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Bitwig 6 Alias Clips - Workflow, Limitations & Opportunities

Tutorial | Sep 09, 2025

This video explores the alias clip feature in Bitwig, which allows users to copy and link clips so that changes to one affect all linked versions, but highlights potential issues with accidental changes in complex projects. The presenter appreciates the flexibility of being able to alter container properties like length or start position without changing the clip's contents and sees potential if alias clips could span across different tracks. They suggest improvements such as more inspector controls and cross-track aliasing, but personally prefer working with unique clips rather than relying heavily on the alias feature.

You can watch the Video on Youtube

Short Overview

In this video, I discuss the new alias clip feature in Bitwig Studio, which lets you link clips together so that changing one updates all linked copies. While I see the appeal of keeping multiple instances synchronized, I personally prefer working with different clips throughout my projects for more variety. I point out some limitations, like alias clips only working on the same track, and share ideas on how this feature could become more versatile, such as letting us use it across different tracks and offering more flexibility in the inspector panel. Overall, I see potential in the alias system, but I mostly stick to copying and editing clips individually.

Introduction to Alias Clips in Bitwig Studio

In this video, I discuss the concept of alias clips in Bitwig Studio, a feature that has sparked some conversation and mixed feelings in the music production community. Throughout the video, I repeatedly use the word "clip," as alias clips revolve around how clips are copied, linked, and edited within a project.

What Are Alias Clips?

Alias clips are essentially linked copies of a single source clip. When you create a normal clip in Bitwig and duplicate it, you typically end up with independent clips that can be edited separately. However, with alias clips, any change you make to one is mirrored in every other alias of that same clip, no matter where they occur on the same track.

Visually, alias clips are marked with a paperclip icon, helping you spot their linked nature. This means you have one set of musical data appearing in multiple locations, but it truly exists only once under the hood. Change the contents in any of the linked aliases, and the change is instantly reflected in all others.

Benefits and Appeal of Alias Clips

There is a clear appeal in the alias clips feature. If you want to keep material consistent across a project, alias clips mean you only need to edit a melody or pattern in one place for it to update everywhere. This is useful when you have certain motifs, riffs, or sequences that recur throughout your arrangement and you want them to always stay in sync.

Challenges and Cautions with Alias Clips

However, this feature comes with its own set of challenges. In large, complex projects filled with many clips, it can be easy to lose track of which clips are linked. Accidentally editing a clip can have wide-reaching effects you might not immediately notice, altering musical sequences elsewhere in the project. This introduces a need to micromanage alias clips and be cautious when editing, so you do not unknowingly change the overall composition.

Manipulating Alias Clips: What You Can and Cannot Do

While alias clips share their core contents, you can still manipulate their containers independently. This means you can adjust the start position, length, and shuffle of each alias individual, allowing you to create different rhythmic effects or polyrhythms with the same underlying musical content. For example, you can have the same phrase repeating at different lengths to create complex patterns.

However, if you change the actual musical content like notes, velocities, or transpositions inside an alias clip, all linked alias clips reflect those changes. This is both a power and a pitfall. If you want variation, you have to make a unique copy instead.

Limitation: Alias Clips Only Work on the Same Track

A significant limitation I noted is that alias clips currently only work on the same track. Once you drag an alias clip to another track, it loses its alias status and becomes an independent clip. This limits the feature's flexibility, as many users might want to share a motif or melody across several instrument tracks, each with its own sound, but keep the core phrase linked.

Potential Improvements and Creative Opportunities

I see a lot of untapped potential in the alias clip system. Allowing alias clips to be distributed across multiple tracks, not just a single one, would open up many creative avenues. For example, you could develop a melody in one clip, then reuse and repurpose sections of it for a bassline or harmony on other tracks, with the ability to transpose or filter notes as needed.

It would also be beneficial if more properties could be adjusted per instance from the inspector panel, such as transposition, without altering every other alias. This would give users more nuanced control and encourage alias clip use for creative tasks such as creating layered synth sounds or intricate polyrhythms.

Making Aliases Unique or Merging Clips

For those times when you want an alias to break from the group and become independent, Bitwig lets you make an alias unique. You can merge patterns or separate an alias from its source, giving you a standard clip that is no longer linked to its siblings.

Personal Perspective and Usage

In my own workflow, I tend to favor copying clips and making unique variations, so I do not rely heavily on alias clips. I prefer having many iterations of a musical idea throughout my projects so each location can develop naturally and independently. However, I understand the potential and appeal of alias clips for others, especially if the system were expanded.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

To sum up, alias clips in Bitwig Studio offer a powerful but nuanced way to manage repeated musical material. While they present great opportunities for keeping ideas coherent and editable from any instance, their limitations and risks in project complexity require careful management. Improvements such as allowing cross-track aliases and more local inspector controls would make them even more powerful and flexible.

If you have thoughts or feedback about the alias feature, or ideas on how you would like to use it, share them in the comments. Thanks for following along with my deep dive into this topic.

Full Video Transcription

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by Whisper, 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.

Click to expand Transcription

[00:00:00] Hey folks, welcome back, so in this video I'll say probably the word clip a lot because it's about alias clips and when you take a clip and you copy these clips around you have copied clips and then you say this is now an alias clip and you have your paper clip on your alias clip and when you change one clip you also change the other clip, so it's basically one clip just in different places.
[00:00:21] So this is the alias clip feature basically in a nutshell, so there are some problems and also some things that maybe could change and I see maybe some opportunities there, so I want to show you this here in Bitwig.
[00:00:35] So in Bitwig here just let us create just some kind of new audio clip or a note clip here by double clicking and of course it opens up here the note editor which I don't want to, so I close it back down and then we open up here some kind of synthesizer, polymer synthesizer and we also probably want to use a convolutionary verb and we want to use a delay just to make it more pleasant to the ears when I play some notes inside of the clip.
[00:01:03] So in here we kind of create some notes, some random ones of course and they are accidentally inside of the scale of the sharp minor for some reason I have no idea why and this is how it sounds very nice and before Bitwig Studio 6 we just could copy this over here right so now we have two different clips and we can change one clip and the other clip stays the same.
[00:01:33] And that's exactly how I like it because I have a lot of clips inside of my projects that just are different.
[00:01:40] I want to have different clips all the time in different places, but for some reason some people really like to have alias clips here with the paper clip now and when you change one clip, you can see the other clip also changes and this works of course if you take this here to different places.
[00:02:00] And when you change this one here, right, all the other clips change and this is kind of cool or it looks cool on paper for me but in reality, let's imagine you have a lot of these clips here inside of your project and your project is, you know, very complex, a lot of clips in there and you just change one clip in a certain position down deep down in your project.
[00:02:28] And then for some reason you have a lot of alias clips in your project and then accidentally you change also sequences in other places you're not aware of at the moment and then you play back the project and then you wonder, this sounds very weird, right.
[00:02:44] So you have to kind of micromanage also here these alias clips because sometimes you can accidentally change sequences in other places you're not currently aware of.
[00:02:57] You have to use some kind of caution I would say, so you don't accidentally do some things.
[00:03:06] But I see the appeal, I see the appeal why people want to have this.
[00:03:11] So here's something I want to show you, not many people are probably aware of, even though these are kind of the same clip, you can still use on the left side here the inspector and can change the start and start.
[00:03:26] Or the length of these clips without changing actually the other clips.
[00:03:31] So we can say I want to have a different length, right.
[00:03:34] You can see it changes here, but the other clip stays the same.
[00:03:38] So this is something where you change the container or the clip container without changing actually the contents, right.
[00:03:46] So we can play something like this here.
[00:03:55] And when you change here this note, it also changes here, but you have a different sequence here.
[00:04:02] So you can still kind of change the sequences, how they behave or how the clips behave without changing the contents.
[00:04:10] In my opinion, there is some a lot of opportunities there, right.
[00:04:15] So you can instantly see all this could be great for pulley rhythms, right.
[00:04:20] Maybe here another instrument track with another polymer on there.
[00:04:23] And then you want to use this same clip here.
[00:04:26] And then you see, oh, now the paper clip is gone.
[00:04:29] Why is that?
[00:04:30] Because these alias clips only work on the same track.
[00:04:34] I don't know if this is intended or maybe they want to change this in the future.
[00:04:39] I could see a lot of potential for this, right.
[00:04:42] So you can say, oh, I have here actually a melody line on my motive, motive of my track.
[00:04:48] It's kind of a nice melody.
[00:04:50] And I just want to use a subsection of this melody on a different track for maybe for the baseline, right.
[00:04:56] I want to pitch this down to octaves, which is not possible here with this.
[00:05:00] So let's make this a make this here.
[00:05:04] Can I actually make this from here pattern merge duplicate patterns here.
[00:05:09] So here we can change the length.
[00:05:12] We can also change the start position.
[00:05:16] We want to do that.
[00:05:18] We can change the length here start position.
[00:05:22] Move this around.
[00:05:24] So I see a lot of potentially a lot of cool usage for this.
[00:05:29] If you ask me if we could put this on different tracks throughout the project.
[00:05:34] So yeah, start, stop, length, you can change.
[00:05:41] I think shuffle we can change.
[00:05:44] Go down then here to nodes and you say, oh, I want to change the velocity.
[00:05:47] Then you change basically everything or all the clips at once.
[00:05:51] Or you want to, you know, transpose this around.
[00:05:55] If you transpose this, you also transpose this.
[00:05:58] So you can work around with the automation, right.
[00:06:02] You put a year transposer in front.
[00:06:05] And then you maybe use here, what's this note transpose?
[00:06:12] I have to use plus button here to get this.
[00:06:14] And then we open the clip.
[00:06:16] I don't want to have this.
[00:06:18] So I close it down and we can change basically in here the note shift, right.
[00:06:23] So we can say.
[00:06:25] Is this actually working?
[00:06:28] No, it's not working.
[00:06:30] We have to open this.
[00:06:32] Okay.
[00:06:34] So here in the clip, we can change the octave.
[00:06:36] Go down one octave maybe in here.
[00:06:39] And in here, we stay on octave zero more or less.
[00:06:43] And then it's just actually working.
[00:06:47] That's not how I intended it, but down is plus one up is minus one.
[00:07:02] Okay, I see.
[00:07:04] So yeah, so you can change with automation here, basically the transposition.
[00:07:08] Transposition would be nice if you could do this here from the inspector panel, right.
[00:07:15] Change it only on the clip without changing all the other clips.
[00:07:19] And then make it maybe possible so you can drag it onto a different track.
[00:07:25] And then you can use it here for the bass, the same motive, right.
[00:07:28] Just two octaves lower.
[00:07:30] And here you can use the full melody for the arp or for the lead sound or whatever.
[00:07:37] So this could be something nice.
[00:07:39] And I could see myself using this instead of how it is now, just having this on one track.
[00:07:47] And then you just copy and clone or alias this around on the same track.
[00:07:51] I probably would don't use it that much because like I said in the beginning,
[00:07:57] I just use different, a lot of different iterations of the same clip all the time throughout my project.
[00:08:06] So I just probably copy and paste and don't use the alias feature that much.
[00:08:11] But it could be great.
[00:08:13] It could be really useful and really nice to have this on different tracks here.
[00:08:17] And also that we would be nice to change here a lot of more things on the left side in the inspector
[00:08:23] without changing the contents of the clip itself.
[00:08:26] So this is basically the alias feature.
[00:08:29] I haven't touched actually this where you can make it unique.
[00:08:34] But yeah, it's basically what it says.
[00:08:36] So we can say, oh, there are two different clips like you can merge these together.
[00:08:41] You can say, I want to make this one here unique, whatever.
[00:08:47] So this is how it kind of works.
[00:08:49] But I actually want to talk about how I want to use this alias system
[00:08:54] or how I see myself using this in the future, maybe.
[00:08:58] So maybe it's an idea.
[00:09:01] Maybe I can change this over the course of the beta.
[00:09:04] Could be great.
[00:09:08] So yeah, let me know in the comments down below what you think about the alias feature.
[00:09:12] Do you want to use it?
[00:09:14] Is it something that you want to see changed?
[00:09:18] Or if you're happy with it, let me know in the comments down below.
[00:09:21] These are kind of my ideas about this.
[00:09:24] And I think that's it for this video.
[00:09:26] Thanks for watching.
[00:09:29] video. Bye.
[00:09:29] [BLANK_AUDIO]