BITWIG 5.1 Beta

Bitwig have just announced a new public beta, 5.1 update. This update brings new distortions, filters, minor quality of life improvements, a new oscillator, and improved voice stacking. It’s not an official release yet, so I’ll keep my thoughts short, as features and problems are subject to change. I have to say the new distortions are a pretty major addition, loads of new flavors to play with and add texture to your sounds. The new filters are probably the biggest change: Ripple, Rasp, Fizz, and Vowels all add multiple peaks and tones to a previously basic filter collection. The new Filter+ device hosts all of the filter and distortion types that you can find in the grid. It’s nice to have these all in one place and makes them easier to explore, I’m hoping a “Distortion+” device is on the way in a future update. The new “Sweep” device hosts 2 filters with a distortion between them so you can easily crossfade between filter types. Each of the new filters are far more complex than previous options, with different ways to focus the various filter shaping. The new oscillator is called “Bite” a hybrid fm/sync/pw/am tone generator which gets some fairly raspy and digital sounds.

Finally, my favorite addition, the expanded voice stacking, previously you could only stack up to 5 voices in bitwig, and these could only be spread evenly to controls. They’ve increased the voice limit to 16, giving a much wider range of sonic possibilities and puts voice stacking on par with other software unison such as Vital/Serum. If you’re a little confused right now, this is unison voice stacking, not polyphony, so for any given note you can have up to 16 voices of unison and this applies to all oscillator types. Swarm would simply multiply by 16. Using the “voice info” grid module or “stack spread” modulator, you can apply unique control values per unison voice. This basically makes grid a 16 partial additive synth. One of my favorite tricks in vital was to use voice spread on wavetable position and other oscillator parameters, but now this trick is possible with an entire instance of the Grid. If you want to get surgical, the two new voice focussed modulators allow you to pinpoint individual unison voices rather than applying an even spread to control destinations.

This update really brings a lot to the table, the new filters and distortions are available in the grid, and the devices explode into grid view just like polymer too. I’ve just noticed that voice stacking applies to both note and fx grids as well, opening up some interesting doors. There’s a few mixing options for voice stacking in the grid as well as some new toggle switches, which fill some important but minor rolls that haven’t been easily possible. All this plus some mixer and clip editing additions will be coming in the update as well. I’m really looking forward to this one to get past the beta and into official release, in the mean time I simply have a separate copy of bitwig saved to my desktop exclusively for testing. Check out Bitwig’s announcement and feature list here: https://www.bitwig.com/whats-new/