Bitwig Tips
Bitwig Studio may be the new kid on the block, but it’s already very powerful. Let’s take a look...
Cue it up
Bitwig Studio’s Cue Markers are small flags that you place at the top of the arrangement window to mark out key sections of your song structure, in exactly the same way as Ableton Live’s Locators. First, go to View>Show Cue Markers to expose the top area above the timeline, then right-click in here to insert a new cue marker. These can be renamed, copied, pasted and muted.
Mod-a-lot
Bitwig Studio’s Mod devices allow you to funnel audio or MIDI signals from anywhere in a session and use them to modulate something else. For example, imagine you have a session set up with a MIDI arpeggiator on one track, and a sustained synth pad on an audio channel. Load the Note Mod device on the pad channel, select the arpeggiator channel as the modulator, then add a Ladder filter within the Note Mod’s FX Chain and use it to modulate the Cutoff. Now, by tweaking the Note Mod’s envelope parameters, you can define how the incoming MIDI from the arp channel will trigger the Ladder filter’s sweeps.
Replacer
Bitwig Studio comes bundled with an awesome drum replacement tool, Replacer, which in Bitwig’s words “analyses the level of the incoming audio and generates notes at a single pitch, which are sent to a nested device chain”. As well as being great for straight-up drum replacement, it’s a handy tool for bolstering or layering individual hits within a loop in parallel. To do this, add an instance on an Effect Track set to 100% Wet, then drag an E-Snare instrument into its INST slot. Send your drum loop to this track in parallel, then tweak the Replacer’s Freq and Threshold parameters to ensure only the loop’s snare triggers the E-Snare.
Identical mod settings
When working with multiple instruments within an Instrument Layer, you’ll often want to apply the same Macro assignments and mod amounts to the same parameter across the various instruments within the layer. To do this in Ableton Live, you need to use the Options.txt workaround, but in Bitwig this is easy to do straight out the box: simply right click on the parameter, select Copy Modulation to all Layers, and that same parameter across all the layers will be assigned to the same Macro.