Bitwig Studio

Harry uses and digs it,I believe.

I use it, sometimes, but mostly for sound design, cuz the modulators are truly out of this world. It outpaces Live in that regard: the modulation system is so easy and useful, and so many fun crazy modulators that can instantly be assigned to any property of any plug.

Other than that, it is kind of a bizarro world clone of Live. The skins and colors are different, but the workflow is virtually identical, right down to the arrangement/session views, and the way that you can chain and stack devices.

The synths are strong, as are the rest of the effects, and it’s much cheaper than live suite.

The other thing that it has going for it is the unique cv control. If you have any hardware synths, like, say,a modular even, that use cv, BW will actually send cv data out. I’m going to try this soon, after I get another audio interface. If I get a 24 out interface,I then have 24 different cv control outputs to send to the hardware. That’s huge, if you need it. AFAIK there is no other daw that does this straight out of the box.

It’s very much personal preference, but for some reason Live just feels more like “home” to me right now. But if it were wiped off the face of the earth, I think I’d have very little problem switching to bitwig. It punches well above its weight, and Live users will feel right at home.

Yup, I mainly use Bitwig, for the past three years. I was a Logic user, Bitwig 1 was bundled with an Arturia controller I bought, and eventually I tried it out, picked it up very quickly. I still write in Logic occasionally, but most of the time I’m in Bitwig.

From what I understand, some Ableton programmers left, started Bitwig, and created a new DAW that did not carry over a lot of the bloat from Ableton. I have very limited Ableton experience, so I can’t really speak to that aspect of it. I think the modulators are a cool feature, seem to do many of the things possible with Max4Live. Add movement to different parameters and hopefully generate cool sounds. You get a good size library of sounds and presets. I think the programmer for the Surge synth is part of Bitwig, so one of the native synths has aspects of Surge in it. Turning an instrument track in to a hybrid track is cool, lets you retain your synth settings, but you have the audio bounce on the track.

At times I feel like you have a limited number of tools, compared to Logic, and sometimes I find myself trying to use a Logic key command, but for the most part I get along well in Bitwig. I do cause it to crash a fair bit with 3rd party plugins. Bitwig 2 introduced a subscription model for the updates. I waited a few months to update, did the 12-month sub, got updates up to 2.3.5, and I haven’t resubbed. Version 2.4 has stuff I’m interested in, but now that Bitwig 3 has been announced for Q2, I will just wait for that. Trying to think of other cons, will post more if I think of any.

OHMYFCKNGGAWD

Just peeped what BW 3 will include. “The Grid” is actually a non-linear nodal-based DAG. It’s the same thing I use to build shaders in CG and do compositing in Nuke (visual fx, my main gig).

This. Is. Huge.

For those that don’t know, this will create power like never before seen in any DAW, and no I am not hyperbolizing.

BW 3 will be an instant purchase for me. I’ve had the same idea for a few years now, but I am just a dumb artist, not going to build any software any time soon. Finally someone has done it. Linear workflow is for the birds, man.

yesyesyes

Mind Zero wrote:

Thanks for the review Harry. Could you tell me more details about that “hybrid track” feature? I haven’t heard of it. What kind of tools are you missing?

So a hybrid track will allow you to have a plugin instrument on it, as well as an audio file on the actual track. The instrument doesn’t affect the audio, but any additional plugins are applied to the output of the track. I don’t use it too much, but could see doing something like putting in a fill/edit/turn around as an audio file so it cuts from the instrument’s MIDI to the audio, and still processing through the same additional plug-ins. Sounding that out though, I probably would just do extra tracks.

As for Logic stuff I’m missing in Bitwig, it’s mostly key commands and short cuts. I like having a one-bar advance key (< and > in Logic), a slice at playhead key (I have it set to / in Logic), and a slice at transients (called offsets in Bitwig) key, which is basically a quick and dirty break slicing technique I use in Logic. Trying to think if there’s anything else that comes to mind, but drawing a blank. Oh yeah, in Logic I have Z set to zoom in on a selected item, and then zoom back out, but I can’t do that in Bitwig. Also in Logic I feel like I can zoom in/out on tracks easier, and using M to mute a clip/element and S to solo a clip/element in Logic; can’t seem to get this to work in Bitwig the way I want.

Hi guys!

I would like to share my experience with Bitwig Studio.
I started using DAWs when i was 13 to record my high school band’s punk-rock songs. in the next 16 years, i had a huge journey with a lot of unexpected turns to most of my uncharted fields of this music thing from jazz piano education via Pop/rock band tours via producing cheap radio pop for singers, learning the basics of most of instruments, and finally graduated on classical composition with elctroacustic music faculty.
During my trip, I also tried several DAWs and organised my workflow based on practical principles
i WAS using Ableton live for most of arranging/creating process and also had a Logic for detailed audio editing and scores.
From Ableton 6 to 10 i was a satisfied ableton user

… while this Januar

I had a lazy sunday morning come down when i decided to download Bitwig demo to give it a try.

…. the result is:
TRUE LOVE!!!! I switched to Bitwig from this single moment and i never could go back anymore!

Its like a fresh air when you stepping out from a club when its hitting too much. I felt in love in music producing once more. Its opened up the whole world for me while tripled my productivity. it is like a cheat or a hack but in fact BITWIG IS THE FUTURE OF MUSIC PRODUCTION.

practising and hard working on my skills to achieve my goals in complex neurofunk music was an everyday suck for me in albleton. In Bitwig its like a video game or a having a date every single day with the hottest blondie i know.

My recommendation for beginners: FL
for anyone else:
BITWIG
:::
:: ::

Wondering how long before a Genie does a monthly tutorial using Bitwig?

from maybe Synergy?!

This month’s tutorial should be of interest to you guys excited by Bitwig!

helljeah!! thanks

Haha sweet looking forward to this tutorial now!
I jumped on bitwig instead of upgrading to live 10 and I’m very happy with it, overall I think ableton is a more complete package but there are some work flows in bitwig which are more efficient than other daws. Plus its the only daw apart from reaper that still works on mavericks, so that’s why I switched from ableton/logic

The Hybris tutorial is amazing, so interesting for many reasons!

It was also a nice bonus that it was in BitWig so I could see what it’s about etc and get a bit of a feel for it from a user (hybris) who has been using it for a month or so.

Think I may try a demo of it at some point, mainly after reading this thread and watching the excellent April videos.

A quick update on some of my issues I’ve had with Bitwig, took a few minutes of researching and reading the manual, but I’ve got key commands working mostly how I liked from Logic. Some of it was difference of wording (Arranger Clip has a button that says Muted, but in the key commands it’s actually Activated), some of it requires a specific action (\ key to slice all onsets/transients, but I have to have the inside of the clip selected), and some is just a work around (adjust height of all tracks, you have to ALT + drag the icon that comes up between track spacers).

I’ve got my notes done for the Hybris’s videos too, will have those posted up in the next few days.

Been playing with BW all afternoon, watching Hybris’ vids.

2 things:

-Mossgrabbers script makes Push 2 work nearly flawlessly with BW. And dozens of other ctrlrs if you happen to not have Push2. Get the scripts here:
http://www.mossgrabers.de/Software/Bitwig/Bitwig.html

–the audio SC modulator. Ho-lee-shit. That is a game changer. Creative ways to react to any other audio source?! This essentially makes any parameter of any plugin dynamic. So many possibilities…

Maybe I need to try and do an entire tune in BW…

I stopped once to eat since that post above. This DAW is nuts, so creative. Made this, all in BW:

https://soundcloud.com/the_shrike/sh_bw_goobagabba_wip01/s-HjIyH

https://www.bitwig.com/en/community/learning/hamilton.html

ok, rolling off bitwig for now…way too fucking buggy. Doesn’t even respect the length of a clip in the arranger, it actually truncates the sound to be shorter than the edit, so I have to hack it by dragging the waveform out longer than it should be. This has happened in several projects thus far. It also won’t respect a trim edit until you release the mouse, which is kind of ridic.

I want to use it, I want to like it, but it’s chock full of bugs, even more than the few I mentioned above. I know it’s only ~v2 software, I get it that it won’t be as stable as Live, but I can’t work this way.

I’ll check out 3 again when it’s released.

Thanks Strike, that’s good to know!

Urban_Hostile wrote:

Thanks Strike, that’s good to know!

STRIKE!

Lol, not a bad moniker, actually…

Bitwig 3 in public beta today!

Very excited about this…