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14. Recording external gear and monitoring through effects

1 Now that we’ve got a simple, MIDIbased backing track, it’s time to do some actual audio recording in Bitwig Studio 2 8-Track. We’re going to lay down a simple sustained two-chord track using an electric guitar. First of all, we need to rightclick below our Dune CM track and Add Audio Track. 2 Next, we route our interface’s input to our new audio track. We can see which inputs and outputs are assigned to our tracks in the Track Inspector. Or we can click the leftmost button (with the opposing arrows) in the lower-left corner of the Arrange window. This will add the desired information to each track’s header. 3 Our track has no input assigned. If we click where it says No Input, we get a dropdown menu that doesn’t have anything under Audio Inputs. Click the Bitwig symbol up top to show the Dashboard. Go to the Audio category where we see a place for mono and stereo input busses. We add two mono busses. 4 In Audio settings, there’s a horizontal slider for adjusting the Block size. This is currently set to 256 samples. This might be too much for monitoring through the computer without latency. However, set it too low and you might have problems with the audio engine. Experimentation is the answer here. 5 If we go back into our Arrange window, we can now use the I/O routing dropdown to assign our track to the input our guitar is plugged in to. We arm this track for recording. We should now be able to hear our guitar and see its level registering in the track’s meter. So far, so good! 6 To adjust your metronome settings, click and hold the Play button in the transport section. We make sure our playback focus is on the Arranger timeline. Once we’re ready to record, we’ll take a deep breath and have at it. For our part, we recorded only a short section and loop it for continuous playback.