Bitwig Grid Resynthesis: How to Recreate Any Kick Drum

[00:00:00] Yo, folks. Welcome back. I know most of you are waiting for Bitwig 6 to drop or at least
[00:00:05] for some kind of an announcement when Bitwig Studio 6 will drop. But it's not here yet.
[00:00:10] It's probably soon. It's probably any minute now. But in the meantime, we still have to
[00:00:15] live our lives. We still have to make music. The show must go on, right? And that's exactly
[00:00:22] the topic of this video. We want to make some music in Bitwig. So I want to switch to Bitwig
[00:00:27] here. It's completely empty at the moment. And yesterday, I made some beats. And I had
[00:00:33] some kind of drum loop here. I choose a random one here without some ... Let's use this one
[00:00:43] here because there is no hi-hat on top. So we drag this into Bitwig here. And we want
[00:00:49] to extract only the kick drum for now. So let's bounce this. Post-fader, 32-bits. Okay.
[00:00:57] So we have a kick drum. Pretty nice. And we want to resynthesize this kick drum inside
[00:01:05] of the grid. But not just ... We want to make it precisely the same thing, polygrid. So we
[00:01:13] go in here. And then we use the kick drum. We just bounced here. Maybe you really named
[00:01:20] this to kick. Just drag it in. And then we can use here, instead of the sine oscillator,
[00:01:27] we can use the sampler. And then use the keyboard. And we want to disable, of course, keytracking
[00:01:36] here. So we have the initial original pitch. And we also can delete here this one. So inside
[00:01:45] of the grid, we want to resynthesize now the kick drum. And we want to make it precise.
[00:01:53] So what I do sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes it's a very neat trick, is to
[00:01:58] extract actually here the pitch envelope and also the amplitude envelope. And we start
[00:02:04] here first with the pitch envelope. And I do this sometimes with the filter here. And
[00:02:09] I use a very steep one, high pass 8. And I want to hear only the top, top noise layer
[00:02:18] of the kick drum. Right here, you can hear it starts, basically it's the beginning of
[00:02:23] the pitch stop of the sine of the fundamental. But this is too much, maybe here. And then
[00:02:30] we switch this to low pass instead of high pass. So now we can only hear the bottom or
[00:02:38] the sign with the pitch drop in there. So now we extract the pitch envelope by using
[00:02:46] a zero crossing small tool. And this kind of works surprisingly well, I have to say. So
[00:02:53] we go into this, and we also go into an oscilloscope, because we want to visualize what's going
[00:02:59] on there. You can see here the pitch coming in, maybe you make this a bit slower. So there's
[00:03:10] all kinds of noise coming here from the filter, probably if I disable this here. So this noise
[00:03:18] is coming from the filter. Anyway, we want to use then a gate input here, which gives
[00:03:23] us one, every time we press a note on the keyboard. So you can see here, this is the
[00:03:33] pitch drop of the kick drum. And it's pretty much always the same. It looks kind of stepped,
[00:03:43] because it tries to pitch track here this with the zero crossing. So you can see here,
[00:03:51] this is basically, so this is a crossing here, right? This is a zero crossing from here to
[00:03:54] here, it measures the distance on every cycle, the distance, or the length, the wavelength
[00:04:03] is a bit different because the pitch changes all the time. So that's what you get here with
[00:04:08] this kind of stepped result. Anyway, so this is the pitch drop here. Maybe we also use
[00:04:18] here a note in there. So we can loop this a bit faster. Maybe go like this. Yeah, this
[00:04:33] is okay. Then we can, I think we can remove here the noise a bit by just bringing this
[00:04:41] down, but it's still giving you values here. It doesn't really matter. Now we want to extract
[00:04:50] more or less the amplitude envelope. We can do this with an envelope follower here, this
[00:04:57] one, very fast rise time and also your default time, we can tweak this to our liking. Then
[00:05:07] we go also here into an oscilloscope. We also trigger this here with the gate. So we want
[00:05:12] to freeze or sample and hold basically the value. So now we have here the amplitude envelope,
[00:05:20] and you can see we have some very small little things in there, but we can tweak this with
[00:05:29] a default time. You can smooth it out, right? So we can decide if you want to have every
[00:05:40] small little cycle peak in there or if you just want to smooth it out. I prefer to have
[00:05:48] it here at this point. That's kind of nice. So now that we have this, we want to just
[00:05:56] test this if this actually makes sense. So we use a sine oscillator and we use maybe,
[00:06:07] what do we use? Maybe segments for now. Connect your segments. We don't want to loop this
[00:06:15] and we just make here a very basic shape and it's maybe eight notes, I don't know. And
[00:06:25] then we disconnect here this and we put this here. So now we have something like this.
[00:06:33] It's very uninteresting, but now we use here the zero crossings output for the pitch input
[00:06:40] of the sine. And we probably want to fake here also the pitch envelope, the amplitude
[00:06:47] envelope by just using a multiply, then using the output of the follower for the multiply.
[00:06:55] So this is basically our envelope here. Instead of using segments, we're using the output
[00:07:00] here, the signal of this follower to amp up the signal or bring the gain back down, right?
[00:07:07] So let's try out the sounds. It almost sounds like the old thing. Maybe we use here a select
[00:07:19] and the button so we can compare two signals. So this is our synthesized thing, right? So
[00:07:38] there's a bit of difference there, but it's just probably because of distortion on top
[00:07:47] of this original sound distortion with some noise on top. I would say my kick drum even
[00:07:58] sounds better. So this one is much cleaner, right? We have some artifacts here at the
[00:08:05] end, but that's not a problem for now. So we can now kind of recent the size already
[00:08:14] the drum, but we have to use the sample as some kind of source for the data of the pitch
[00:08:22] and the amplitude envelope. And this is not something I want to do. I just don't want
[00:08:27] to save this patch as a preset and keep the sample in there. Why makes no sense because
[00:08:34] then you can just save the sample and use the sample instead of recent the sizing it.
[00:08:39] So what I do then is I try to mimic what the pitch envelope does and also the amplitude
[00:08:46] envelope does. And I do this by using also a segment here, something like this. And I
[00:08:56] turn the looping off and I also switch instead of timing, I switch to maybe seconds, right?
[00:09:04] So seconds is actually not bound to the BPM. So when you use your half note and so on,
[00:09:11] the half note length changes when you change the BPM setting, which is not what you want.
[00:09:15] You want to have the kick drum sounding always the same, no matter what kind of BPM you set
[00:09:22] here in Bitwig. So I'm going for these unbound kind of units, which is seconds milliseconds
[00:09:30] and so on. So seconds would be maybe enough. And I also want to use a pitch, a pitch module
[00:09:41] here. And yeah, let's hit your phone moment. Then we go basically with this into the sign
[00:09:49] here. And then we want to use an add. And you want to add the segments to it. But for
[00:09:57] now, I just give you an idea why I do this. So I go in here. And you can see the second
[00:10:03] line here. This is our initial pitch stop there. And this is our liner. So it's perfectly
[00:10:09] in the middle because it's C3 and C3 is zero and zero is exactly in the middle of the oscilloscope.
[00:10:16] So now I hit play here and let this loop for a moment. And I bring down the output here
[00:10:23] of the polygrid. So we just have a bit of room to talk. So what I want to do now is
[00:10:30] I want to bring down here the pitch to the lowest point here, which is the kind of the
[00:10:38] fundamental of the original kick drum, right? It pitches down to an fundamental pitch. So
[00:10:44] in this year, basically this pitch down there. So what I do then is I just pull down here
[00:10:50] the thing until we hit the floor there. So it's C0, maybe D. It's probably D is C0, right?
[00:11:02] So this is the lowest point of this kick drum here. So we match this. And then again, like
[00:11:10] I said, I'm using add. And I add the segments to it. And I also use an attenuator. And then
[00:11:20] I create here a basic pitch drop, something like this. So now you can see, maybe give
[00:11:29] us a different color, maybe blue. So you can see in yellow here, more or less our original
[00:11:36] pitch drop. And in blue, you can see our static segments thing. So we have defined basically
[00:11:47] our root pitch here. If I go down, it goes down to the root pitch. And then with attenuate,
[00:11:54] I'm changing this until I hit the highest point in the pitch drop, which is here, right?
[00:12:02] So maybe make this a bit bigger zoom in a bit more. And we try to reach the highest point,
[00:12:12] which is maybe there. So all we have to do now is we have to shape this one here until
[00:12:23] it kind of mimics what this kind of shape does. It sounds harder than it is. So we can
[00:12:34] hold down shift here so the snapping is disabled. So here there's probably a longer part where
[00:12:41] this pitches. So I just put in a note there. Put this there. It's pretty indirect, but
[00:12:55] we kind of can manage it. So this is here probably too long. Let's go down. Yeah, that's
[00:13:07] probably better to use something like this first. So that's better. Paint in some kind
[00:13:16] of simple curve here first, until the end. And then you pull down this here seconds.
[00:13:25] So the length of this whole envelope and until you match basically the end of the pitch drop.
[00:13:32] So it's probably easier then. So now we can put in here stuff in between. Something like
[00:13:42] this there. Yeah, it's a bit of small work, but it helps. Okay, so this would be maybe
[00:14:04] my pitch drop. Maybe this would be better here. Okay, something like this. So this would be
[00:14:18] my pitch drop here for this kind of kick drum. Let's see how it sounds. It's kind of the
[00:14:34] same thing. So now you can see we just recreated here the pitch drop with the segments thing
[00:14:40] pretty easily because we can first set up the boundaries. So the top part of the highest
[00:14:50] pitch and the lowest pitch. And then we nail here the length of the kick drum with the
[00:14:55] pitch envelope. And then we bringing us some things in between to mimic kind of this curve.
[00:15:02] And then you get kind of the same sound, the same pitch drop from it. So now with this,
[00:15:09] we can completely remove this first thing here and just move on to the amplitude follower
[00:15:18] here. And we can do the same thing basically here, right? So maybe use here, attenuate.
[00:15:30] And we can also disable here the smoothing, by the way, here this kind of prequot if you
[00:15:36] want to have a different sound. So with this disabled, it's kind of, you know, not smoothed
[00:15:41] out. But for me, it sounds kind of the same. So let's nail this one here. So attenuate
[00:15:49] brings down the whole thing. Okay, like this. And then we maybe try to nail here the timing.
[00:16:01] So this is seconds. This too short. Maybe here. Then we put this there. And maybe there's
[00:16:16] in the beginning, there's some kind of, it's kind of the same thing, right? Yeah, for me,
[00:16:26] it looks kind of the same. Okay, so now we have this thing here happening, we can, we
[00:16:34] have an attenuate. Yes, we change the overall loudness. So what you can do is you can just
[00:16:40] this, this, you know, this disconnect this here and then maybe use the separate. Let's
[00:16:49] do something like this. And then go in here. Let's see how this sounds. Or if you don't
[00:17:05] want to have this attenuate in here, you can just delete this and connect these two. But
[00:17:12] then the overall loudness is different because the segment goes all the way up, right? Nice.
[00:17:24] So with this, we can now completely remove all of this. It's just analyzing. And you
[00:17:32] can disable this, disconnect this and we have a very simple pitch drop here. We have an
[00:17:40] amplitude envelope and we kind of recreated the original kick drum. We can also here enable
[00:17:47] this kind of thing to retrigger the science. So it starts at the same position every time.
[00:17:54] But I would argue if you want to use this kick drum in some something like a dance floor
[00:17:59] tune, you have to resample it. So you have every time the same sample. But then you could
[00:18:07] also use the original sample, I guess. But here you can at least tweak it. You can shape
[00:18:13] the amplitude envelope. You can make the pitch envelope a bit different and so on. So you
[00:18:18] can recent size it in a different way. Okay, so the next thing I would do is to put some
[00:18:29] kind of noise layer on top. And usually people go for white. So for this noise, your white
[00:18:36] noise or pink noise. But this noise generator here generates noise. That's why it's a noise
[00:18:43] generator, but you get every time a bit different kind of noise. So what you want is basically
[00:18:50] you want to have the same noise every trigger. So it sounds like the same kick drum all the
[00:18:56] time, but maybe you don't want that. But here I give you an example. Mixer put this in the
[00:19:06] second here. And also like a simple envelope, maybe a high pass. Something like this. Yeah,
[00:19:21] let's go up with this.
[00:19:51] So that's something you can use. Or what I do sometimes is I use a sampler. And I have
[00:20:00] here some kind of noise. Noise samples, pink noise, white noise, for instance. So like
[00:20:11] this I sampled here from zero. And that's a noise sample. And it's always the same, right?
[00:20:16] It's the same sample. So you can go in here and then use this. So that's maybe something
[00:20:31] you want to put on top. Or you can also instead of using here a separate amplitude envelope,
[00:20:38] you can also use a multiplier and then go in here and maybe using attenuates, we can
[00:20:49] change the strength of the modulation. So let's see how this sounds. And yeah, the benefit
[00:21:02] of using a sample, of course, here is that you can change the pitch of the sample. So
[00:21:22] many possibilities. But that's how I would do these things. But actually, let's go here
[00:21:31] for noise. And replace this. Yeah, I can. Let's go for this kind of solution here. With
[00:21:41] a noise on top, maybe in the post FX part here, let's use, I don't know, peak limiter
[00:21:51] or maybe a clipper. And with this we can perfectly replace probably, let's bring this back in.
[00:22:13] Let's loop this here for a moment. What's this one on 74. Okay. That's too fast. Slice. So
[00:22:28] let's delete here actually our kick drum. So there's a noise layer on top missing, but
[00:22:37] also here these kick drums have, I think, a hi-hat on top. Okay. Also here, let's remove
[00:22:50] this. Maybe you can steal this kind of hi-hat here and put it there like this. It's probably
[00:23:07] better. Can almost hear no difference at all. So this is what I do sometimes to read synthesize
[00:23:17] kick drums I like. And then I save this as a preset and every time I want to make a track
[00:23:23] instead of loading in a sample, I load in basically this patch and then I can tweak
[00:23:28] this patch to my bass sound or to my other sounds or whatever. And I've always basically
[00:23:35] a very tweakable, high definition sound I can use. Let's loop this here for this part.
[00:23:52] Yeah, there's a bit of different noise on top, but it's the same pitch shop. Yeah, and
[00:24:05] then you save it here as, let's say, I have actually some multiple presets of this. Dnb.
[00:24:16] You can see a lot of stuff I recent the size. I think this is Dnb kick 14. Dnb kick. I show
[00:24:28] you some of my other ones. Maybe I put this on my Patreon, I have no idea. That's the
[00:24:35] kick drum, that's the kick drum. Digital. Okay. Nice. So this is one of my kick drums
[00:24:50] here. Then we have search for Dnb kick 13. This is a snare sound, right? It's all kind
[00:25:09] of synthesized in the in the grid here, just a noise sample, a bit of sign and some kind
[00:25:19] of clip by the end, some very basic kick drum. Oh, that's very stereo. Oh, this is actually
[00:25:35] this Dnb generator is actually generating kick snare and hi-hats in the pattern. So a lot
[00:25:45] of different stuff here I'm using. Maybe I put this at some point on my Patreon. I have
[00:25:50] no idea if people are interested in this. Yeah, many different sounding kick drums. And yeah,
[00:26:06] that's how I do it. Yeah, maybe let's use it a snare sound for a moment. Put it here,
[00:26:13] and here. Okay, and here I use my kick we just generated, 14. And we just clone this
[00:26:29] part or add here the hi-hat. Okay, use that. Just copy that, delete this. Let's see all
[00:26:41] the sounds. Put this in a group. I really like to use this free plug in called squash for
[00:27:01] some reason. It's a four band OTT, whatever, it's completely free. Right, this is the drum
[00:27:27] loop and the rest is synthesized. And here you can go in and can say I want to have a
[00:27:35] different noise layer. So this is the benefit of re-synthesizing this because I can already
[00:27:58] see the comments why don't you use just samples, right? So the idea is I don't have 3000 samples
[00:28:05] on hard drive, I just have a few presets with sounds I like, and then I can tweak it and
[00:28:10] I can resample it or bounce it down to audio and then I have a consistent result. So this
[00:28:16] is how I do sometimes these kind of drum sounds or re-synthesizing kick drums I really like
[00:28:22] from other tunes often drum loops or whatever. And I also did recently some kind of kick
[00:28:30] drum for some of my Patreons here, this one. And this is out of some kind of minimal techno
[00:28:38] tune and you wanted to recreate this kick drum. And I did the same thing, basically, I sampled
[00:28:47] the kick drum from the tune and I analyzed the pitch envelope and also the amplitude
[00:28:53] envelope and then you get this kind of result from it. Yeah, I put probably some of my drum
[00:29:02] sounds on Patreon and I hope you liked the video. Let me know what you think, maybe you
[00:29:07] do this for yourself already, maybe it's a known trick and I'm the last one discovering
[00:29:12] this, but the zero crossing module is pretty dope for analyzing the pitch envelope of samples.
[00:29:22] That's it, thanks for watching and I hope we don't have to wait much longer for Bitwig
[00:29:29] 6, it's coming soon, any minute now, okay. Yeah, thanks for watching, see you in the
[00:29:35] next video, bye.
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