BITWIG 6.0 Beta Announced
Bitwig have announced their latest 6.0 beta, available now to anyone with an active plan. Version 6 seems to be focussed around polish and workflow rather than new devices or fun “toys/gimmicks” that I tend to enjoy writing about more. While new devices and effects are always fun, there have been many calls from the community to bring Bitwig up to par with other DAWs when it comes to standard workflow options.
This update brings improvements to automation, clips, and editing, as well as one of my personal wishes, full dark backgrounds for all editors. I know it’s not much, and honestly a petty complaint of mine, but I always found the light grey midi/audio/timeline editors to feel incongruent with the rest of Bitwig’s UI. This new style just makes working within Bitwig a bit more “immersive” for me.
AUTOMATION
The new automation updates add several features. There is now a “hold” option for automation nodes, allowing you to create steps from single nodes rather than 2 nodes per step.
We also get some a “probability” range per node, allowing us to set a range of possible values for that specific point of automation, perfect for generative production.
Automation clips allow you to take the same midi/audio loop and apply various automation to it. Perfect for mixing and matching a collection of different motions to different musical patterns rather than having to create entire clips for each variation.
CLIPS
Clip aliases are likely the most exciting feature added. These let you make changes to multiple instances of the same clip, much the same way a looped clip would behave. If you have multiple non-aliased regions that contain identical data, you can select them and consolidate them into aliases allowing you to make changes across a project. This is perfect if you want to edit things like velocity or groove later in the production cycle.
You can also make sections “unique” if you’d like to add variation. Additionally, you can swap out entire loops for other aliases.
This opens the door quite a bit for experimentation in song writing, essentially, you could throw together a basic structure template, and go through things to mix and match lower level content while retaining a complete song structure.
Obviously this has the issue of ending up with very predictable composition if used too often, but in the context of DJing, where you might want some predictable layouts. With composition for media such as film and games where you might need to hit certain cues, this can allow for easier iteration of musical ideas.
There is of course more in this update, I see some potential editing improvements and key signature stuff. My favorite new feature might be step input recording. I’ve already ran into one complaint, and that is automation nodes pushing old nodes out of the way, you may like this behaviour, I think I’d prefer it mapped to a keybind. That said, there does seem to be a “detent” region where it snaps to the node rather than pushing it away. It’s a very small complaint, but things like this come up in use over time. I also noticed that the automation clips seem to always follow the midi clips, meaning there doesn’t seem to be a way to get random midi on top of random automation.
You can read more from Bitwig’s own official update post: https://www.bitwig.com/whats-new/
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