuss the beta version of Bitwig Studio 5.1, focusing on the sweep device and its features. I explain the importance of having the wet gain as part of the main interface, rather than in the inspector. Additionally, I explore the polyphonic capabilities of the sweep device, including voice stacking and note source functionality.

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Questions & Answers #

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

What does the video discuss about Bitwig Studio 5.1 beta version? #

The video discusses various features and enhancements in the beta version of Bitwig Studio 5.1, specifically focusing on the sweep device and the filter plus device. It explores the functionalities and possibilities of these devices, such as voice stacking, polyphonic effects, and modulations.

Where is the wet gain parameter located in Bitwig Studio? #

While the wet gain parameter is technically available in the inspector on the left side when the sweep device is selected, the video argues that it would be more convenient to have the wet gain as part of the main interface, especially considering its importance for adjusting the output volume of the device.

How does the sweep device in Bitwig Studio function as a grid device? #

The sweep device is a grid device in Bitwig Studio and has a grid-like interface when the "show expanded device view" button is clicked. It offers parameters such as voices, voice stacking, note source, and allows for the creation of polyphonic effects and resonators by applying effects on each key or voice separately.

How does the Filter Plus device in Bitwig Studio function in terms of polyphony? #

Similar to the sweep device, the Filter Plus device in Bitwig Studio is also capable of polyphonic effects. It allows for voice stacking and modulation of each voice individually, offering the ability to create complex resonators with different modulating parameters and voice spreads.

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.
[00:00:02] Today, I want to talk about the beta version of Bitwig Studio 5.1 a bit more, give you some
[00:00:07] interesting facts and some ideas.
[00:00:10] And in the last video, I kind of complained about the missing output gain of the sweep
[00:00:15] device here in Bitwig Studio.
[00:00:18] And a lot of people pointed out in the comments that the wet gain is actually in the inspector.
[00:00:22] So when you have the device selected here, you can head over to the left side to the
[00:00:26] inspector and we have here wet gain, right?
[00:00:30] But I guess what I wanted to say is I think the wet gain needs to be part of the main
[00:00:37] interface.
[00:00:38] It needs to be here, right?
[00:00:39] We have here some kind of shape or distortion device in this collection of filters here
[00:00:44] in between.
[00:00:46] And we can kind of increase the gain of the output signal very much with just the distortion
[00:00:55] device here.
[00:00:56] So there needs to be a quick way of turning down the volume.
[00:00:59] I think it's better to have an output gain here in this section instead of the inspector
[00:01:04] on the left side.
[00:01:06] I think we could put the stereo pan here into the inspector and just replace these two,
[00:01:12] right?
[00:01:13] Because the stereo pan is probably not that important for an effect device.
[00:01:18] It's important for an instrument, of course.
[00:01:20] Maybe for an audio effect, you don't need the stereo pan that much versus the wet gain,
[00:01:27] which is more important because we have a distortion device in here, right?
[00:01:30] Another interesting fact about the sweep device is that it's actually a grid device.
[00:01:36] So when you use here the window open or show expanded device view button, it looks like
[00:01:41] this, right?
[00:01:42] So we have internals.
[00:01:43] We have basically just a grid device with a nice chain interface here.
[00:01:50] And that's why I argued in the last video, I hope we get something like this, but in
[00:01:55] dynamic where we can build our own grids here and then use this as a kind of an interface
[00:02:01] for the chain.
[00:02:02] But the interesting fact about the sweep device now is that because it's a grid device, it
[00:02:08] has some interesting parameters on the left side in the inspector.
[00:02:12] So first of all, we can turn up the voices from mono to, I don't know, up to 64 voices
[00:02:20] here, right?
[00:02:21] So it's a polyphonic audio effect, which means you can play multiple keys on the keyboard
[00:02:28] and it puts an effect on each of these keys on each of these voices separately, right?
[00:02:35] So it's a polyphonic audio effect.
[00:02:38] That's the first interesting fact about it.
[00:02:40] The next one is that we can use voice stacking.
[00:02:44] And with voice stacking, we can duplicate basically this effect device also exactly
[00:02:49] like with voices multiple times, virtually, and can put it or can put different automations
[00:02:56] on the sweep device for different voices.
[00:03:01] So this is pretty mind blowing, actually.
[00:03:03] I think it's the first device besides, of course, the FX grid where you can use voice
[00:03:11] stacking and polyphonic polyphony for the audio effect, which is super interesting.
[00:03:19] We also have here on the left side a note source.
[00:03:23] So as you can see here in this effect device, there's actually no note receiver or anything
[00:03:29] like that.
[00:03:30] So why do we have a note source here, right?
[00:03:32] So what you can do is if you attach here, for instance, an ADSR and we place some kind
[00:03:40] of key here on this instrument, right, you can see we receive here something on this
[00:03:46] ADSR.
[00:03:48] But now with the note source here, we can switch this off from device input, which is,
[00:03:53] of course, you're coming from the channel or from this instrument track.
[00:03:57] We can switch this to a different track from maybe to FX1.
[00:04:01] And now when I play a note, you can see we have here notes coming through.
[00:04:06] But the ADSR is not reacting to these notes.
[00:04:10] So we can grab notes from a different channel and can use these notes or pitch informations
[00:04:16] in here in this modulator panel to modify modulators.
[00:04:22] Maybe you can also use here a key track, right?
[00:04:25] Relative key track.
[00:04:26] You can see it's not reacting here to the input or the notes coming in because we are
[00:04:30] selected here a different note source.
[00:04:33] When we put this back to device input, you can see the key track and ADSR is reacting
[00:04:39] to the incoming notes.
[00:04:42] So because of this, we can maybe do something interesting here.
[00:04:46] I just closed down here the grid view.
[00:04:50] We can say we have here a polymer in the beginning, right?
[00:04:53] And we want to create here maybe an interesting noise sound, kind of a knock sound here, something
[00:05:07] like that.
[00:05:08] And then we can use here the sweep device and can say I want to have here XP filter,
[00:05:14] maybe a low pass in the beginning.
[00:05:19] Open this up a bit more.
[00:05:21] And put this here in serial mode.
[00:05:22] So we go from this filter into this distortion device and then into this filter here.
[00:05:28] And here we maybe use a selling key or SVF filter.
[00:05:32] Let's use this one here.
[00:05:34] Use a band pass, right?
[00:05:35] You already know already where I'm going to, right?
[00:05:39] I put all the modulations here on zero.
[00:05:43] Maybe make the input pulse here a bit shorter.
[00:05:52] So we can kind of now use the key track here.
[00:05:56] And if you watch the key track on the left side, see three spread range is 64 semitones.
[00:06:02] So you modulate here this one by 64, 64 semitones, right?
[00:06:11] And there's also an interesting factor.
[00:06:12] You can see the SVF filter actually looks inside of this device a bit different than
[00:06:18] it looks in the grid.
[00:06:20] The SVF filter has here a pitch input and also down here a pre chord for the pitches.
[00:06:26] And you can turn down here the amount of pitch modulation for the incoming signals.
[00:06:34] So it looks a bit different, right?
[00:06:35] Here we have basically an input attenuator and here's an input one attenuator.
[00:06:40] This basically coming from the LFO and this one is here the audio input or an audio rate
[00:06:45] modulator basically.
[00:06:47] And these two come here from the audio in from the LFO, right?
[00:06:53] And goes into this pitch bus, which is a new kind of device or module inside of the grid.
[00:06:59] I explain this maybe a bit later.
[00:07:03] And yeah, the device is kind of look different here.
[00:07:06] So I'm I don't know if this is this maybe specifically designed for that this SVF filter
[00:07:13] now here.
[00:07:14] Or is this actually an effect of the pitch bus inside here, right?
[00:07:19] Because we use multiple inputs here and this maybe adapts to what's coming on.
[00:07:25] It's coming in here from the pitch bus.
[00:07:27] So this is something, something strange I saw there.
[00:07:31] Maybe they specifically designed this SVF for this device for the sweep device here.
[00:07:36] Maybe it's already hinting at something new coming that the interface of elements or modules
[00:07:42] change in this in this device view when you use different modules here combined in the
[00:07:47] grid.
[00:07:48] I have no idea.
[00:07:49] That's just something I discovered, right?
[00:07:53] So back to that year.
[00:07:54] So we use here basically the key track for the frequency here.
[00:07:58] So now when we play different notes on the keyboard, right, you can play a melody because
[00:08:06] the key track tracks the keyboard here, the notes, and then it opens up the filter to
[00:08:12] the recording frequency here because we double click this and this is C3.
[00:08:16] This is also centered here at C3.
[00:08:19] We can spread it up to 64.
[00:08:21] We use the modulation to 64 here and minus 64.
[00:08:25] So it's perfectly aligned.
[00:08:26] You can play melodies now with this.
[00:08:30] Right?
[00:08:32] Nice.
[00:08:34] We can also now go here to polyphony, right?
[00:08:40] At the moment it's mono.
[00:08:41] So we play one note and we play another.
[00:08:44] The new note chokes basically the old voice.
[00:08:47] So we can increase here the voices to maybe 12.
[00:08:54] And we can now use the sweep device in a polyphony mode, which means it's actually a resonator
[00:09:00] now, a typical resonator where you can play multiple notes on the keyboard and use that
[00:09:09] as an instrument or an instrument effect.
[00:09:11] I don't know.
[00:09:12] So it completely replaces actually the old resonator bank here where you need to dial
[00:09:18] in the frequencies for each band, the resonance for each band and so on.
[00:09:25] So now you can completely remove this because it's also monophonic only.
[00:09:30] It has a pitch track or key track you already implemented.
[00:09:33] So I guess it makes sense in certain circumstances, but you can completely replace the resonator
[00:09:38] bank now with a sweep device here and some high resonant filters like the SVF here and
[00:09:45] make it to wrestle to a resonator that plays the notes or the frequencies that you give
[00:09:53] it by using keys or note clips or whatever.
[00:09:58] Right.
[00:09:59] And we have even here a new or new saturation devices or distortion devices in front of
[00:10:05] the filter.
[00:10:09] We can even say the first filter here is actually we use the first filter to shape the input
[00:10:18] pulse signal a bit more.
[00:10:20] So we can also use the ADSR for that, right?
[00:10:23] And open up the filter.
[00:10:28] So we can shape basically the pulse before we go into the main resonating filter thing
[00:10:34] here and even before that into some kind of shape here.
[00:10:40] Let's go for push.
[00:10:48] And yeah, it's not only made for devices, basically an all around filter device.
[00:10:58] It's actually really great.
[00:11:00] So it's nice for making nice sweeps.
[00:11:03] Where the name stems from, I think.
[00:11:06] So sweeping across pads across bass sounds.
[00:11:09] I show you this in a minute.
[00:11:11] And it's also resonator bank now for some reason that takes note inputs from the current
[00:11:17] channel or if you use note source here from a different channel and it can play melodies
[00:11:23] and polyphonic melodies.
[00:11:25] Right.
[00:11:26] That's really great.
[00:11:30] The only drawback is that in here there's no ADSR to actually persist the voice over
[00:11:40] a long time.
[00:11:41] So when I press the note here, the resonator rings out right slowly.
[00:11:49] But I need to hold the key when I release the key on the keyboard.
[00:11:52] The voice is basically disabled or destroyed in polyphonic mode or in polyphonic mode here.
[00:11:59] Right.
[00:12:00] If I release the keys, it's gone.
[00:12:04] He put the spec into a monophonic mode.
[00:12:07] And of course, this voice is always active.
[00:12:10] So there's no ADSR needed.
[00:12:12] Just compressed the key once and it rings out.
[00:12:22] So that's the first interesting fact about this device that you can use it as a resonator
[00:12:27] and a polyphonic resonator.
[00:12:30] So the next thing is of course the voice stacking here.
[00:12:33] So we can put this into voice stacking mode and I go only up to up to six voices here
[00:12:39] because I have CPU problems with the current beta version of a big studio that need to
[00:12:44] optimize it a bit more.
[00:12:45] So my CPU was choking hard on 16 voices.
[00:12:50] So now we have basically duplicated this device in memory or virtually six times, right?
[00:12:58] So they all play the same frequencies.
[00:13:01] So now you can go into the spread parameter stack spread here and can say I want to spread
[00:13:10] the frequencies for each voice six times, right?
[00:13:15] So each voice has now a filter bank that has six frequencies.
[00:13:21] So if I play one note here, all these six voices play just the same frequency, but the
[00:13:27] spread parameter now, right?
[00:13:33] Let's you spread the frequencies out on the spectrum.
[00:13:37] So let's use your spectrum thing.
[00:13:41] Let's put this on white.
[00:13:46] Let's put this here in this mode.
[00:13:50] Let's maybe put this into huge.
[00:14:00] So back here to normal.
[00:14:01] So this is now six, yeah, six sweep devices playing the same frequency because we have
[00:14:09] this voice spread here.
[00:14:11] We can now spread out these six voices to different frequencies.
[00:14:17] So you can see here, right?
[00:14:25] So and this is just one key.
[00:14:27] So one voice, one mono voice.
[00:14:32] So one voice has six voices.
[00:14:34] Okay.
[00:14:35] So we can now put this here into polyphonic mode.
[00:14:38] So we have six voices and each voice has six stacks, which means we can play here one sound
[00:14:45] and we can play two keys or three keys.
[00:14:51] You can see here the voices basically add up.
[00:15:02] So it's a resonator bank that you can define in all kinds of different directions.
[00:15:09] However, you want to define it, right?
[00:15:11] I can make so, so many nice sounds just with that.
[00:15:16] And you don't need to open up actually the grid and build it for yourself.
[00:15:21] It's basically in everything and all solution for filtering stuff in the chain, just with
[00:15:27] voice stacking here with the polyphony and with having multiple filters in here.
[00:15:35] Also something that you can do is actually switch the filters here with the modulator.
[00:15:41] You can't modulate this, right?
[00:15:42] So you have to define a filter at first and then you can modulate the parameters of this
[00:15:49] filter, but you can't change the filter on the fly or the distortion device here.
[00:15:55] But anyway, it's still, I mean, it's mind blowing how many things you can do just with
[00:15:59] this.
[00:16:04] So if recorded something with your iPhone, maybe some Foley, right?
[00:16:09] Some percussion textures or some random stuff from reality outside of your bedroom, right?
[00:16:19] You can put a sweep device on it, use your some resonant filters, use voice stacking
[00:16:24] and polyphony and then play with this noise texture and create interesting sounds.
[00:16:31] So here I just use basically a noise burst, right?
[00:16:35] This click, this click sound, but it's probably much better when you just use a noise texture
[00:16:42] of some sort and then, yeah, play with that.
[00:16:46] Okay.
[00:16:48] So that's that.
[00:16:51] And if you don't like here this zero to one spreading option, of course, you can switch
[00:16:58] this up here to different spread or different spread options.
[00:17:04] So this is here zero to one.
[00:17:08] It's kind of linear.
[00:17:11] So this is your prime numbers, right?
[00:17:13] You can see here it's a different distribution.
[00:17:17] Golden, rent.
[00:17:24] So every time you press the key, it gives you a different set of frequencies, which is
[00:17:29] super nice.
[00:17:31] Flipped.
[00:17:32] Okay.
[00:17:33] And of course manual, they can dial in here each frequency with these sliders.
[00:17:44] So maybe we use here a second stack spread, switch this to manual, open up both of these
[00:17:54] modulators here and then we use it here for the volume input of the filter or the input
[00:17:59] gain.
[00:18:03] So now we can change here the frequency and here we can change the volume of each partial.
[00:18:11] Let me put your peak limit at the end.
[00:18:28] You can probably also use an ADS IR for these things.
[00:18:46] Put this down, open this up.
[00:18:50] And then let's say I want to modulate here this one.
[00:19:05] You can say I want to have a voice spread here.
[00:19:09] Zero to one.
[00:19:10] Then I want to pull this down.
[00:19:14] So zero or the lowest voice is actually here, right?
[00:19:17] This decay setting and then the higher you go with the frequency, the more you or the
[00:19:22] shorter the decay gets.
[00:19:30] We need of course to bring in the modulation.
[00:19:44] So a lot of possibilities and like I always say in Bitwig Studio, it's like playing with
[00:19:49] Lego bricks.
[00:19:51] Every update of Bitwig Studio is important even though we have maybe a smaller update
[00:19:55] at some point.
[00:19:57] But if they bring in a modulator or some kind of device, you can or you have to combine
[00:20:02] it with the rest of the ecosystem in new ways and then you get something much, much larger
[00:20:07] because you have this modularity inside of a door.
[00:20:11] Every update is basically a big update in my opinion.
[00:20:15] It's like, you know, it changes the game completely every time because you need to relearn and
[00:20:22] recombine every device with every other device or with the new devices.
[00:20:27] And then you explore and yeah, find something new, a new possibility, new sounds, new ways
[00:20:33] of doing things and so on.
[00:20:36] So every update in Bitwig Studio is kind of special because everything in Bitwig Studio
[00:20:41] is so modular.
[00:20:42] Okay, so we learned in this video that you can do a lot of things with the sweep device
[00:20:47] and the voices, the voice stacking and the note source here where you can grab notes from
[00:20:53] a different channel.
[00:20:55] But there's also a new device called Filter Plus.
[00:21:02] And the last video I complained about the missing visuals here instead of having just
[00:21:09] a normal filter, this one here, right?
[00:21:13] We have some visuals here, let's see what's exactly going on, what's cutting away by the
[00:21:19] filter and so on.
[00:21:20] So that's missing in Filter Plus.
[00:21:23] But the filter device itself is also monophonic and the Filter Plus device again is a grid
[00:21:28] device.
[00:21:29] We also have your multiple voices and voice stacking.
[00:21:32] So you can do the same things you did here with the sweep device.
[00:21:36] You can do on the Filter Plus device again.
[00:21:39] You can create here different voices.
[00:21:42] You can modulate each voice differently, specifically, manually and also algorithmically and then
[00:21:51] create resonators.
[00:21:52] You can create different modulations on different voices.
[00:21:58] So you can explore in this area a lot.
[00:22:03] And now also these LFOs here make a bit more sense because you can modulate them also on
[00:22:09] different voices differently.
[00:22:10] So you have different LFOs on different voices, which is actually mind boggling, mind blowing
[00:22:17] to wrap your head around because the complexity gets so high, so fast.
[00:22:23] You have multiple stacks on one voice and then you can multiply these voices and you can
[00:22:29] modulate everything specifically or algorithmically.
[00:22:35] And it's more like something you don't maybe want to wrap your head around it.
[00:22:43] It's more like keep exploring, try to modulate each voice differently with all these modulators,
[00:22:48] play around, combine different modulators and find something that sounds good instead
[00:22:54] of going to this with the plan, with the logic behind it.
[00:23:00] Sometimes it's good to have a plan.
[00:23:01] I want to make a resonator.
[00:23:03] I want to amplify certain specific frequencies or partials.
[00:23:09] That's good maybe, but sometimes you lose track of all that and it gets too complex, too fast.
[00:23:17] So I just give you the idea that maybe sometimes just let it lose and just explore and try
[00:23:26] out modulators on different things.
[00:23:28] So you have of course vowels for instance, right?
[00:23:32] So maybe disable here this one and this one and go from noise to let's say a pad sound,
[00:23:44] something like this.
[00:23:49] So here you can bring in different vocals, different formats.
[00:23:57] Maybe bring this down here a bit more.
[00:24:02] Then you can say I want to put this into voice stacking mode here, maybe six voices again.
[00:24:11] Let's go for spread or voice stack spread and then let's say modulators here.
[00:24:31] So every voice now has a different bowl setting here and then we can use maybe this here for
[00:24:37] the frequency.
[00:24:48] And then let's actually delete this here and use a key track, relative key track here.
[00:24:58] Go to 64 voices, 64 semitones.
[00:25:02] I put this into voices mode here.
[00:25:10] That gets loud pretty fast.
[00:25:21] So it's a polyphonic filter also and that's what I want to say.
[00:25:25] It's maybe not the best example here with the heat in front of that.
[00:25:29] But yeah, you can use it polyphonically which is pretty mind blowing.
[00:25:33] I don't think I know another DAW that uses polyphonic audio effects.
[00:25:38] Maybe Able Live, I'm not sure.
[00:25:40] Maybe you can answer that in the comments down below.
[00:25:43] I actually haven't used anything else besides Bitwig for the last seven years, eight years
[00:25:49] maybe.
[00:25:50] So that's that.
[00:25:52] So polyphonic filter effects here on filter plus and sweep.
[00:25:58] So many opportunities to create sounds.
[00:26:02] That's the video for the day.
[00:26:03] Leave a like if you liked the video, ask stuff in the comments down below or some impressions,
[00:26:09] some ideas and subscribe to the channel.
[00:26:13] See you in the next video.
[00:26:14] Thanks for watching and bye.
[00:26:15] [ Silence ]