Tags: posts polarity-music Bitwig Physical-Modeling Sound-Design Tutorial Preset

Physical Cymbals with Stock Devices

Tutorial | Nov 29, 2025

This video demonstrates how to create realistic hi-hats, cymbals, and crash sounds in Bitwig Studio using a free native preset based on physical modeling principles, similar to Excite Cymbal plugins. The patch includes features like a stick simulation, dispersion feedback with low delay times, and a resonator made from stacked comb filters, with macros and EQ for versatile sound shaping. The presenter also highlights ways to sample these sounds and mentions alternatives like the open-source Excite plugins and pure data patches for deeper customization.

You can watch the Video on Youtube

Short Overview

Today I explored how to create realistic hi-hat and cymbal sounds in Bitwig Studio using only native devices and some clever physical modeling techniques. I built a free preset that simulates stick impact, dispersion feedback, and resonance, with easy controls for shaping your sound. The patch uses Bitwig’s comp filters in voice stacking mode to create a range of metallic timbres, and you can further tweak the results with built-in EQ and delay modulation. If you want more flexibility, there are also free and open-source plugins like Excite Cymbal that follow similar principles. This setup is simple yet powerful, letting you design your own cymbal samples or experiment with unique electronic textures.

Introduction

Today, I want to share my exploration of creating realistic hi-hat, cymbal, and crash sounds within Bitwig Studio using only a few plug-ins and the principles of physical modeling. After receiving numerous questions inspired by Xeon James’s video on this topic, I was challenged to see how far Bitwig’s native tools could be pushed for this purpose. I developed a free preset, which I'll discuss in detail, detailing the concepts and techniques involved.

Building a Physical Modeling Patch in Bitwig Studio

Basic Setup and Principles

At its core, physical modeling is a form of sound synthesis that aims to emulate real-world acoustic instruments by mathematically simulating the physical properties that produce their sounds. When applied to percussion instruments like cymbals and hi-hats, this involves simulating both the stick striking the surface and the resulting complex vibration and resonance patterns.

In my Bitwig patch, I started with a stick simulation. This component acts as the initial excitation source, like a drumstick hitting a cymbal. By modifying this “stick” sound, you influence the timbre and character of the resulting cymbal sound downstream. Adjustments to the stick's pitch and frequency content have a significant effect on the final sound.

Exciter and EQ

After the stick sound, I introduced an EQ to allow for further adjustment of the exciter’s tonal character. Using an EQ early in the signal chain lets you color the initial energy that gets fed into the feedback and resonator stages, impacting whether you end up with more of a ride cymbal, crash, or other metallic sound.

The Importance of Dispersion Feedback

What is Dispersion?

Dispersion is a crucial aspect of modeling metallic instruments. It refers to the phenomenon where different frequencies travel at different speeds through the material, creating a spreading of sound waves. In digital synthesis, this is often approximated using very short delay lines and modulated all-pass filters.

Achieving Low Latency Feedback in Bitwig

A major technical hurdle in Bitwig Studio is the need for extremely low delay times to create convincing dispersion feedback. Bitwig is not inherently designed for sample-accurate feedback loops, so I had to lower the audio buffer to around 1.3 milliseconds by adjusting the audio settings. This enables the construction of a feedback network with delay and all-pass modulation, mimicking how a cymbal’s vibrations evolve chaotically over time.

Within this feedback loop, delay times and modulation depths are critical. Adjusting these parameters changes the dispersive properties and, in turn, the quality of the cymbal sound, allowing for a huge range of results.

Resonators Using Comb Filters

Modeling Resonance

The final ingredient is the resonator stage. In Bitwig, I utilized a bank of 16 comb filters, distributed and tuned using an internal stacking modulator. This spreads the resonances across a range of frequencies, imitating the complex overtone structure of a real cymbal.

Comb filters are digital filters that create a series of harmonic notches and peaks, very similar to what you find in the transfer function of vibrating metal. By stacking and detuning several of these, a rich and metallic spectrum is built up, providing the characteristic shimmer.

Voice Stacking and Frequency Spreading

Using voice stacking in conjunction with the stack spread modulator makes each instance of the comb filter resonate at a slightly different frequency. The overall effect is a far more realistic reproduction of how a real cymbal or hi-hat resonates in space.

Final Touches and Workflow Recommendations

Static EQ and Further Enhancements

A crucial final step is the use of a static EQ at the end of the chain. This allows you to sculpt the final output, boosting or cutting certain frequencies to emphasize the desired metallic aspects or tame unwanted harshness.

Handling Low Latency Mode

Because Bitwig's low buffer setting is necessary for the feedback network to behave correctly, I recommend only sampling your generated cymbal sounds while in this mode, then switching back to a standard buffer size for regular music production. This workflow is less than ideal but presently unavoidable.

Other Tools and Alternatives

If you prefer not to build such a patch from scratch, there are excellent open-source plug-ins like Excite Cymbal and Excite Snare, which use similar physical modeling techniques. These are available for free or for a small fee for pro features such as audio input for external excitation signals. If you’re familiar with Pure Data or PlugData, you can even download and modify the original synthesis patches.

Conclusion and Future Prospects

This approach demonstrates that it is entirely possible to create complex, physically modeled cymbals and hi-hats natively in Bitwig Studio. With attention to detail in the exciter, feedback, and resonator stages, a wide palette of realistic metallic percussion sounds can be achieved. I hope Bitwig will eventually implement better support for low-latency feedback loops directly within devices, making this workflow smoother.

Let me know if you’d like to see similar patches for snare drums or kick drums. Thanks for following along, and I encourage you to try out the free preset and experiment with these ideas in your own projects.

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 everyone was messaging me today about this video
[00:00:05] from Xeon James about creating realistic hi-hats and symbols and crash sounds in a door
[00:00:12] just with a few plug-ins and using basically physical modeling to create these realistic sounds.
[00:00:18] And people want to know can you do this in Bitwig Studio of course and I try to come up with some
[00:00:25] patch in a very short time and this is here the preset which I want to share with you for free
[00:00:31] of course in the description below. It creates here a stick sound and dispersion feedback and also
[00:00:36] there's here a resonator and maybe you want to also add an EQ here at the end but this is how it
[00:00:43] sounds at the moment. Then you can use here these knobs to change some settings inside of this patch.
[00:00:56] So it's a very easy setup actually. It's the same setup here like in Excite Symbol which are some
[00:01:04] plug-ins and these plug-ins are completely free by the way and they are also open source. So if you
[00:01:10] don't want to use here in the grid patch you can also use this plug-in it sounds like this.
[00:01:15] And these plug-ins here are around for quite some time a few years actually and if you don't want
[00:01:32] to use the free version you can upgrade to Pro and then you have a sidechain input and you can feed
[00:01:37] in any sound possible into this exciter and resonator model here if you want to. There's also
[00:01:44] a snare model for that. It looks exactly the same. So it's also around for years now and also open
[00:01:58] source and I think this is just under the hood it's a pure data patch that you can use and examine
[00:02:04] or maybe just tweak and make some different sounds over it. So this is here the the preset for Bitwig
[00:02:11] Studio completely native. We have here a stick simulation very basic. Actually you can't hear
[00:02:20] anything. Yeah it sounds like this. You can change the stick pitch and everything that you do to the
[00:02:27] stick of course influences how it sounds later down the line when you feed it through all these
[00:02:32] feedbacks and resonators. There's also an EQ in here so you can tweak the exciter a bit in
[00:02:40] different directions. Then we go here into the dispersion feedback. So this one here is the
[00:02:45] critical part because here you need very low delay times for the feedback and this is not really
[00:02:54] possible inside of Bitwig. What you need to do is you need to go to the settings here and go to
[00:03:00] audio and choose a very small plot size. So you can go down to 1.3 milliseconds of latency or
[00:03:09] round trip time or however you want to call it. So you can actually go into a long delay here with
[00:03:16] 1.3 millisecond delay then go through all these effects and then go back into the beginning and
[00:03:22] then you can create here a nice feedback line with some alpars delays in it with delay modulation
[00:03:30] and there also is here the audio rate modulation to change delay which is basically like FM or this
[00:03:36] how is it called dispersion. You just modulate the delay time with the amplitude. So this is
[00:03:45] how it sounds here. Then you take all of this and go into a resonator and in Bitwig I just use
[00:03:55] here the comp filter and I don't use only one comp filter. I actually use 16 comp filters here in a
[00:04:02] voice stack and then I use here a stack spread modulator to actually spread all these frequencies
[00:04:11] apart so you don't just stick on one frequency with the comp filter and of course you can tweak
[00:04:16] this in all kinds of directions and you get always a different sound and at the end here you probably
[00:04:21] also want to have an EQ. Let's use an EQ5 here maybe a bit of low pass filtering there low cut
[00:04:30] filtering there. Okay let's save this here. Okay and then you can play around with this.
[00:04:38] I use here some macros but you can also just go into the patch here and tweak it.
[00:04:49] Everything you do to the stick makes it sound completely different so you can push here some
[00:05:00] low frequencies to get more like a right sound or this type of right sound. So it's completely
[00:05:20] dependent on the stick sound how it's how the symbol or what kind of type of symbol you get
[00:05:26] if you get the right sound or more like a crash or whatever. Then we have here this dispersion
[00:05:32] feedback also here very important what you do to the all pass delays here what kind of timing there is.
[00:05:44] Also the LFO modulation is very slightly on the delay but also if you just amplify this
[00:05:50] it gets you kind of different sounds you can play around with this. You can also try to stick in
[00:06:01] here some transfer curves some saturation to get some different effects. Also if you don't
[00:06:07] want to use the stick sound you can just disable this and send audio into it it's also possible.
[00:06:13] Resonator yeah just explained us just a bunch of comp filters and I use here the voice stacking
[00:06:21] or the stack modulator to just spread these frequencies apart. It gives you also widely
[00:06:28] different results what kind of center frequency you use. Sounds even better sometimes if you
[00:06:43] completely spread it apart. Then we have here the there's kind of a delay line in here and there's
[00:06:51] also a low pass on that and I use here this macro for that.
[00:07:04] To get all kinds of different ride and simple sounds out of this if you want to
[00:07:14] also at the end here very important to have a static EQ.
[00:07:21] To highlight some of the contents of the sound or bring out
[00:07:28] certain frequencies more or less so very important. So it's actually a very simple setup
[00:07:34] and I think this is usually how you create these physical modeling ride and simple sounds
[00:07:42] but usually this is hidden inside of pure data patches most of the times because there you can
[00:07:49] get these low delay times. Here in the DAW you always need to go to the settings and
[00:07:54] choose a very low plot size for that just to get this very low round trip time.
[00:08:02] But in Bitwig Studio completely possible of course if you want to create these kind of
[00:08:07] sounds and you want to sample them maybe so you have to open up here this project or maybe make
[00:08:12] a new project use this preset pull down the plot size create your simple sounds sample it
[00:08:20] into multiple samples and then you go into a project you have to choose the different sample
[00:08:25] size again because you don't want to produce here with 64 samples it's probably not possible.
[00:08:31] So yeah this is a bit of a tedious thing to do I hope we get in the future in Bitwig some kind of
[00:08:39] feedback system that allows you to create very low round trip times without going into the settings.
[00:08:50] This would be really nice to have but I also said this a few years ago but you know it's a
[00:08:55] very niche thing to do. Also here Excite Snare I really like these plugins sometimes I use this
[00:09:02] here for sampling snares sometimes on to create layers and if you like I said if you use here
[00:09:08] the upgrade and you buy this for 30 bucks you can also feed some audio into this or if you are
[00:09:14] familiar with pure data plug data if you go to the website here I think you can even download
[00:09:21] the pure data patch and make some tweaks to it. Okay so that's that and maybe I also create here
[00:09:29] his versions for kick drums and snare drums inside of Bitwig if you want me to do this
[00:09:35] it's kind of the same setup I think probably just with a few different tweaks. Anyway cool channel
[00:09:44] give him a follow of course he makes a lot of buzz here with these videos I can see this already
[00:09:49] and yeah cool stuff. Thanks for watching leave me a like and let me know what you think
[00:09:56] download the patch, have some fun, see you in the next video, bye!