Tags: posts polarity-music Audio-Effects Bitwig Bitwig-5.3.2 Tutorial Bitwig-5.3.8

Soundscapes from Random Sound Sources in Bitwig

Tutorial | May 23, 2025

In this video, I show you a cool party trick in Bitwig Studio using the Grid, where I turn a simple Dirac signal into random, musical percussive sounds by combining transient detection, randomized filter frequencies, and pitch quantization all synchronized to the beat grid. I demonstrate how easy and flexible the Grid is for creative sound design, layering multiple voices with different parameters and even quantizing live audio input, making it fun to experiment with any sound source. If you want to try this yourself, I'll upload the patch to GitHub for free,like and subscribe for more!

You can watch the Video on Youtube

Summary

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

Hey everyone, welcome back! Today I wanted to share a cool and fun party trick you can try in Bitwig Studio over the weekend,a nice example of Bitwig’s power and why I think it’s such a great DAW. The best part is how quickly and simply you can whip up something creative. So I started off with a completely fresh Bitwig project, loaded up the Test Tone device, and scrolled past the usual sine, triangle, square, and saw waves, all the way to the Dirac signal. For those unfamiliar, the Dirac signal is a super short burst where all frequencies are more or less equally present. It almost sounds like a click,and it’s super useful for exciting filters or creating impulse responses.

I dropped an EQ+ onto a track and demonstrated how this impulse can “ping” any resonant EQ frequency band, giving you surprisingly percussive results. But manually dialing all frequencies is a hassle. The solution? The Grid. This is where Bitwig shines!

So, instead of EQ+, I loaded up an FX Grid and used an XP (experiment) filter, set to a default frequency (C3), with high resonance. Passing the Dirac pulse through it, I got those “zappy,” percussive filter sounds. Even better, I used voice stacking,setting grid voices to three or more,and added pitch modulation for each voice to spread those peaks across different frequencies. To automate this, I set up random modulation (using dice and trigger modules) linked to the pitch. Each time the trigger fires, you get a new set of random, peaky frequencies.

But just random notes can be musically chaotic. So, I added pitch quantization, restricting those filter frequencies to a musical scale (like G# minor), making the resulting bursts sound melodic, not just noise.

I took it further by making the whole process audio-reactive: instead of using a manual trigger, I set up a transient detector (using an envelope follower after the audio input) so every time there’s a new burst of sound, it automatically triggers a refresh of the random frequency “stack.” This lets me process all sorts of input material (not just test clicks) in real time.

However, a limitation was that these transient events didn’t necessarily sync to my project’s BPM. To solve this, I implemented on-the-fly quantization using a recorder and a clock quantizer linked to the beat grid. Now, whenever a transient was detected, I’d “record” the next bit of audio into a buffer, then delay its playback until the next 16th note grid division, keeping everything perfectly in time with the song. The quantizer and trigger modules handled all this internally, requiring only a handful of grid modules.

As icing on the cake, I explored deeper sound design, stacking even more voices (e.g., six), offsetting trigger/playback times per voice (for staggered, layered effects), and experimenting with extra delays, reverbs, and spread control per voice. All this was still built around a single Dirac pulse,the most minimal impulse possible! The beauty of this approach is that you can easily swap in field recordings, mic input, or environmental sounds (like rain, clicks, or pops) as your trigger source, and the system just works, turning them into rhythmic, musical events aligned to your grid/scale of choice.

Throughout the walkthrough, I labeled main grid sections for clarity: transient detection, frequency randomization, pitch quantization, etc. The key takeaway here is how much power you get from a handful of grid modules, especially when combined with Bitwig’s voice stacking and modulation system.

I closed by emphasizing how much fun and potential the Grid has in Bitwig Studio,one of the biggest reasons I recommend Bitwig. While the Grid hasn’t received major updates lately, it’s still an absolute powerhouse for creative sound design. I encouraged viewers to experiment with the ideas themselves, promised to upload the preset to GitHub (for anyone who wanted a starting point instead of building from scratch), and wrapped up with a request to like and subscribe.

That’s the full rundown! Give it a shot this weekend,I think you’ll find yourself making weird and wonderful, musically synced percussion out of just about anything. See you next time!

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] Yo, folks, welcome back. I want to show you a nice party trick for the weekend inside of Bitwig studio
[00:00:05] It's maybe also a testament of why Bitwig is great and what kind of things you can achieve in a very short time
[00:00:11] It's not complicated here. I go into Bitwig completely fresh project and we're gonna load up here a test tone and
[00:00:20] Inside of the test tone we have different sounds we can choose from sign try square
[00:00:27] Saw and so on and now I just want to use here the Dirac signal and this is usually used for
[00:00:33] creating impulse responses. It's a very
[00:00:36] short burst of sound
[00:00:39] Where all the frequencies are kind of equal
[00:00:43] Sounds like this
[00:00:47] Right, it's it's very short, but it's very nice to excite filters
[00:00:54] so let's say we have an EQ plus here we can just take the signal and
[00:00:58] Create some kind of very resonant frequencies here
[00:01:04] Just some random stuff
[00:01:07] And with this you can create percussions basically, but here the filter is kind of not, you know
[00:01:24] You have to dial in all the frequencies
[00:01:26] by hand
[00:01:28] So we can just take the grid for this and maybe I just put here a peak limiter on the master
[00:01:35] Just in case so instead of using here the EQ plus and putting in some manual frequencies
[00:01:41] We just take an FX grid and
[00:01:43] Here we can do the same thing. We don't have an EQ in here, but we can use for instance an XP filter
[00:01:52] So I feel like this and then put this here on the default frequency
[00:01:58] Which is C3 and then crank up here the resonance and we get kind of similar similar things
[00:02:04] Let me put this up here
[00:02:08] Maybe you have to make this here a bit louder
[00:02:13] Or maybe we take here
[00:02:20] a peak
[00:02:22] Maybe a band pass
[00:02:31] So you get the idea right
[00:02:37] So at the moment we just have one
[00:02:40] peaking frequency. So what I usually do is then I use a
[00:02:44] Pitch which gives us some kind of note
[00:02:47] So here it's C3 and we just can feed this into the XP filter and
[00:02:52] Crank up here this amount knob and maybe pull this down because we don't want to influence this filter with the keyboard
[00:03:00] accidentally
[00:03:02] So this one just brings the frequency then if you have to see at the default frequency
[00:03:07] This brings it up to C3 so the to the frequency of C3 should sound already different
[00:03:17] Yeah, it brings it to the frequency and then we can do like voice stacking here. So we do three voice decks and
[00:03:25] We then maybe use the stack modulator or maybe we use let's say a dice and
[00:03:34] a trigger and
[00:03:39] We basically have this already three times now because we have your voice decking on three and then we kept can press trigger
[00:03:47] Here and we have in all three layers. We have a different
[00:03:51] Random number here from zero to one. So we use a modulator modulator here and we modulate
[00:03:57] Yeah, the pitch maybe by let's say 12 semitones or 24 semitones two octaves basically
[00:04:06] Around that. It's not important. So we hit this and now we have three frequencies picking
[00:04:11] So every time we press trigger we get a random
[00:04:26] Three random frequencies more or less we can increase this here of course to six frequencies
[00:04:34] So
[00:04:36] What you can do then is we can
[00:04:49] Hook up a pitch quantize here after the pitch now because we kind of modulate this here in a random way
[00:04:57] Right, we press dice we get a random value and then we modulate this here by random amounts
[00:05:03] And we want to have all these frequencies inside of a scale. So here it's the shop minor
[00:05:08] So this sounds more musical in a way
[00:05:11] So it's still a bit boring and
[00:05:34] The idea here is instead of pressing actually trigger
[00:05:40] Manually I want to trigger this with an audio signal, right? So we can do this
[00:05:44] Inside of the grid. Maybe I zoom out here a bit more. We can do this with an envelope follower
[00:05:52] So we follow the audio signal
[00:05:56] Maybe the rise time goes down. Maybe this goes up something like this
[00:06:01] You can already see we have multiple voices here. So this is basically on all of these layers on six layers at the same time
[00:06:10] So with this we go then into let's say a delay
[00:06:15] We take the same signal delay it by a few milliseconds, maybe 30 milliseconds and we just subtract
[00:06:23] The follower signal from the delayed signal and use a seal which just
[00:06:32] Brings up all the values rounds up to the next upper
[00:06:36] Integer which is one then which gives us some kind of trigger. So let's use an oscilloscope here, maybe
[00:06:43] Put this here
[00:06:47] And let's use you the follower signal
[00:06:51] So we should get a trigger from this
[00:07:01] Maybe use a different color
[00:07:03] Maybe all voices. Yeah, you can see it barely there down. This is basically the trigger we get all the audio signal
[00:07:15] We analyze its very short burst of audio
[00:07:17] But we can extract a trigger from that pretty easily
[00:07:22] Maybe make this a bit shorter, yeah
[00:07:26] So with this then we can
[00:07:31] Trigger instead of triggering this manually here so we can just remove this
[00:07:36] whoops we
[00:07:39] Trigger the dice we get the random value on each of these layers and then we
[00:07:45] Randomly change the pitch so every time we get now an audio signal in we detect the trigger
[00:07:52] We randomized the pitch for the filter
[00:07:55] So
[00:07:57] This is kind of already pretty dope in my opinion because you get random sounds or random melodies or different
[00:08:19] Yeah, random peaking frequencies
[00:08:24] But we can take this a bit further
[00:08:26] maybe
[00:08:29] Make here this a bit more orderly and so I say
[00:08:32] to have a label here
[00:08:35] So we can say this is transient detection
[00:08:43] This is
[00:08:49] Frequency randomization
[00:08:53] This modulates this here. This is
[00:08:56] Pitch quantization, I actually don't need to label this and then we just take the audio signal and yeah
[00:09:06] Resonate here with this filter at this position
[00:09:09] Okay, so that's not all
[00:09:14] We can take this further
[00:09:17] So another problem is that the test tone here has a certain frequency and this is of course not aligning
[00:09:25] With the with the transport BPM, right?
[00:09:30] so here the thing is already on so you can hear the
[00:09:35] Metronome in the background
[00:09:44] Right, so it's not matching the BPM of the track. So we can do something goofy. We can implement some kind of
[00:09:53] live audio
[00:09:56] Quantize quantization and we do this by
[00:10:00] using a recorder and
[00:10:03] We record the audio signal, right? We record the incoming audio signal
[00:10:09] But only when we receive a trigger so the transit
[00:10:14] Detection here gives us a trigger because it detects. Oh, there's an audio signal peak coming in and then we say to the recorder
[00:10:22] let's record this and
[00:10:24] We want to record this for a long period of time. So we use a gate length here. Maybe let's say, I don't know
[00:10:33] 100 milliseconds or something like this it depends
[00:10:38] What kind of signals you want to
[00:10:40] Record because remember we just detect the first transient of the sound
[00:10:46] But the sound also has some kind of tail some ringing out, right? And we also want to record this so
[00:10:53] This basically decides how much of the tail you want to record
[00:10:58] So this should already work
[00:11:01] And then we take the output of this and go into the filter
[00:11:05] But the playback here is now something we want to
[00:11:09] Quantize or kind of synchronize
[00:11:14] So we can use a trigger here or triggers module which sends out
[00:11:19] four triggers for each bar
[00:11:22] So we can do this
[00:11:35] Maybe it's too long here, I don't know
[00:11:37] So we can kind of delay the signal
[00:12:04] But what I want to do is I want to use this you're more like a clock so I have 16 triggers for each bar
[00:12:11] Which is 16 nodes?
[00:12:14] And then I use a clock one tizer here, and I use this as a clock
[00:12:18] So then we use the trigger signal here coming from the transient detection also to trigger basically here the recorder
[00:12:29] But we delay the signal until the next 16 node is appearing so we kind of quantize the audio in a way
[00:12:37] So this is the original input signal here are still Dirac signal going into the FX grid
[00:13:07] it's pitch quantized it's
[00:13:09] timing quantized or
[00:13:12] rhythmically quantized and
[00:13:16] We have random
[00:13:18] resonating frequencies inside of a scale
[00:13:22] With the filter we can also change it a bit of course or something else
[00:13:34] Yeah, maybe the peak is not not the best for this
[00:13:37] So now
[00:13:45] There's also something uninteresting because all the triggers happen at the same time, so we could technically just delay
[00:13:53] the triggering on each layer kind of
[00:13:57] differently
[00:13:59] So maybe use a long delay here
[00:14:02] Let's put this in here. This is fourth node. This is eight node. This is 16 node
[00:14:10] So this doesn't work because we don't record in the right time
[00:14:17] Maybe do this
[00:14:22] Yeah, and then we use maybe a stack stack spread here
[00:14:31] So each voice gets then a different delay time
[00:14:34] With a free verb
[00:14:50] And delay
[00:14:59] Right and you can play around with this in all kinds of different ways
[00:15:02] You maybe you can increase here the modulation strength for the pitch
[00:15:07] And to remember there's no sound creation or sound source in here, it's all coming from this small little Dirac signal
[00:15:24] And
[00:15:26] When you slow this down
[00:15:35] You get interesting rhythmically rhythmic effects because it tries to quantize this to a 16 node bridge here and you maybe get some uneven
[00:15:50] Clicks
[00:15:54] And
[00:15:56] It's kind of synchronized here to the grid to the BBM cred
[00:16:22] And also maybe switch this to a song let's let's try this
[00:16:25] Maybe any cue before that
[00:16:38] So
[00:16:40] So I want to show you this here
[00:17:06] How easy it is actually in the grid if you know if you know your way around the grid
[00:17:11] You can do transient detection triggers some dyes with that get some random values
[00:17:17] Modulate the frequency with this so you get random resonating frequencies
[00:17:22] Um, the frequencies are actually a quanta pitch quantized here to scale you can
[00:17:28] Synchronize or rhythmically quantize here also the sound coming in with the recorder
[00:17:34] So you basically record into a buffer and then you delay the buffer playback until something happens in the beat grid
[00:17:40] So you can do so much stuff here and it's just a few modules, right? And we also use here the
[00:17:47] Voice stacking things we have six voices. So this is basically six times on different layers with different values on each layer
[00:17:56] different
[00:17:58] random
[00:18:00] Synchronizing frequencies, you know different delays and so on it's so easy and it's so fun to play around with this and I just
[00:18:07] Bring in here some kind of
[00:18:10] Dirac signal, which is very simple
[00:18:12] But you can also just use some field recordings with some clicks and pops in there or maybe use her microphone as an input
[00:18:20] or I don't know
[00:18:23] Everything you can imagine maybe rain sounds
[00:18:26] and then
[00:18:27] Just layer it and use the mix knob here and
[00:18:30] Put it on top and make it more musical in a way
[00:18:34] So my opinion the grid is still the king for this
[00:18:38] And it's one of the main reasons why you maybe want to buy bitwig studio in my opinion
[00:18:46] And sadly the grid wasn't really extended in a certain way in the last few years
[00:18:54] I'm sure there are some new modules here and there over the years and
[00:18:57] Maybe the note grid was new
[00:19:00] but
[00:19:02] It it's kind of the the same thing for a few years now and I just can't imagine how
[00:19:08] big this will become when they finally extend the grid in certain ways
[00:19:14] anyway
[00:19:16] That's it for the for this video. Maybe you want to try out this on the weekend. I think it's a
[00:19:23] It's a great party trick
[00:19:25] It's fun to do and you can feed all kinds of different audio signals into the grid and you get different outcomes
[00:19:32] Okay, maybe I put this here also in the github if you want to if you don't want to replicate this
[00:19:38] If you just want to download this of course, then you can do this for free
[00:19:42] Leave a like leave a subscription. See you next day next in the next video. Bye
[00:19:48] Bye.
[00:19:49] (slurping)