Bitwig Studio 6

Bitwig 6 brings a host of updates, but the big news is how automation has been reconfigured into a creative tool.

Bitwig Studio has reached another major revision, with a visual redesign and a revamp of some fundamental features, such as how musical information can be shared across a project, and how automation is encapsulated and edited. The changes to the automation system very much bring it to the foreground as a compositional tool, and we’ll spend some time looking at this in detail.

First Impressions

Bitwig Studio 6 (Bitwig 6 for short) has had a fairly comprehensive visual update, and definitely looks a bit sharper than version 5. Backgrounds are a darker grey, and a few visual features like clip loops and automation curves have acquired gradient colour fills, adding a touch of depth. In designer parlance, it ‘pops’ a bit more. Otherwise, everything feels pretty familiar, apart primarily from the controls for accessing automation lanes, which now work differently as we’ll see.

Alias Clips

Selecting alternate patterns for clips.

Repetition is not exactly a new concept in music production. We have had loops for as long as we’ve had sequencers (and samplers and delay lines). In Bitwig’s Launcher, a looped clip runs indefinitely until some action causes it to stop. In the Arranger, the loop is unrolled in the time dimension, so a clip loops until its overall duration is up. By default, each clip is unique, even though multiple clips may contain copies of the same musical information.

This presents a problem if you want the same clip in several scenes, or to break a loop in the timeline and then come back to it — the clips are distinct, even if they actually contain the same material, and edits to one clip won’t take effect in any of the copies, leading to some rather tedious effort if you want to keep the copies in sync.

Bitwig 6 introduces a mechanism called clip aliasing. Whenever you’re in a situation where you want to create a break by copying a clip and pasting it somewhere else on the timeline, or into a different scene, you have the option to ‘paste as alias’. The result is the same clip featured in two different places, where any edits made in one occurrence immediately take effect in the other. Well, mostly: some clip properties are individual to the particular instance in the Launcher or Arranger, whilst others are shared between all aliases. Note and audio events are shared (which is the point), as are clip colours and names (so a colour or name change in a clip will affect all aliases). Individual properties include loop position — so each alias can loop in a different way — and playback cue marker (ie. start point).

Clips which are aliased are labelled with a tiny paperclip icon. When an aliased clip is selected the paperclip turns white on that instance and on all of its aliases. The paperclip looks awfully small, and could be made a bit more noticeable.

The Launcher with aliased clips.

The concept of aliasing content between sections of music is not unknown in DAWs — I seem to recall a similar feature when I was using a precursor to FL Studio more than 20 years ago. A distinguishing feature of Bitwig’s aliases is that they are all equal citizens: there is no master clip of which all the others are read‑only references. Instead, there is a single piece of shared content (which Bitwig refers to as the ‘event pattern’) and any number of aliased clips which refer to this, as well as carrying their own settings for name, colour, looping and so on. The Clip Inspector Panel has a drop‑down menu which lets you select which pattern you want the clip to refer to — this would give you an easy way to switch between versions or takes for MIDI clips (or audio clips, although they already have their own dedicated comping features). If no clip refers to a pattern, though, the pattern becomes inaccessible.

You can make an aliased clip unique, which copies its pattern content and ‘de‑aliases’ it. There’s also a feature for going in the other direction: turning identical clips into a set of aliases, useful to add pattern sharing in material from older projects. To help keep track, newly created clip patterns are now initially named according to the Launcher scene they are created in, or the timeline bar in the Arranger.

Clips can be aliased between Launcher and Arranger, which makes perfect sense and certainly makes it easier to develop ideas for live performance and for linear recording with the option to share material between the two workflows. I did attempt to create aliased clips across multiple tracks but this isn’t supported — it’s single track only.

Automation Clips

Automation has had an overhaul in Bitwig 6, primarily in the way it is accessed in the Clip Launcher. Unlike the Arranger, where a linear timeline incorporating automation is a container for multiple clips, everything in the Launcher resides inside the clips themselves, and there is no overall automation over time. This clip‑based automation can be regarded as a kind of internal modulation, possibly looping in sync with the clip, possibly with its own loop settings.

In Bitwig 5, each available device or mixer parameter could be clip‑automated in three distinct ways, potentially at the same time: a traditional ‘absolute’ setting, an ‘additive’ (offset) control, and a ‘multiplicative’ scaled attenuation. This could lead to potentially complicated behaviour, especially since the different automation types could be looped at different rates. I don’t know how popular this three‑way automation system was — I may have used it once or twice in the last decade — but the additive and multiplicative automation machinery has been deprecated. (It is still active and can be edited for existing clips, but cannot be accessed for new content.) I don’t see it as a great loss, since Bitwig’s modulation features can be pressed into service to achieve many of the same aims.

Automation in the Arranger, some of it inside clips.

This simplification clears the decks for a complete overhaul of clip automation handling. Automation data that used to live inside note and audio clips now resides in its own clips, one per automation type.

In the Launcher Panel (if displayed in the Arrange View where scenes are represented in columns), these automation clips are now shown stacked underneath the parent note or audio clip. Layout‑wise this is not so different to Bitwig 5, but now the automation is a first‑class citizen, and the Launcher can be regarded as having proper automation lanes, similarly to the Arranger. These automation clips are linked to the main ‘parent’ clip: cut, copy or paste the parent and the automation clips follow. But they also have a partial life of their own: automation clips can be copied and pasted between Launcher scenes, or between different automation lanes — the success of that depends on the types and resolutions of the parameters concerned — or between Launcher and Arranger. Pasting aliases for automation clips is a feature that is broken in the release I’m testing, but Bitwig are aware and have promised a fix soon, most likely by the time you read this.

Automation clips can have their own cue (start) points and loops, unrelated to the parent. They can also be launched independently of their parent clips, so a track might end up playing content from one scene alongside clip automation from another, or it might mix automation from the Launcher and the Arranger. Automation clips also have their own follow actions, so playback can jump between clips independently of their parents. (Aliased clips individually have their own follow actions.)

Launcher automation clips, overlaid on the parent clip in the Clip Editor Panel.

Automation in the Arranger can behave in ways which are subtle. The Arranger can carry its own track‑based automation data in the traditional linear manner regardless of clips. If a clip is dragged into the Arranger, it will override any existing automation, and its own data will take precedence on playback — editing or moving the clip will make its automation erase any existing in the track.

Arranger automation clips can be edited in place, and background track automation in the absence of clips can be edited as well — the two types of data coexist, although they can’t overlap in time in the same lane. In addition, any time selection in the Arrangement can be turned into a new automation clip, and an automation clip can be ‘flattened’ into track automation, unrolling loops in the process. Linear automation can therefore be siloed into clips, and even aliased in different places, making automation management easier.

By default, automation lanes are shown visually both in Launcher and Arranger on an all‑or‑nothing basis: a toggle control shows or hides all existing automation per track. This seems a step back from Bitwig 5 which had a more complex menu arrangement for selective viewing, but now you can switch the project view into so‑called ‘automation mode’ and the Arranger switches to showing a single automation type on top of note and audio data; this ‘flying’ automation view follows the parameter being touched or edited. I spent a while wondering whether my editing options had been impoverished, but the new system has a clarity and immediacy which makes up for any loss of power.

Automation Editing

Automation editing has been improved as well. There’s a new editing tool called (rather bewilderingly, but perhaps betraying Bitwig’s Berlin roots) the Spray Can. The name suggests it does something free‑form and chaotic (and, perhaps, difficult to clean up), but in fact it’s a creator of step‑sequenced data. You can ‘spray’ to create an equally‑spaced sequence of notes, duration set by the active grid size, inside a clip at a single pitch (although if that’s your desired end result you are better off creating one long note and using the ‘repeats’ operator to slice it up). The notes created by the Spray Can are distinct and can be edited individually. Alternatively, you can Option‑drag to spray them with varying pitches from the outset.

Techno‑friendly stepped automation displayed against the parent clip’s audio.

The Spray Can also works on automation data, creating techno‑friendly stepped values. As a general rule, each step has a beginning and an end control point, the step being level if those points have the same automation value. The Spray Can produces steps with a starting control point only, so each value is ‘held’ until the next point. This is one of those improvements that seems so obvious in retrospect that it’s a wonder we’ve not seen it before now. There are half as many points to deal with, and each step is always level. This sounds like a winner for longer‑lasting automation as well: many times I’ve tried to set up a long level automation segment for volume, only to notice that the end is something like 0.1dB lower than the beginning: not a showstopper, but annoying. Now those segments will be level (although you will need to match up the end if it needs to be continuous). The ‘hold’ property can be enabled point‑by‑point.

It’s now possible to add random ‘spread’ to automation control points, just as with note velocities — the effective value will change on each clip launch and loop. Do this with ‘held’ steps and they will stay level, giving a sort of random sample & hold effect on an underlying overall contour. (You can even random‑spread points in your linear track automation, though it seems a rather mad thing to do.) If your automation needs are smoother than techno, the Pencil tool has a much improved algorithm for drawing curves, using smooth curved segments between points. Clicking the pencil on top of flat automation lines generates some beautiful curved spikes which I’m sure I can make use of somewhere. Finally, automation clips can be dragged into ‘Segment’ or ‘Curve’ modulation generators and vice versa, really blurring the boundary between creative mixing and device programming.

Setting spread ranges for automation points.

Now that the Launcher can contain multiple clips per track and scene, I was led to wonder what this might mean for MIDI controllers that support clip launching. I plugged in my trusty Novation Launchpad Mini Mk3 to find out. Short answer: the controller still has a view of sessions (as rows) and tracks (columns), but this doesn’t ‘unfold’ to show automation lanes. Buttons are lit according to the colour of the parent clip at each location. In the case of a slot where there are automation clips without a parent clip, the button isn’t illuminated at all, but the slot or scene can still be triggered to run the automation.

My initial experimentation suggested that there was no way to launch different automation clips in different scenes whilst looping a single parent clip. If the automation clips are in scenes with no parent clips, then launching scenes or slots launches these clips, but stops the parent clip that’s playing elsewhere. On a whim, I tried removing the Stop button from the empty parent slots. As a result, it became possible to target these slots to launch the automation clips without affecting the parent — but launching the enclosing scene would do nothing. At this point I decided to cut my losses and stick with the method that worked.

Back on screen, things can get a little more complicated for clips in the linear Arranger. Automation clips can actually be shifted in time relative to their parent clip, and can be changed in length. If its Free Time setting is on, then the loop length can also be changed relative to the parent. (Free Time will turn on if you edit the loop.) Sections of an automation clip that extend in time beyond the parent clip basically get sliced off and orphaned if the parent is resized or moved — but the orphaned parts are established as aliases of the original, so that automation edits are still shared.

All in all, the changes to the automation system make it a lot more accessible and usable as a compositional tool, alongside modulation and note operators. Some of the pain points have been removed, and clip automation now feels immediate and more accessible.

Key Signatures

Key signature selection, and the Key Filter+ device.Bitwig Studio is now aware of key signatures. This manifests itself in two ways: editing support, which assists with positioning notes to be in the correct scale, and device control, which equips note‑processing devices to constrain their behaviour to fit the desired scale. The former does not affect existing note data, whilst the latter potentially alters the musical output of devices.

The transport area at the top of Bitwig’s window now contains menus for scale selection, in terms of both root key and scale intervals above that key. Each potential root key is correctly indicated as sharp or flat according to scale (a welcome attention to detail). We are still in equal‑temperament 12‑note‑per‑octave territory here, with no attempts to explore more adventurous tuning systems. The key signature setting here is global for the entire project, although individual devices can choose whether to respect or ignore it.

In true Bitwig style, there are modulation options here. If a device is capable of using the global key signature, its on/off setting can be modulated. (Mapping it to a MIDI controller would make the most sense, but if you want to control it with an LFO or step sequencer, you have that option as well.) More intriguingly, the global key and scale can also be modulated. Since this is established at the project level, it can only be affected by modulators in the project panel, not any of those at track or device level. (A MIDI controller could also be pressed into service at the project level to select root key and scale.) Key signature changes can also be automated — alongside tempo and time signature, these automation lanes now have their own dedicated area in the project, and are no longer part of the Master track. This automation data can even be encapsulated in automation clips and looped.

Open the device browser and search for ‘key scale’, and you’ll be presented with a list of the Note FX devices which are key‑signature‑aware. A new Key Filter is the most obvious one: the existing device already filters by its own root and scale, but in its redesigned incarnation as ‘Key Filter+’ in Bitwig 6 it can opt to use the global settings. Other note processors (Multi‑note, Note Transpose, Randomize, Arpeggiator) apply constraints to their output as expected — if you wanted to apply key constraints on input on a device, you could just put a Key Filter+ in front of it.

The winning feature of the new release is the rethinking of automation data and its promotion to clip.

Conclusion

Bitwig Studio 6 has arrived with a design overview which adds some visual flair and clarity to the user interface, and some compositional support in the shape of key signatures. Clip aliasing removes much of the need for duplicating looped material, and helps keep edits in sync. The winning feature of the new release is the rethinking of automation data and its promotion to clips, not only making editing easier but also bringing together techniques of automation and modulation, enabling new ways of controlling device and mixer parameters creatively in the studio or on stage. A recommended upgrade.