Why Bitwig Studio Is the Ultimate DAW
Tutorial | May 16, 2025
In this video, I explain why I love Bitwig Studio, highlighting its platform independence, stability with plugin sandboxing, and incredibly flexible modulation system that lets me modulate almost anything. I also talk about the creative power of The Grid for building custom instruments and effects, as well as Bitwig's responsive support and controller scripting capabilities. Overall, Bitwig Studio’s innovation and reliability make it my top choice for music production, and I can’t imagine switching to anything else.
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Summary #
Hey guys, welcome back to a new video! Last week, I attended Superbooth in Berlin and spent a lot of time at the Bitwig booth, talking to both current Bitwig users and people on the fence about switching from other DAWs like Ableton Live, Reaper, or Cubase. I still can't really understand why everyone isn't using Bitwig Studio—maybe I'm a bit biased, but the reasons to use it are just so strong. So in this video, I wanted to make a comprehensive list of what makes Bitwig Studio so great, especially the features I love and the reasons others might benefit from it too.
1. Platform Independency
First and foremost, Bitwig Studio works on all the major platforms: Windows (10 and 11), macOS, and Linux (including ARM processors and even the new Snapdragon chips). This isn’t just some half-baked “beta” Linux version either—Bitwig is a true first-class citizen on all these operating systems. Many of Bitwig's own developers run Linux themselves, and if you hit issues on Linux, their support is actually helpful instead of giving you the brush-off. I use mostly Linux Mint and SteamOS, but you can run it on Ubuntu, Arch, or whatever flavor of Linux you prefer.
On top of that, the Bitwig Studio license is very flexible. When you buy it, you get three activations, which you can use on different machines (even across OSes), and you can move activations around without any hassle. You don’t have to shut down one system to use another—Bitwig lets you run actively on, say, Windows and Mint at the same time. I even made a video showing Bitwig running great on a Steam Deck with SteamOS. For me, this flexibility is a huge deal.
2. Stability & Sandboxing
Another massive plus for Bitwig is its stability. It basically never crashes for me—maybe once a year I’ll get a total crash, and when I reopen, Bitwig immediately offers to recover my unsaved project, which works flawlessly. If a crash ever does happen, Bitwig support is quick to jump in and help fix it.
The main reason it’s so stable is because of Bitwig’s plugin sandboxing options. Bitwig lets you choose how plugins are hosted: in the same process as the main app, all in one process, by vendor, by plugin, or even individually per plugin instance. Most other DAWs crash the whole project if a single plugin goes down—but with Bitwig’s sandboxing, one plugin crashing doesn’t take down the entire DAW. Instead, Bitwig gives you on-screen options to reload just that crashed plugin or all plugins from the same vendor, or to replace it or save your work and move on. For me, this is a total game-changer and should be standard in every DAW.
3. Modulation System
Now, let’s talk about Bitwig’s legendary modulation system, introduced in Bitwig Studio 2. You can attach any number of modulators (LFOs, Envelopes, Random, Step Sequencer, and so on) to any device—VST synths, built-in devices, FX, whatever. In contrast to typical VST synths (like Serum), where the modulation sources are fixed and you usually only get a few LFOs and envelopes, Bitwig lets you load and stack as many modulators as you want, at any time, with zero limitations except for your CPU.
Every parameter that can be modulated lights up in blue, and routing modulation is as simple as clicking and dragging. You can modulate modulators with other modulators—including feedback modulation, so things can get really creative and organic. Modulation can even go hierarchically: you can nest devices (like putting a delay inside a synth device’s FX box), save the whole construct as one preset, and modulate child device parameters from parent device modulators. The only limitation is you can’t modulate “up” the hierarchy, but they’ve added solutions like Track Modulators (to modulate everything in a track, even if they're not nested) and Project Modulators (to globally modulate multiple tracks or parameters at the project level).
One of the newer features is that all modulators can be polyphonic. If your synthesizer is running in poly mode, you can set LFOs or random modulators to be “per voice,” so every voice/note gets its own modulation value. This makes sounds super alive and organic, since every note can behave a bit differently. You can use random per voice on parameters like filter cutoff, attack, pan, anything—it’s incredibly powerful for sound design.
On top of that, you have "voice stacking," where you can virtually duplicate a patch across multiple “stacks” (up to 16, for example) and modulate each stack individually with stack modulators. This opens up insane stereo and timbral design, like turning a simple patch into a super-wide, lively sound or making custom ensemble patches. The possibilities are endless, and I simply can't go back to any other DAW after getting used to this workflow.
Everything I’m explaining works not just on synths but on FX racks, the Sampler, the Grid, everything. Modulation is truly at the heart of Bitwig.
4. (The) Grid
The last major feature I want to spotlight is the Grid, Bitwig’s fully modular environment. It’s similar in concept to things like Reaktor or Max/MSP, but it’s more hands-on and immediately musical and visual. You can build synths, FX, sequencers, generative patches, resonators—pretty much anything. It doesn’t distract me from making music; if I have a sound or tool in mind, I can just whip it up quickly, rather than getting lost in endless possibilities. You can make generative patches, modular effects, custom synthesis, or specialized MIDI tools all within the DAW.
The Grid provides all the polyphony, voice stacking, and modulation features I talked about before. It’s visually appealing and fast, though I do wish in the future they’d add GUI-building tools for custom interfaces. If you’ve ever wanted to build your own instrument or effect, the Grid makes it accessible and integrated right into Bitwig.
Other Notable Features
Bitwig also has an impressive scripting system for controller support, using JavaScript or Java. Pretty much every hardware controller out there has a script, and you can even use the scripting environment to generate notes or automate other parts of your workflow. I showed a quick example of using a script to generate melodies in C major, right in the launcher.
There’s also a recent feature where all GUI rendering is now GPU-accelerated, which frees up CPU for audio and makes the visuals and animations super smooth.
All things considered, Bitwig Studio is hands-down the most forward-thinking, flexible, and creative DAW I’ve ever used. Its cross-platform freedom, rock-solid stability, limitless modulation, and powerful Grid mean I simply can’t imagine switching to anything else. If you haven’t tried it, I hope this video inspired you to give it a shot!
Let me know in the comments if you love Bitwig Studio, what features you’d highlight, or if you’re thinking about switching! Thanks for watching—leave a like and a subscribe if you enjoyed, and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye!
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] Welcome back to a new video guys. So last week there was a super booth here in Berlin and of
[00:00:04] course I was talking to a lot of Bitwig users at the Bitwig super booth booth about Bitwig Studio.
[00:00:10] Wow, this was a sentence. And we are talking about why we love Bitwig Studio and I was also
[00:00:17] talking to a lot of people that don't use Bitwig Studio or on the fence of searching to Bitwig
[00:00:22] Studio and they are still using, I don't know, Ableton Live, Reaper, Cubase or whatever people
[00:00:29] use these days. I have no idea why not everyone uses Bitwig Studio. I'm not biased at all.
[00:00:35] And I thought maybe it's a great idea to make a list or, yeah, list reasons why you might want
[00:00:45] to use Bitwig Studio, what are the things people love about Bitwig Studio. So number one reason
[00:00:51] for me is the platform independency. Okay, you can use Bitwig Studio on Windows, Windows 10 or
[00:00:59] Windows 11, whatever, can use it on Mac OS and you can use it on Linux. So it runs on all systems
[00:01:08] available on the market, also on ARM processors and the new Snapdragon thing, right? So everything
[00:01:16] is possible. Also, it's not just an attached feature like, oh, yeah, we have some kind of outdated
[00:01:24] Linux build you can try out. But if you run into bugs, good luck. It's really a first class citizen.
[00:01:34] Most of the developers are some of the developers of Bitwig Studio themselves run Bitwig on a
[00:01:39] Linux system. So it's really a first class citizen. Also, if you have problems, you can call the
[00:01:44] support, you can mail the support if you have problems with Linux on, I don't know, Mint,
[00:01:50] I'm using here Mint and SteamOS. But you can also run it on Arc or Ubuntu or whatever people use
[00:01:57] these days. So it's really something that works and you can call the support for it. So it's not
[00:02:06] just something that they attach for marketing reasons, it's really a first class citizen,
[00:02:12] and it runs on all systems. Also, the license you buy. So if you buy Bitwig Studio, you buy the
[00:02:18] license, you can run Bitwig Studio on all systems at the same time. So you have three activations
[00:02:26] kind of you can use, and you can also rework these activations. So if you just don't want to use it
[00:02:32] on one system anymore, you can just rework it and activate it somewhere else. So for me here,
[00:02:37] I run it basically on my main PC. I have it here on my older PC, which runs Mint. And if you want
[00:02:46] to, you can also activate it on your MacBook at the same time. And you also don't need to close
[00:02:51] the application like, you know, you have running, you have it running on Windows, and then you want
[00:02:56] to run it on a different system at the same time, and you have to close one application because you
[00:03:01] only allow to have one, you know, running system. That's also not the case. You just
[00:03:08] you can run it at the same time on different platforms, and it just works. In my opinion,
[00:03:13] pretty dope. I also made some kind of video or short for Bitwig where I show how to run it on a
[00:03:20] SteamOS on a Steam Deck. And it works. It just works great. So platform, independency is a big
[00:03:28] point, in my opinion. The second big feature is, in my opinion, the crashing. It doesn't crash.
[00:03:35] It doesn't crash at all. I have maybe once a year, one occasion where Bitwig completely
[00:03:42] crashes to desktop with no error message at all. And when I open up Bitwig Studio again,
[00:03:49] it shows me, oh, there was a crash. Do you want to recover the old project so I can just
[00:03:55] continue my work without any problems. This works pretty flawlessly. And if you run into a crash to
[00:04:04] desktop situation, you can always always mail or call the support, and they are pretty interested
[00:04:13] in this to get this fixed as soon as possible. But it's very, very rarely that I have a complete
[00:04:22] crash to desktop. It almost never happens to me. And the reason for this is the sandboxing of Bitwig
[00:04:29] Studio. So most of the times when your door is crashing, it's because of a plug-in. And in Bitwig
[00:04:35] Studio, we have so called sandboxing. So we can make that all these plug-ins run in different or
[00:04:44] separate processes, which is pretty interesting. I can show you this here on the desktop. So this
[00:04:52] is Bitwig here, you can go to settings. And there is here, let me see plug-ins. So settings
[00:04:58] plug-ins. And you can see here is the plug-in hosting mode. You can choose between with Bitwig,
[00:05:05] which means all the plug-ins you run are run in the same process as Bitwig Studio. So when the
[00:05:12] plug-in crashes, the whole process is crashing. So Bitwig crashes with the plug-in more or less.
[00:05:19] This is kind of the case, I think, in most the doors. And it's very frustrating. I had this back
[00:05:26] in my Cubase days a lot, you know, some random obscure plug-in you really want to use and it
[00:05:32] just crashes and then your whole project is gone. Here you can just choose a different hosting mode.
[00:05:39] So you can choose your different, different amounts, right? So with Bitwig, it's in the
[00:05:46] same process as Bitwig together basically means you have two processes. One is Bitwig, the door,
[00:05:53] and one is all the plug-ins. So two processes. Then we have by Wendor, which means all the plug-ins
[00:06:01] by one company are in one process. So if you run a Pro-Q4, for instance, and another Pro-Q4 or maybe
[00:06:11] what's the name, a saturator by Fedfilter, they all share the same process. And if you run a
[00:06:18] different plug-in by a different vendor, they have their own process, right? And then you have,
[00:06:22] of course, always Bitwig as a separate process. Then by plug-in, this means you have the same
[00:06:29] plug-in ID or the same plug-in name, yeah, whatever. So all plug-ins all have their own
[00:06:38] process. And if you run a different plug-in, then they create a new process more or less.
[00:06:44] Then we have individually here. And this is every instance of the same plug-in ID of the same
[00:06:50] by a different vendor is has its own thing, its own process. But I choose here most of the times
[00:06:56] by plug-in. And the reason for this is that you have sometimes plug-ins that communicate with
[00:07:02] each other. So let's imagine Pro-Q4 can communicate to other Pro-Q4 instances or
[00:07:10] something by Voxengo I use a lot. And they also can drag in the audio information from other channels
[00:07:19] or plug-ins like Isotope, Ozone, they also need to communicate with other instances of
[00:07:30] different channels to gather information. So this is why I use this here. It's the best option for
[00:07:36] me at least. And it makes sure that when plug-ins crash, Bitwig Studio stays stable. I can't show
[00:07:44] you this here, but you have, I don't know how to make a crash here with the plug-in. But when
[00:07:52] the plug-in crashes, it shows you here basically two buttons, reload or something and then reload
[00:08:00] only this plug-in or reload all plug-ins from the same vendor when they crash together.
[00:08:06] Or you can then just replace it here with another plug-in if you want to get rid of it,
[00:08:12] or you can just save the project. But it just crashes this plug-in when it crashes. Very nice
[00:08:19] feature, my opinion, should be standard in every DAW in Bitwig it is from version 1.0 and it works
[00:08:27] flawlessly. So while we are here at Bitwig at the moment, I can show you also
[00:08:34] the third reason why I think Bitwig Studio is great. And this is of course the modulation system.
[00:08:41] This was introduced in Bitwig Studio 2.0 and we had kind of this before in 1.0. It was a bit,
[00:08:48] you know, not that nice on the GUI side. So here this is a synthesizer or device in Bitwig Studio.
[00:08:57] We can also use something different, but I show you this on the polymer here. And you can see
[00:09:02] we have here an amplitude envelope and your filter envelope which is cool. And maybe you
[00:09:10] can say this is already a modulator. But we can attach as many modulators as we want on this device.
[00:09:18] So usually with VST devices or with VST instruments, let's say you want to open up here Serum 2.
[00:09:25] Oh, that's an update. We have down here a modulation system. You have this in all kinds of
[00:09:32] synthesizers. You have an envelope here, three, four, a bunch of LFOs and they are kind of
[00:09:38] predefined. And you have like five or maybe six LFOs. I don't know. I think you can make more here.
[00:09:45] But you're kind of limited in a way and they are predefined and they have certain functions and they,
[00:09:52] you know, cover up here the GUI from the beginning, even if you don't want to use
[00:09:57] any modulations, it's still there, right? So in Bitwig, it's not like this.
[00:10:03] We have here the bare bones synthesizer controls and you can open up here the modulation panel in
[00:10:11] front and then you can attach modulators. And we have a lot of different ones here,
[00:10:18] starting with the classical LFO, right? As you can see, and then you can modulate anything
[00:10:24] that you can see here on the screen is highlighted in blue by different amounts.
[00:10:30] We can switch the modulators to unipolar mode. So it only modulates from zero to one or from minus
[00:10:37] one to plus one. We can change the amount and the phase and so on. So very straightforward.
[00:10:44] You can also attach multiple of the same modulators and you can modulate from one
[00:10:51] modulator to the other. So we can modulate here the modulation speed with the second LFO, right?
[00:10:58] And there's no limitation. You can just take this one and modulate this one.
[00:11:03] You can go from this one then back to this one and modulate this. So you have also feedback
[00:11:10] modulation in a way. There is maybe a latency between that. I'm not really sure, but you know,
[00:11:16] for modulation, it's okay in my opinion. So here we modulate this modulator or this modulator
[00:11:22] with this modulator and this modulator is modulating this modulate by this modulator and
[00:11:26] then we modulate this modulator and this modulator. So we can modulate everything.
[00:11:30] So there is no limitation to that, right? And yeah, you can modulate all the things inside of this
[00:11:38] device here. If you want, we can also rearrange this here a bit more, which is cool.
[00:11:44] But we can also nest devices. So you can say instead of adding here, I don't know a delay,
[00:11:53] delay plus here after the device, which makes it impossible here to actually use the signal
[00:12:01] and modulate this delay, but we can just nest these devices. So we just put this delay plus
[00:12:08] into the Xbox here, right? So it's now part of this polymer synthesizer. It's kind of a child,
[00:12:16] right? This is the parent device and then we have here the child device. So with this, we can
[00:12:21] first and foremost, save a preset for this polymer synthesizer and delay plus and all the
[00:12:28] settings and all the parameters are part of this preset. So you can make a whole bunch of
[00:12:35] connected devices and just save one preset for the parent device and everything below it is
[00:12:41] part of this preset. But now we can also use the modulation system here and modulate things inside
[00:12:48] of delay plus from the parent device from this polymer synthesizer, right? We can now say here,
[00:12:54] oh, we want to change the delay time with this, right? And it modulates this. And this is kind
[00:13:06] of how I like to make music. And this is also the reason why I can't switch to any other DA from
[00:13:14] Bitwig Studio, because I'm so used to attaching whatever I want to a device at any time with no
[00:13:23] limitations and just modulate everything and create sounds. This is so powerful, I can't go
[00:13:29] back to anything else. And I know they added modulators in Cubase and they added some kind
[00:13:36] of modulator modules in Able Live. But I don't think it's that deep. It's on this level. So
[00:13:44] this is one thing of the modulation system here. So you can intermodulate or you can modulate
[00:13:52] between different modulators. We can modulate things down the line or child devices here.
[00:13:57] By the way, you can make more stuff. You can add more tools here, right? And then
[00:14:03] use here maybe segments or curves or wavetable, LFO, whatever you want to use. And then modulate
[00:14:13] your tool down there, right? Only downside is you can't modulate up. So if you want to use an LFO
[00:14:21] here and you want to modulate something at the parent device, that's not possible, right?
[00:14:27] Another thing that they added is the problem when you have a synthesizer here and maybe you have,
[00:14:37] I don't know, a compressor after the device. So not inside. It's not a child device. It's not
[00:14:45] a hierarchy or not nested. They added now track modulators. So we can open up here the same panel
[00:14:54] that you opened up on the device. You can also open up on the track itself. And then you can attach
[00:15:00] these modulators to the track and then modulate everything that's inside of this chains. We can
[00:15:07] modulate here the compressor, even though it's not a child of the polymer synthesizer. It's now
[00:15:15] a child of the track, right? So we can use it to track modulators. And then at some point,
[00:15:21] they're also introduced for the project modulators. So we can use a random LFO here, right?
[00:15:28] And then we can modulate something on track one or the panning on, it's not the panning,
[00:15:37] it's the volume knob here, the volume fader of this track with the random mod because it's attached
[00:15:43] to the project and everything below the project is of course a child. So it's nested. So we can
[00:15:50] modulate all the tracks, we can modulate the panning, we can also modulate here the
[00:15:54] yeah, the synthesizer on this track, we can also modulate on another track here, a tool device
[00:16:02] with the same LFO over the same random LFO, right? So this is the project modulator.
[00:16:10] We can also make here macros and change the tool, the volume here at different tracks at the same
[00:16:18] time, right? And then you just push this up and then you change the volume here and the volume there.
[00:16:25] So no limitations to modulations, you can add everything, you can dream off and the only limit
[00:16:34] is your CPU or GPU. And that's probably also a feature I want to recall that from the last update,
[00:16:43] I don't know which version exactly, but they added GPU processing in Bitwig here. So everything
[00:16:53] that you can see every visuals in Bitwig Studio runs on the GPU, it's not CPU processed anymore,
[00:17:01] which frees up space on your CPU for audio processing, right? So this was a big step for
[00:17:09] Bitwig Studio, it took them a lot of time and a lot of debugging, but it's working now, it works
[00:17:14] flawlessly and it makes all the animations here, all the visuals you can see look so nice.
[00:17:21] So yeah, that's the modulations or I forgot something about the modulation system, sorry,
[00:17:27] there's more. Let's recall up here the Polymer synthesizer again,
[00:17:33] do I have here MIDI input here I have. So all the modulators that you can attach here are also
[00:17:43] polyphonic. So usually when you have a synthesizer here, the question is, is it a
[00:17:50] monophonic synthesizer or polyphonic synthesizer? And the Polymer here is of course polyphonic
[00:17:55] because it's probably also using the name Polymer. But you can see this when you
[00:18:00] enable or focus here on the device itself, you can go to the inspector on the left side,
[00:18:06] you can see here we have 12 voices available, you can pull this down. And now it's a monophonic
[00:18:11] synthesizer, which means you can only play one note at a time. If you press multiple notes,
[00:18:18] the old voice is disabled and it just plays the new voice, which is great for baselines,
[00:18:24] right for funky baselines, that's also why you people use Moog monophonic bass synthesizers
[00:18:31] for this because you can really nicely jam on them and one voice or one note chokes the old voice.
[00:18:38] I have to actually use my headphones here for a moment.
[00:18:47] Let's increase your sustain. So as soon as I play a new voice, the old voice is disabled,
[00:18:55] this is a monophonic behavior. And also the LFO or the modulator is monophonic at the moment,
[00:19:01] right? We modulate here this just with one signal. But when we switch this here to,
[00:19:08] let's say polyphonic modes, we have 12 voices available. So you can press multiple notes here,
[00:19:13] you can see one voice, second voice. So I'm pressing two notes, holding two notes on my keyboard.
[00:19:19] But they are using the same modulation here or the same signal for the cutoff. So we have two voices
[00:19:27] with two oscillators playing, but the modulation is the same. So we can switch this here to a
[00:19:35] per voice mode, which makes it now independent. So we have one voice, one voice, second voice.
[00:19:43] And you can also see here, these two voices represented as two dots bouncing, dancing,
[00:19:49] three voices, four voices. And they all have kind of slightly different LFO because the
[00:19:58] re-trigger here is free. We can also put this on note re-trigger. So I'm pressing three notes at the
[00:20:06] same time. So they receive the same LFO because we are re-triggering at the same time. But I also can
[00:20:12] do this because I'm playing one note after the other re-trigger at a different point in time.
[00:20:23] So what I want to tell you is all the modulators are also polyphonic and we can make a lot of
[00:20:29] tricks with this because we can, for instance, say, we use a random modulator and we also have
[00:20:36] this one here in focus. And at the left side, we can say per voice. So now we have a random value,
[00:20:43] a different random value, a different seed for every voice. I also can see this here with the dots
[00:20:52] and we probably also want to use here slide modulation.
[00:20:57] And now we can do something interesting. We can use this output here, which is just one signal,
[00:21:08] but it's a polyphonic signal and modulate here the LFO speed with the random output here.
[00:21:20] And this is also per voice. So when I play multiple voices,
[00:21:24] we change the LFO speed here to different values on different notes on different voices.
[00:21:32] Right? So it's also polyphonic, which makes it super interesting for sound design
[00:21:47] because you can make the sound come to life very easily. And yeah, you get a slightly different
[00:21:58] sound on each note you are playing, which makes it, yeah, very, very organic, in my opinion.
[00:22:05] So this works, of course, with all things inside of the synthesizer here. So you can do panning,
[00:22:13] right? So you have one voice on the left side, one voice on the right side with the volume knob
[00:22:17] with attack and decay settings for the filter and the amplitude here for the wavetable position
[00:22:24] for the detuning. So it works for everything. Everything is polyphonic and can be changed
[00:22:28] for every voice differently. Okay. It sounds very complicated, but once you do it,
[00:22:36] you never want to go back. It's just this simple. There's another mode in most, by the way,
[00:22:46] this is not only on the synthesizer, it works on all Bitwig devices. It's not just Polymer.
[00:22:52] You can use also the sampler for this or anything else, Phase 4 or the grid or the FX grid. It also
[00:23:01] works on FX devices, by the way. So, yeah, this works on Polymer. So what I want to say after,
[00:23:11] ah, yeah. So there's a different mode here. So this is running at the moment in just
[00:23:18] without voice stacking. So this is also kind of voice handling. So voices here is the polyphonic
[00:23:26] mode, which means we can play multiple notes at the same time, which activates multiple voices.
[00:23:33] But we can also just press one note, just place one voice here, and then use voice stacking.
[00:23:40] So we can say, oh, let's play this one voice two times. So this is basically now two voices here.
[00:23:48] Oh, there's a thunder outside. Oh, nice. So two voices now with voice stacking are three voices.
[00:23:56] And it just duplicates your current patch to multiple instances virtually. So we play this
[00:24:04] sound here three times at the same time, which is not very useful. Maybe you want to make the sound
[00:24:11] louder. You can just stack multiple multiples of the same sound on top of each other. But we can
[00:24:17] also use now a stack modulator. This one here is stack spread. And we can say we want to have here
[00:24:25] the stack spread output a value between minus one and plus one. Okay. So now when I modulate here,
[00:24:33] let's say the panop by plus one or 100% to the right. This means I have three voices playing
[00:24:42] when I hit just one note. And voice one gets a value of minus one. So the panning is on the left.
[00:24:50] Voice two gets a value of zero, which means it's in the center. And voice three gets the value of
[00:24:58] plus one, which means it's on the right side. So we have three voices playing left center and on the
[00:25:04] right. And it sounds a bit stereo already because we have here a random, random retrigger of the
[00:25:14] oscillator phase. But when we just hit this one here, it sounds very centric or very mono because
[00:25:21] we play the same oscillator with the same phase start on the left and the middle and the right.
[00:25:26] So this is okay. But now we can also introduce here a random modulator. And if this is in polyphonic
[00:25:33] mode or per voice mode, we have now a random value for all the voice decks by default. And
[00:25:41] you can say, oh, let's use a random value on the index on the wave table index. So now when I press
[00:25:48] here one note, the left side, the middle or the center and the right side get a different wave
[00:26:02] table position here. And it makes it very wide, very stereo ish. And you can go crazy with this.
[00:26:11] We have here this stack modulator, which features a lot of different things. We can also go just
[00:26:17] to randomize here. So we have every time we press a key, we get a random value. There's also here
[00:26:26] as what's it called voice control. So you can see we have here three dots we can choose from
[00:26:32] to modulate. So we can make specific changes to each voice. Say the middle voice here, maybe opens
[00:26:40] up the filter or the right side, which is the right panning, which was pen to the right side,
[00:26:49] we can open up the filter, right? So you can very, or you can be very specific about what you want
[00:26:59] to modulate or where you want to differ on different voices, just with this simple trick here. So the
[00:27:05] modulation system is very, very limitless, very powerful, and very easy to get. Once you get
[00:27:16] the hang of it, how it works, you never want to go back. You can modulate the device,
[00:27:21] you can modulate VST instruments, you can modulate clap lock ins, you can modulate audio effects,
[00:27:27] and you can save everything as a preset and recall it later. So I have no idea why people
[00:27:36] use something else than Bitwig Studio. I have no idea. Once you try it out and you know how it
[00:27:45] works, it's very powerful. And you can create so many nice sounds with it. So this is a synthesizer
[00:27:53] here. So this is usually how polyphonic synthesizer work, but we also have this on FX devices and
[00:28:01] only at the moment for FX devices that are based on the FX grid. So the FX grid here looks like this.
[00:28:12] All right, and you can add here, let's say a filter. Let's make it very simple, low pass filter.
[00:28:18] Open up this filter here.
[00:28:21] So this device, this audio FX device is not attached to the synthesizer at all,
[00:28:33] but we can select the FX grid and go to the left side and can say we want to use voice stacking,
[00:28:41] or also we want to use this effect polyphonically. So this means this audio effect receives also
[00:28:48] MIDI information or note information from my keyboard, right? And it changes the filter type
[00:28:55] here based on my keyboard input. You can see here the pre chord is active and it changed basically
[00:29:01] here the frequency to the frequency of the note I'm pressing. So maybe use your SVF. So we have a
[00:29:09] band pass filter. So you have key tracking with the audio effect.
[00:29:20] It's so funny because I mean, if I had this in the early 2000s, I would go crazy.
[00:29:30] So what you can do now is here we can use a noise source from the synthesizer.
[00:29:39] Right noise. And in the audio effect you want to, you don't want to use here the keyboard input,
[00:29:48] but we use a pitch input. Let's say this one here. So we say C3, right? So we activate this,
[00:29:59] which means this filter here, this position is always exactly on the frequency of C3,
[00:30:06] pretty straightforward. But then we can say, oh, let's actually use multiple of this filter, right?
[00:30:13] So we use voice stacking here instead of polyphonic mode. We use your voice stacking.
[00:30:19] So let's use 16 different filters. So now we have 16 filters pointing at C3. And then we can say,
[00:30:30] use quantizer because you want to stick to C major with this note, even if I dial in here
[00:30:38] C#3, right? It points at D. So it's a pitch quantizer. So now we have here 16 voice stacks and
[00:30:48] we use a stack modulator, stack spread modulator. And we go to value and we say increase by let's
[00:30:55] say two semitones. Let's type this in here on the left side, two semitones, which means voice one,
[00:31:04] voice stack one is C3, voice stack two is D because it's two semitones higher. Voice stack three is E
[00:31:11] because it's already, it's also two semitones higher than D and so on. So we have 16 different
[00:31:17] filters in each filter points at a different key or note of the scale of C3, which is kind
[00:31:26] of a resonator now, right? You can hear it. We just play in here some, a noise bit, maybe increase
[00:31:35] here there. Right? So with this, you can make just an easy resonator or couple of strong or
[00:31:52] whatever you want to do. We can also say the higher you go in the voice stack, the higher we go in pitch
[00:32:00] with the frequency here. We can also decrease the loudness. So the higher you go in frequency,
[00:32:08] the lower you go in volume or the opposite to upper frequencies are louder than the lower frequencies,
[00:32:18] just with this voice stack modulator. So it's a very easy setup. But if you get the idea how
[00:32:23] voice stacks work, it's so easy and you can do more or less everything. We can also do something
[00:32:30] stupid like, let's say we have C3 here, we can also use a pitch, pitch in, which is the keyboard
[00:32:41] input. So I play different notes on the keyboard. And then I add here what we just did C3 to the
[00:32:51] keyboard inputs, we add this together. And now we have kind of a key tracked resonator.
[00:32:59] But all the notes you play, all the overtones are in the key of C major. Very easy to set up,
[00:33:14] very easy to get. And it's very powerful. And yeah, if you put this here into the FX box,
[00:33:20] you can also say I want to add a random modulator here at the beginning of the
[00:33:24] polymer. And then I modulate something inside of the grid here for whatever reason,
[00:33:31] you can do it. There's no limitation.
[00:33:33] Oh, maybe I add here some kind of ADSR to keep the voice alive.
[00:33:48] Yeah, kind of works. And you can do it a bit bigger. So yeah, this is basically
[00:34:06] one big feature of BitX Studio. You can be modular at every occasion in every situation.
[00:34:15] You can attach modulators as many as you want. Only the CPU is basically the limit.
[00:34:22] So this is why I love BitX Studio. And probably can never be ever use anything else that works
[00:34:30] differently. So once you do it, you never go back. You can't go back. It's impossible.
[00:34:36] So the last thing was probably also the fourth big feature of BitX Studio for me. And this is
[00:34:43] the grid. I showed you this. You can make anything happen on the fly. It's not complicated like
[00:34:51] Reactor or Max DSP where you know, you it's more like coding in a way. But this is more like hands
[00:34:58] on. It's a powerful modular semi modular synthesizer. But you can also build instruments
[00:35:06] with it if you want to. It's very easy to get. It's very pleasing to the eyes. All it misses is
[00:35:14] maybe an interface designer. But maybe we get this at some point. But the grid is also a big feature.
[00:35:21] And maybe you're not into modular synthesis or maybe you're not into Eurorack or dragging cables
[00:35:27] around because you think it's distracting you from making music. In my opinion, sometimes
[00:35:33] just having having a track and you want to add something to it, right? And you have exactly
[00:35:39] in mind what you want to add. Just call up the grid, put a few modules together and you have it
[00:35:45] if you know what you're doing. So it's not like it's a big distraction where you always open up
[00:35:51] the grid and I'm lost basically for hours because I don't know what to do or I'm doing too much.
[00:35:57] I have too many options. But if you already know what you want to do, you can quickly
[00:36:03] make this reality inside of the grid. Okay. So here's also a generative patch I usually make
[00:36:11] sometimes. That's something that you don't need to activate. There is basically no
[00:36:16] note information here. There's no track, there's no clip, no clip or anything. It's just a grid
[00:36:23] in kind of a monophonic mode here, which means one voice is always active. So you have to put
[00:36:29] this into a monophonic in this monophonic mode here. And then you can create here inside of the
[00:36:35] grid something that runs for itself, a generative patch, it generates notes, it randomizes here,
[00:36:41] the wavetable positions, it randomizes the notes or the melodies. So it's also possible to do inside
[00:36:49] of the grid. And I have already made a lot of videos about this and how to do it and how to
[00:36:55] approach it. And yeah, it's sometimes fun just to create these kind of things here. And you can
[00:37:02] just sample it or use it for starting a track or maybe add something to it, play along with the
[00:37:11] keyboard with the piano, play guitar to it. I don't know. Right. So it opens up new possibilities
[00:37:18] and it's sometimes very fun. So this is basically my video, I think, for why you should maybe try
[00:37:27] out Bitwig Studio platform, independency, sandboxing, it's basically never crashing. And when it
[00:37:34] crashes, it you can easily recover your project. Then we have the powerful modulation system that's
[00:37:41] unlimited, only limited by your CPU, you can attach it to everything, VSTs, devices, tracks,
[00:37:49] projects. Then we have the grid, which is polyphonic, also uses voice stacking like every other
[00:37:56] device in Bitwig Studio. And you can be creative with this. And I left out even more things, right?
[00:38:05] There's here this powerful scripting system, actually more made for controllers. So every
[00:38:13] controller you can buy on the market, there's probably a script or multiple scripts for Bitwig
[00:38:17] Studio. You can also use the scripting system like I did here for creating notes. Let's say we have
[00:38:27] here a note clip, right? We can generate melodies in C major inside of the launcher. And we can
[00:38:40] generate here some random notes pretty easily. So this is the scripting system. It works with
[00:38:48] JavaScript and also with Java itself. I think they want to phase out JavaScript at some point.
[00:38:55] I hope not because it's very easy and straightforward. But yeah, this is also the scripting system for
[00:39:00] controller scripts. A lot of features actually that you want to miss. Okay, so this is my video
[00:39:14] for praising Bitwig Studio. Thanks for watching. Leave me a like, of course, maybe a comment
[00:39:19] why you love Bitwig Studio, what you love about Bitwig Studio. If you think about switching to
[00:39:23] Bitwig Studio and maybe you don't like me, I don't know, just write it in the comments. I have no
[00:39:30] idea. Okay. Thanks for watching. Leave a like, leave a subscription and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.