Random Noise Generator in Bitwig

Tutorial | Dec 26, 2024

In this video, I demonstrated a random noise generator I created using a simple grid setup, which can produce interesting and usable sounds by applying various modulations and randomizations. I explained how to blend between random and sub oscillators to achieve different tonal qualities and shared that you can download this preset on my Patreon. Additionally, I highlighted the technical aspects behind the setup, aiming to inspire viewers to experiment with creating random sounds.

You can watch the Video on Youtube

• support me on Patreon
• Download the Preset

Summary #

Maybe you don't watch the video, here are some important takeaways:

In this video, I demonstrate a random noise generator that I created inside a grid over the past few days. It's an interesting tool I've been playing with, and I thought it would be fun to share with you. By using my MIDI keyboard, I'm able to generate a random sound each time I press a new note. Some of these sounds are quite intriguing and could be perfect for creating percussion sounds, sample libraries, or just some unique tones for a track.

Firstly, I want to let you know that you can download this preset from my Patreon if you're interested. But more importantly, I want to explain the setup because it's quite simple and shows how easily you can create usable random sounds. The setup even includes a hold button, which allows you to play the same sound repeatedly without generating new ones.

The key feature of this setup is the use of oscillators and sub oscillators. You can blend between a random oscillator and a sub oscillator using the "Oscillator Sub" knob, which helps with adjusting overtones and ensuring the tuning aligns with the key you're using. The sub oscillator always aligns perfectly with the note you're pressing, providing tonality.

Additionally, there's a pitch offset knob that controls pitch scalars within the patch. This allows for a drastic change in sound, enabling you to find a sweet spot that matches with sub or main frequencies. Along with amplitude envelopes and the integration of effects like reverb, this setup can produce a wide array of sounds.

However, there's a caveat: because this is created within the grid, every time you reload the patch, the sound is entirely random. Persistence isn't possible within the grid, so to keep a sound, you must sample it. This is something to keep in mind for practical use.

I also included a demonstration of how I set this up with basic modules and dice to randomize pitches and modulations, showcasing how these interactions can create diverse sounds. I wanted to emphasize the potential for both audio rate and low frequency oscillations to create unexpected tones, combining tonality and modulation randomly.

Finally, I highlighted the importance of experimentation with the grid setup, including basic modules like oscillators, filters, and dice for randomness. It's a simple yet powerful method to explore noise generation.

As I wrap up, I invite you to check out the preset on my Patreon, and I plan to produce more content soon, so stay tuned for upcoming videos. I appreciate your support, and if you enjoyed the video, don't forget to leave a like, subscribe if you haven't, and perhaps drop a comment. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video!

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, Christmas is finally over and everyone is slowly crawling back and preparing for New Year's Eve.
[00:00:08] And I kind of created this random noise generator inside of the grid here over the last few days, had a bit of fun with this.
[00:00:17] And I want to show you first how it sounds here, I just use my MIDI keyboard and press some notes.
[00:00:22] And it generates every time I press a new note, I get a random sound.
[00:00:27] [MUSIC]
[00:00:36] Right, something like this.
[00:00:38] And there are some kind of interesting sounds in between there.
[00:00:41] And it's kind of perfect for using here the master record feature and getting some sounds out of it, some percussion sounds and creating, I don't know, sample libraries this way.
[00:00:57] Or just some random sounds you need for a track.
[00:00:59] So first, I want to say you can download this here on my Patreon if you want to.
[00:01:06] But I also want to explain how this kind of setup works here, because it's a fairly simple setup.
[00:01:13] And it shows you how easy you can create sometimes these random sounds that are also usable in a way.
[00:01:23] I mean, sometimes.
[00:01:24] [MUSIC]
[00:01:27] There's some pretty decent sounds in between there.
[00:01:29] And here there's a hold button.
[00:01:31] So when you hold the sound, it's always the same sound when you press the note.
[00:01:36] So you don't generate new sounds.
[00:01:39] [MUSIC]
[00:01:41] And then you can play it on the keyboard.
[00:01:43] And sometimes these overtones are very dissonant.
[00:01:48] So what you can do is you can use this knob here, Oscillator sub, so you can blend between the random oscillator and the sub oscillator down here.
[00:01:57] [MUSIC]
[00:02:00] You can hear the overtones are a bit, you know, out of tune with the sub oscillators.
[00:02:05] So the sub oscillators always the perfect key of the key you are using on the keyboard or pressing on the keyboard, right?
[00:02:12] So you can hear it's a bit dissonant.
[00:02:15] It's it's a bit off in terms of pitch.
[00:02:19] So what you can do is you can either just leave it on the random oscillator here all the way or blend into the sub oscillator all the way.
[00:02:29] And then use sub FM or sub face modulation to bring in the random oscillator here into the sub oscillator.
[00:02:37] You can see it is right. You can blend in then the FM or a PM.
[00:02:42] [MUSIC]
[00:02:45] So now you hear basically only the sub oscillator, but face modulated by the random oscillator.
[00:02:51] [MUSIC]
[00:02:53] So it gives you kind of more like tonality or the right tonality.
[00:02:57] It brings it into the pitch in the right pitch.
[00:03:01] So that's one way of doing it or maybe just blend here between the oscillator and the sub oscillator.
[00:03:08] [MUSIC]
[00:03:12] And then on the right side here, there's a pitch offset knob.
[00:03:16] So this is kind of controlling all the pitch scalars here in this patch.
[00:03:22] So with this, you can drastically change the sound.
[00:03:26] So let's press here just one note.
[00:03:28] [MUSIC]
[00:03:34] And then you can try and find the sweet spot that you kind of like.
[00:03:37] And that also maybe matches with the sub frequency or the right frequency of the note.
[00:03:43] [MUSIC]
[00:03:45] Something like this.
[00:03:46] [MUSIC]
[00:03:49] Then you have kind of a sound you can play.
[00:03:51] You also have here down there a normal amplitude envelope.
[00:03:56] [MUSIC]
[00:03:58] Right?
[00:03:58] So you can put this here maybe in a reverb or maybe instead of your viola,
[00:04:04] we just use here my new simple verb preset.
[00:04:08] [MUSIC]
[00:04:22] So you can play sounds with this also.
[00:04:25] The drawback is of course, this is again in the grid.
[00:04:28] So every time you load up this patch, the sound is completely random.
[00:04:33] You can't persist the sound with the project.
[00:04:35] So when you save it in your project, right, and you load up the project,
[00:04:39] it's a completely different sound then.
[00:04:41] So you have to sample it.
[00:04:44] We still don't have a way inside of the grid to persist certain data or
[00:04:50] generated data values, so it's not possible.
[00:04:54] So you have to save it as a sample or maybe make a multi sample patch out of this.
[00:04:59] I don't know.
[00:05:00] Or just generate some sounds, put it into a track and then render out some samples.
[00:05:06] It's also fine.
[00:05:08] But you have to do it in some way or another.
[00:05:10] But here this is not persistent.
[00:05:12] It's just for the time temporary or for temporary use.
[00:05:19] Okay, so let's generate just something different.
[00:05:22] [MUSIC]
[00:05:32] So let's see the sound, right?
[00:05:34] It has a lot of slow modulation in there.
[00:05:36] [MUSIC]
[00:05:39] So now you can use here the re-trigger button.
[00:05:42] So this one just enables here the re-trigger on all the oscillators at the same time.
[00:05:48] So it starts exactly at the same position every time you hit the key, right?
[00:05:55] So maybe you need this at some point.
[00:05:57] You leave this off, then it's completely random.
[00:06:01] So the modulation is sometimes a bit different.
[00:06:04] [MUSIC]
[00:06:13] So it's actually interesting how much sounds or how random these sounds are sometimes,
[00:06:19] even though the setup is pretty simple.
[00:06:22] Like I said, I put you this preset here on my Patreon so you can just download this.
[00:06:28] It's kind of fine tuned a bit here and there.
[00:06:31] Certain things you can see are modulating a lot of different parameters inside of this patch.
[00:06:37] So it's not like you just have to copy here how it looks like.
[00:06:42] You have to put in a bit of rock and tweak everything a bit.
[00:06:47] But I want to explain what the magic or what the reason is why this works.
[00:06:54] Let's call up here fully grid.
[00:06:58] Let's imagine you have a sine oscillator here.
[00:07:01] Let's use an oscilloscope.
[00:07:04] Make this a bit longer.
[00:07:06] You can see here you get a sine wave out of this.
[00:07:10] And we have an initial pitch of C3.
[00:07:14] But we can also use here the input jack.
[00:07:17] Let's use a constant instead of here, a pitch signal.
[00:07:22] So one gives you the highest pitch here of the piano roll, I guess.
[00:07:27] Zero is C3.
[00:07:30] And then you can go down to the lowest.
[00:07:33] I think you can.
[00:07:36] Now you can't go lower than minus one.
[00:07:39] But you can see minus one is actually a very low frequency.
[00:07:45] So it goes into LFO or low frequency oscillation territories here.
[00:07:51] It's not only usable for audio rate modulation or audio rate, audio output.
[00:07:58] So you can also do slow modulations with it, right?
[00:08:01] So the idea here was to just use one oscillator here and then a second one.
[00:08:07] And this one goes into the pitch input here, which gives you some kind of exponential FM.
[00:08:14] Not like here this PM thing.
[00:08:16] We use here the pitch input.
[00:08:19] And then you use another one here.
[00:08:23] And then you go into this pitch input, right?
[00:08:26] So this one modulates this and this one modulates this.
[00:08:29] Something like this.
[00:08:31] We also use here a DICE module and something like the gate input.
[00:08:37] And this gate input here triggers this DICE module.
[00:08:40] I mean, we can use here just this record.
[00:08:43] It's also possible.
[00:08:45] And this gives you, every time you press a key on the keyboard,
[00:08:50] get a random number here between zero and one.
[00:08:58] But we can also use your bipolar mode.
[00:09:00] So now we have also a negative values.
[00:09:04] And we use this to go into here the sine oscillator pitch input, right?
[00:09:09] So we decide kind of a random pitch for this sine oscillator.
[00:09:14] Sometimes it's a very low pitch.
[00:09:17] Like I showed you before, it's a very slow modulation.
[00:09:21] And sometimes you get a very high pitch signal.
[00:09:23] So between these two extremes, you get something.
[00:09:27] And you can also use this, of course, here, maybe.
[00:09:30] Maybe with a different one.
[00:09:33] Something like this.
[00:09:35] And then we go in here into the phase input.
[00:09:37] And maybe here at the amount, we can also modulate with the DICE.
[00:09:45] Something like this, right?
[00:09:47] So we get already different sounds here.
[00:09:50] And maybe let's try this out for a moment.
[00:09:57] Maybe peak limiter.
[00:10:00] Just in case.
[00:10:02] We get already very widely different sounds.
[00:10:13] Just with this simple setup.
[00:10:15] We can also do here the thing I try to do first.
[00:10:20] Something like this. Let's see how this sounds.
[00:10:22] So sometimes we generate modulation signals.
[00:10:30] So low frequencies, right?
[00:10:32] So slowly modulating our time.
[00:10:34] And sometimes we create randomly high pitch signals.
[00:10:38] So we get tonality and modulation at the same time, pretty randomly.
[00:10:43] So in my opinion, just using here the pitch input
[00:10:46] or doing exponential FM inside of the grid here
[00:10:50] with the pitch input is a very nice method
[00:10:53] of creating random sounds sometimes.
[00:10:56] If you're not after a certain over tone
[00:10:59] and you just want to have random noise,
[00:11:02] this is a very easy, simple setup to experiment with.
[00:11:06] And in my other patch here, I basically did the same thing.
[00:11:11] But here I combined it with a sub oscillator, right?
[00:11:14] I did some fancy things here just to make it more interesting.
[00:11:18] Also here noise oscillator.
[00:11:20] The noise oscillator mixes in here into this main oscillator, right?
[00:11:25] And then I change here the amount with the dies
[00:11:28] and the frequency and the low pass.
[00:11:30] Everything is kind of randomized here.
[00:11:33] It gives you more variety and interesting.
[00:11:36] Also your filter is also in there.
[00:11:38] So yeah, this is what I want to show you.
[00:11:41] First, the preset that you can download on my Patreon
[00:11:44] and how it works.
[00:11:45] And also here the simple setup with the dies modules
[00:11:48] and using the pitch input.
[00:11:51] And yeah, it's very nice in my opinion
[00:11:54] for creating random sounds.
[00:11:56] That's it for this video.
[00:11:58] I do some more videos the coming days.
[00:12:00] I have a bit of free time, of course.
[00:12:02] And I will also fill out my Patreon with new content
[00:12:06] for the next year.
[00:12:07] And yeah, thanks for watching.
[00:12:09] Leave a like if you liked the video.
[00:12:11] Thanks for subscribing.
[00:12:12] If you haven't so, then please do.
[00:12:15] It helps.
[00:12:16] And also maybe leave a comment, maybe just a smiley.
[00:12:19] It also helps a lot.
[00:12:21] Thanks for watching and see you in the next video.
[00:12:23] Bye.