Innovative music creation platform Bitwig takes a big leap forward with the introduction of an open-ended modular environment.

Ever since Bitwig Studio launched some five years ago, the company have been talking about a "modular audio system" underlying the whole design, and how one day that might get exposed to the user community at large. Bitwig Studio 2 made some first steps in the modular direction, allowing any instrument or effect to be enhanced with its own collection of modulator objects: LFOs, step sequencers, vector mixers, envelope followers and so on. With Studio 3 we're finally being shown the complete picture, with fully modular instruments and effects as first-class citizens, and it's called The Grid.

On Grid

On-screen modular environments aren't new: they go back at least a couple of decades to products like the Nord Modular. These days modularity is a major feature of products ranging from Cycling '74's Max and Native Instruments' Reaktor to Propellerhead's Reason, as well as a fair number of software modular plug-ins. Roughly speaking, Studio 3's Grid falls somewhere between the integrated environment of Reason and the editable-devices approach of Ableton's Max for Live.

Like Max for Live, Bitwig's modular environment is revealed through a small selection of dedicated device types: Poly Grid is a polyphonic instrument that responds to MIDI and outputs stereo audio, while FX Grid is a stereo-in, stereo-out audio processor. (There's no facility in The Grid for direct MIDI processing, and hence no equivalent of the Max for Live MIDI Device.) Select one of the two Grid device types, drop it into a track, and you're away. These are first-class devices, with remote-control macro knobs, modulator slots, and even dedicated nested chains for other effects. In place of the usual panel of controls there's a miniature grid of squares, some of them filled with coloured blocks. This grid can be thought of as a 'satellite view' of modular components: click the appropriate icon for an expanded view, or click in the grid area itself, and the device pops up, full sized and fully detailed, into the main panel area. (The expanded view panel can also be popped out into its own dedicated window.)

With the arrival of The Grid in Studio 3, Bitwig have knocked the ball out of the park.

What you see in this panel depends on the type of Grid device you select: for the Poly Grid the default is the world's simplest synthesizer made from an oscillator and an envelope, while for the FX Grid it's just a through connection from input to output. These are the starting points: you can build on what's there, or remove everything and start from scratch. The entire configuration of any modular device is saved with the Bitwig project, just like any other device. It's not a separate file as in Max for Live, unless you choose to export it to your library, and there's no notion of preset switching for a device: the entire device, modules and all, is the preset.

Modular devices are constructed from a selection of approximately 150 modules, laid out strictly on a fixed grid and wired up with virtual patch cords. The simplest modules occupy one grid square and are reminiscent of Scrabble tiles, while more complex modules occupy larger rectangular areas. Some modules, such as the step sequencers, are resizeable. There's no nesting or grouping of modules, but the editing grid appears to be unbounded in all directions, so there's no hard limit on the complexity of device you can build, and the view can be zoomed to help with navigation. As you patch, the miniature view of the module layout updates in the device panel.

Modules have patching inlets on their left and outlets on their right, so the natural signal flow is left-to-right, although there's nothing stopping you patching from right to left or vertically if you don't mind the disorganisation that results. For some device designs that's going to be unavoidable, but patch cords turn translucent when not selected, so the visual clutter is minimised.

Making Connections

Working with modules in The Grid is so similar to all the other modular environments out there that's it's hardly worthy of explanation. Modules are selected by dragging from a palette at the top of the panel and patched together by dragging from a module outlet to inlet, or vice versa. An outlet can connect to several inlets, but not the other way round. You can cut, copy and paste modules individually or as selected groups. And if you drop a module on top of a similar module, the new one replaces the old and adopts whichever parameter values they might have in common.

The available modules are arranged into 16 groups: Oscillator, Filter, Envelope, Math and so on. Some modules seem to be filed slightly arbitrarily (the step sequencers are found under Data, for example, while Sample/Hold is under Level but the Sample/Hold LFO is under Random). I was pleasantly surprised to find Bitwig's new Sampler instrument (of which more later) available as a dedicated module, for those times when you absolutely need a multisampled grand piano in the middle of your modular patch (or more realistically, you want some wavetable action). Sampler zones can be selected based on a modulation input, as can playback mode and playback 'head' freeze, and, as in Sampler proper, the three multi-zone parameters are available as modulation sources, so that switching between samples (by key pitch or velocity, say) can alter the processing in the rest of the device.

Every module has an inspector pane for setting parameters that aren't part of the module's main panel, such as envelope segment shapes — and, subtly but importantly, sometimes parameters that are exclusively in this pane are valid modulation destinations. There are also handy scrolling scope displays showing input and output signals. The entire modular device also has an inspector pane where you set things like polyphony, voice allocation, retriggering and the timing of bar-and-beat phase inputs. (As an aside, the FX Grid device for audio processing can also run in polyphonic mode, responding to note events, allowing for various layering effects.) This inspector pane has a Show Help button, which pops up a massively useful help window explaining all of the module's controls. This isn't just a passive piece of documentation: the module illustrated in this window is 'live', so you can continue to make edits with the documentation right in front of you.

Everything in The Grid's world is continuous–signal-based, just as in hardware, and not like Max for Live which encompasses discrete messages as well as audio. Hence, no MIDI messages appear in The Grid: there's implicit conversion to (virtual) CV and gate. (If you want do some kind of MIDI processing on the input, the Poly Grid device has a dedicated nested chain for Note FX, and any note-processing devices here can be modulated by the Grid device.)

Double Trouble

A couple of aspects of The Grid's signal processing are a little unusual. Firstly, as the name suggests, the Poly Grid device is polyphonic (and the FX Grid has polyphony as an option): you can set the voice count, note triggering and stealing modes, and can stack voices for a unison effect. (Stacked voice modulation is available as in Bitwig's other devices.) Secondly, all signal processing is 4x oversampled and conducted in stereo, including control, gate and phase signals. Stereo makes perfect sense for actual audio in a DAW environment, but it caused me a little bit of head-scratching when I discovered that LFOs have a phase control that separates the left and right output, and the oscillators can be stereo-detuned. In fact, the entire signal path runs in stereo right up until any point where a single signal is needed (for example, as a general-purpose modulation output), at which stage the left and right parts are merged together. Similarly, signals from polyphonic voicing are averaged together where a single value is required. Rather confusingly, some visual display modules, such as the oscilloscope, show the averaged signal rather than the individual voices or left/right channels.

Patch cords, as well as module inputs and outputs, are colour-coded by function: yellow for logic, orange for pitch, purple for phase, while red and blue are referred to as 'untyped', which in most cases means audio. But the colouring is advisory rather than mandatory, and there are no rules against mixing and matching signals of different colours: everything is audio-rate and stereo. In fact, you can even change colours arbitrarily.

Not everything needs to be patched: some modules like the oscillators and envelope generators have 'pre-cord' features which connect their control inputs invisibly to incoming note pitches and gates, without the clutter of more patch cords. (Pre-cord signals for pitch also take pitch-bend gestures into account.) In the filters, the pitch pre-cord connection is variable, for control over the amount of keyboard follow.

Open Ends

Modulation in general has been front and centre of Bitwig's feature set since version 2's device modulator panels (see Sound On Sound, May 2017), and devices built in The Grid are likely to be heavy on modulation, so I was rather worried that these two modulation worlds might be distinct, or at least different enough to be confusing. But fear not: modulation flows into and out of The Grid's environment without any technical or cognitive hiccoughs (although it only runs in mono at the standard sample rate). For a start, device modulators can drive module parameters inside The Grid just as they can control parameters for any device, and in the same way: 'arm' a modulator, click and drag on a knob or slider, and the modulation path takes effect. (Consider this another kind of 'wireless' patch connection like the pre-cords.) For additional cord-free fun, some Grid modules like envelopes and LFOs have an explicit modulation output, marked by the familiar arrow. Click the arrow to activate, and then click and drag on a destination control to establish the connection. In the screen shot, the step generator is modulating the sustain level of the envelope generator, without any patch cords needed. To treat a general signal in The Grid as a modulator (perhaps after some mathematics or logic processing), there's a dedicated Modulator Out module.

Most intriguingly, you can connect a modulation source inside The Grid to a destination outside, like a device parameter in the Grid device's nested chains — and these destinations could even be in third-party VST plug-ins. If you wish to use a Grid device purely as a sophisticated modulation generator, that's fine, though it can only modulate its own sub-devices, so you'd effectively be limited to control of a chain of note and/or audio effects. I spent a happy hour or so connecting various step sequencer generators to various parts of Audio Damage's Discord 4 pitch-shifter, coming up with rhythmic patterns which could charitably be described as unusual.

If you find The Grid a little overwhelming, there are over 200 bundled presets which show off its capabilities whilst providing starting points for your own experimentation. 'Plant Eater' is a versatile bit-crusher effect, 'Grid Arp Synth 1' is an animated analogue bass riff (though the arpeggiation does come from a device in its Note FX chain) and '80s Dystopy' does a reasonable impression of a soft Roland synth pad with some unexpected but dynamic wavefolding — it uses two instances of The Grid, one purely for the chorus effect. 'Dice in Control' is the archetypal modular patch, a plucky rhythmic pattern that jumps between octaves. 'Gripped Beat' is a four-to-the-floor analogue drum pattern, though a bit of experimentation tweaking its sequencers, oscillators and waveshapers produced all manner of techno rhythms. The presets are equipped with a generous complement of macro controls, so even if you don't want to dig into the modular innards, there's plenty of scope for broad timbral changes.

Overall, the editing experience offered by The Grid is clear, neat and intuitive, and integration with the rest of Bitwig is logical and well implemented. If I had to nit-pick, there's only one aspect of Grid editing that I found slightly frustrating: it's a bit too easy to accidentally alter a module parameter when you really just want to select the module or move it around. But that's a minor point: overall, The Grid is a thoroughly impressive effort and really expands the boundaries of what a DAW is capable of.

Supersized Sampler

In Bitwig Studio 2, the Sampler instrument was respectable: it was capable of triggering and optionally looping samples into a multimode filter and envelope, with multisamples supported via zones delimited by note pitch and/or velocity. So far, so conventional, though Bitwig's modulation machinery could be brought to bear to dynamically shift sample start and loop points. But there were a couple of weaknesses: at the voice level, there was no support for loop crossfades, and in multisample mode, zones couldn't crossfade or overlap: a voice would only play a single sample at once. The new Sampler, introduced in Bitwig 2.4 and present in Studio 3, lifts these restrictions.

A first glance at the new Sampler panel reveals some slight shifting of the furniture — the filter section is now shown to the left of the envelope, for instance — but there are some deeper enhancements. For a start, the filter now supports variable keytracking, as does sample playback pitch itself (before, keytracking to pitch was all or nothing). And there is a loop crossfade parameter to gently smooth the audio at the loop point; for more drastic smoothing, you can set the crossfade to be the entire loop. Without crossfading, the loop section is highlighted as a green block; apply a crossfade, and the green area becomes a colour gradient fading from green to black over the fade area. Crossfading mixes audio from the latter part of the loop with audio leading up to the start of the loop, so loops near the start of the sample are more constrained in terms of crossfade length.

The modulation system that first appeared with Bitwig 2 is really starting to show its power when applied to the Sampler instrument.

There is still a distinction between 'manual' sample parameters such as play start, play stop, loop start, loop end and loop crossfade, which can't be modulated, and what are referred to as offsets: play position, loop position and loop length, which can be dynamically controlled by modulation sources. In Studio 2 these were additional knobs; in Studio 3 they are distinctive coloured sliders, with clear visual feedback. And the modulated parameters are also overlaid dynamically on the waveform display.

The sliders are part of a new panel area containing, by default, a speed control. This might seem a little superfluous given that there's already a pitch control (best thought of as transposing the sound), but that's only true in the default playback mode (labelled Repitch). In the new playback modes the distinction between pitch and speed becomes significant.

A snowflake icon puts the Sampler into a 'frozen' state, where the usual left-to-right playback is completely disabled: if this were vinyl, it would be the equivalent of stopping the turntable. With freeze active, the speed knob turns into the position control parameter, and you have to move it to hear anything, in the manner of vinyl scratching. Map your MIDI controller here for live scratching, or apply a modulator to sweep the audio. Sampler still operates as an instrument, so you'll have to play notes to hear anything, but this also means that it'll operate polyphonically if you play chords — I'm not aware of many turntables that can do that! With freeze active, keyboard tracking is ignored, as is the pitch setting; position modulation is everything.

Cycles & Grains

Conventional sample playback and this turntable-style scrubbing are both part of the default Repitch mode. Two other modes take Sampler's behaviour into more experimental territory. Cycles decouples the pitch of the sample from the playback speed: as the playback position shifts, individual waveform cycles derived from the sample data play at a pitch determined by incoming notes. Set the playback speed to zero and you have a synthesizer playing whatever single-cycle waveform can be extracted from sample data under the 'play head'. Generally, Cycles works best when the playback position is moving very slowly, or is instantly shifted from one position to another by modulation or MIDI. Sonically, we're in wavetable territory: stay in the same location in the sample, and you have a static timbre (I'm reminded of the classic Korg DW-8000), while a slow position sweep is more reminiscent of a PPG Wave. If the play position is sped up further, the result takes on more of the timbral quality of the original sample as a whole.

In Cycles mode, the sample loop is still active, with the effect of looping a portion of the wavetable (there's no crossfade looping in this mode) and a dedicated formant filter adds some harmonic complexity. Cycles is also a good contender for freezing, if you want to modulate the 'wavetable position' with an LFO or envelope. Overall, I found Cycles to be a decent wavetable source, but rather at the mercy of the original audio; Bitwig could help out here by providing a library of carefully chosen samples that could be used to do high-quality wavetable synthesis. (I discovered, quite by accident, that some of the single-shot samples in the Analog Waves library, mentioned later, work very well as wavetables.)

The final mode is Textures, which performs playback using individual 'grains' of audio from 1 to 300 milliseconds in length. Initially, Textures sounds much like the standard Repitch mode, but the grain-based playback means you can change the playback speed rather than the pitch to get a time-stretching effect. And again, with freeze enabled, you are responsible for positioning the 'play head' where you want it in the sample, via MIDI or modulation control. There's a 'motion' parameter which randomises the playback position for each grain instance, to add variety or richness to the sound. (Motion is not indicated visually in the waveform display, unfortunately.) Unusually for a granular synth, Textures does not appear to play multiple grains at once: to get this effect, you'll have to stack voices. (We look at stacking later.)

The choice of grain size is pretty critical: at the highest settings, you're basically working with a 300-millisecond looping instrument, whilst very short grains get you into the realm of hard sync as audio cycle and grain cycle interfere. Also, the motion parameter is based on grain size, so with long grains you are jumping around in several seconds of audio, while short grains generate various noise textures. Having said that, overall Textures delivered clean and pleasing results with no obvious glitching, though the sound is a little thin unless voices are stacked to add depth.

Stacking Up

To get the most out of Cycles or Textures, you will need to stack voices, and then apply per-voice modulation to vary them. Voice stacking has been a general feature of Bitwig Studio for some time, but it was only with Cycles and Textures that I found myself having to make serious use of it, so it's probably worth taking a look at how it works.

The Inspector pane for a device provides parameters for the maximum number of voices to allocate to a device, and for the number of voices to play or stack per note. There's also an indication of how many notes are available at once, which is calculated by dividing the first two figures; in practice, you'll probably get more notes than indicated, since voices will be reallocated within stacks. Turn up the voices-per-note value, and voices will be layered, but the sonic effect very much depends on how the voices differ from one another. Bitwig supports polyphonic modulation, so you can randomise parameters by voice (tuning would be a good contender). But there's a set of modulation sources derived purely from the voice stacking: 'stack spread', indicated by a logo of a 3D stack of paper, is a modulation source which provides a value evenly spread across all voices in a note, while the individual 'stack voice' modulators provide constant levels of modulation which can be set on a voice-by-voice basis. For Textures, I found it most useful to stack three or four voices and spread out the playback position and grain size, while my wavetable experiments with Cycles benefited more from a two-voice stack with a slight modulated detuning between them, emulating a chorus effect.

To summarise, Cycles and Textures are similar: they are picking out a small portion of audio to loop, with the audio location dictated by playback speed and/or modulation. In practice, Cycles picks out single cycles of audio to play at the required pitch, while Textures generally works in a longer timeframe to bring out the pitch and features of the original audio. Cycles has the benefit of a formant filter for synthesis; Textures works more in looping territory, with the ability to explore and highlight aspects of the sample. I liked Textures a lot and spent a fair amount of time playing with it, eventually becoming confident that I could rock up to an academic electroacoustic gig and play something convincing. Much as I love wavetable synthesis, I feel that Cycles is a little too sensitive to the quality of the waveform data, and would benefit from some bespoke curated audio assets. Either way, both modes enable Sampler to be transformed into a formidable sound design tool. And clearly, the modulation system that first appeared with Bitwig 2 is really starting to show its power when applied to the Sampler instrument.

Zoning In

Amidst all the options for sample mangling and manipulation that have arrived in Bitwig Studio 3, it's easy to forget that Sampler is essentially designed for playing back samples from a keyboard, which implies support for multiple zones according to pitch and velocity. Everything we've described about Cycles and Textures can be applied to a setup of multiple zones. Parameters such as sample source, play start and end, loop mode and location are zone-specific; the play mode (Repitch, Cycles or Textures), freeze setting, filter and envelope settings are common across all zones.

Previous versions of Sampler supported zones for pitch and velocity, but in a rudimentary manner: a simple jump from one zone to another without any overlap or fading. (You could overlap zones visually, but only one would be active in the overlap area.) Version 3 brings a much more sophisticated zoning scheme. Zones can overlap, and the 'expanded device view', where you set up the zones, has been improved: there's a sample drop area to the left, zones can be dragged around in the pitch/velocity space, and there's now an inspector pane for zones which allows fine-tuning of parameters.

The zone inspector pane provides easy access to some of the most important sample parameters, such as playback and looping boundaries and tuning, but there are some new parameters here as well. At the top of the pane is a group selection menu: zones can be collected into groups for editing, so that a single parameter edit can be applied to all zones in the group: useful, for example, to nudge a related set of zones up or down together in the MIDI pitch range. Below are parameter boxes for key and velocity, as a substitute for graphically dragging the edges of the zone boxes, and parameters for fade amount: this is where you'd set up your pitch and velocity crossfades. And there's an additional zoning parameter called 'select', accessed by a knob in the main Sampler panel (and amenable to MIDI or automation control or modulation); you can arrange your zones to fall into areas of the select range, so that the select value dictates which zone is played on Note On. And just to add some more zone selection options, zones can play 'round-robin', so that in any area of zone overlap the zones are triggered sequentially per note rather than all at once.

If you want to see the crossfade areas, you have to switch to a second view of the zones called the 'list view'. Here the zones are laid out from top to bottom, with one column for key range and one column switchable between velocity and select. The fade regions are shown in place. (Fade values can be edited in the inspector, or graphically by Alt-dragging in the column area.)

And just when you thought the Sampler modulation scheme couldn't get any more sophisticated, enter zone parameters. Three modulation sources (labelled P1, P2 and P3) can be applied to the Sampler voice architecture (including its modulators). Then each zone can set its own values for these parameters, so that different zones can have individual voice variations. With zone parameters, stacking parameters and round-robin triggering, the potential to animate a sample set is immense. (Much as I'd hate to complicate things further, it would be good to also have modulation sources representing position-in-zone by key, velocity or select in order to create a spread of parameter values across an entire zone.)

I've spent a lot of time describing Sampler, but in Studio 3 it really has been transformed into a truly sophisticated instrument, with myriad modulation and performance options. While some of these features are found in third-party instruments such as Native Instruments' Kontakt, the way that Sampler integrates into Bitwig Studio makes it a compelling environment, even for users (like me) who don't generally work with sample libraries.

Count Me In

Since Bitwig Studio is so strong on modulation, it makes sense that some new modulators should arrive as part of this upgrade. Note Counter counts upwards as notes are played, resetting to zero when the count reaches a configurable limit, and the output modulation amount is a measure of how far the count is towards the limit. It is a polyphonic modulator, affecting instrument voices individually. I tested this by applying it to position offset in a Sampler instrument, and was rather confused to see the position marker jumping around in a fairly random manner, until I realised that this was Bitwig switching its visual sample display between the different voices as they triggered and expired. (I should have trusted my ears, which were telling me that everything was working as expected!) I should also emphasise that Note Counter actually appears to count voices rather than notes, so if you are stacking voices the counter will advance quicker than you might expect.

A more complex newcomer is a modulator called ParSeq-8, a parameter step sequencer. Bitwig Studio already has Steps, a step sequencer which can control a single modulation parameter. ParSeq-8 is a more complex proposition: each step (up to a maximum of eight) is its own modulation source, and can be applied to any number of parameters in the modulator's device (or for that matter in other modulators). By default, each step is independent: when the step begins, all of its modulations are applied, to an amount specified by a slider for the step; when the step finishes, all modulations are reset to zero, and the next step takes over. Steps can be disabled, and each step has a 'hold' switch which holds the modulations of the previous step unless the new step is applied to any of the same parameters. There's a control for shifting the phase of the entire sequence, and another for smoothing the modulation changes. And, again, aspects of the steps (on/off, hold, modulation amount) can also themselves be modulated. I found ParSeq-8 to be an immensely powerful way to generate new rhythmic ideas: find an instrument preset with a full set of remote control knobs (FM-4 or Phase-4 are good choices, since the controls tend to make drastic timbral changes, and if there are embedded audio effects, so much the better), create a clip with a simple repeating MIDI pattern, and then start arbitrarily modulating the remote controls with steps until something compelling emerges.

Lost In Actions

Clips in the clip launcher (as opposed to the linear arrangement) now support 'next actions' to allow playback to transfer between clips in the same track. After a set period of time once the clip launches, specified in bars, beats and ticks, the specified action fires. Actions include Stop (stop the current clip), Return to last Clip (return to the clip playing immediately before this one), Return to Arrangement (return control to the linear arrangement) as well as selection of first, last, previous, next or random actions. As well as actions which take place within the same contiguous block of clips in a track, actions can 'jump the gap' and target other contiguous blocks. However, there's no probabilistic selection of actions: each clip has one possible action at a fixed time. (I wouldn't be surprised to see a selection feature in a future release.)

A clutch of interface improvements have also made their way into Studio 3. Tracks and scenes now have variable width (though scenes have to be viewed horizontally for resizing), and scenes now support custom colours. In the arranger view, audio can be 'slid' back and forth without moving the enclosing clip. Support has been added for new controllers from Novation, Sensel and others. Textual hints for mouse actions are now provided in a footer area at the bottom of the application window, and if you have an external controller with knobs or sliders that can send control change messages, the state of these controls is also shown in the footer, colour-coded and labelled with the names of the parameters they are bound to. And a handful of existing devices have been given minor improvements.

Of course, there are invariably one or two niggles. In the standard vertically stacked launcher view, the scene column itself cannot be resized, so you can only see the first few characters of the scene name. (When working in theatre, I put dialogue cues into scene names, so they need to be long.) Audio files cannot be renamed. Remote control knobs cannot have their target range scaled (you have to use a modulator for that). And projects are completely independent, so if you make backup copies or distinct versions they all end up with a complete copy of all the audio assets. (But at least you can have multiple projects open at the same time to move material between them.) None of these is a show-stopper, more a reminder that every DAW has its own ways of working and its own interface trade-offs.

All in all, Bitwig Studio continues to advance by leaps and bounds. Version 1 was respectable, but version 2 brought the modulation system centre-stage and, in my opinion, repositioned Bitwig Studio as both DAW and fledgling modular synthesis engine. With 2.4, the Sampler instrument was reworked and enhanced, delivering granular and wavetable synthesis, and leveraging the modulation system to radically expand the program's sound design potential.

With the arrival of The Grid in Studio 3, Bitwig have knocked the ball out of the park. While it may not be the most powerful software modular in the world, the integration between The Grid and the rest of the DAW is deep and thorough, opening up creative possibilities and realising the full potential of the modulation system which arrived in version 2. Whether you approach Bitwig Studio as a DAW with a modular synthesizer at its core, or an extensible modular environment with multitrack recording and processing on the side — or both — this is an exciting hybrid design philosophy that calls out for new imaginative ways of working in response, and finally sets the application truly apart from the pack.

Checkout the SOS Tutorials video on Bitwig Grid.