From the course: Learning Bitwig Studio 3

Navigating Bitwig Studio's user interface - Bitwig Studio Tutorial

From the course: Learning Bitwig Studio 3

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Navigating Bitwig Studio's user interface

- [Instructor] Let's talk about the general user interface of Bitwig. So right now I'm looking at the Arrange panel. We can switch between our main views down here, between mix, and then we also have edit which is sort of like the piano roll if you're familiar with Logic. Now, the arrange view is sort of where you're going to see your tunes and your clips on a timeline. So time is a factor here. On the mix window, for example, this is where you're going to have different scenes and things like that, if you're familiar with Ableton Lives Session View for doing live performances and things like that. You can have different loops stored in these slots within your channels. So let's go back to the arrange view. I'm just hitting tab to go back and forth. We'll have our MIDI and audio clips arranged in the timeline here. Our tracks are on the left at the bottom. We have send channels which are going to have effects typically on them. And then we also have our master out. When I've clicked on a channel I can choose things like the color. I can look at its path in terms of the ins and outs. We also have our volume control. We have solo, we have mute, we have a pan pot. We also have the record enable button which doesn't really do anything on the master. Down here is where we're going to see our devices. So if I click on instrument, this is where we're going to see our instruments and then the effects and so on and so forth. All of the devices on the channel. And you'll see most of the settings here. If it's a stock Bitwig device, then you're going to see all of the settings just right on the front here. But if it's a VST, generally you're going to have to open it up and you'll see the VSTs interface in a separate little pop-up window. On the right-hand side, we have our browser which is really handy. So right now we're in the devices area. We can see all the device locations and it's showing me all of the devices that I have. So this includes instruments, plugins from Bitwig, third party, you can see I've got a handful of these. I know I have an issue. So, we can also pair things down using this browser. So if I say, hey, I just want to look at the Bitwig devices, I can go down here and I can see those particular Bitwig devices. I can also click category. I can say, hey, look, I only want to look at synthesizers. Okay, so these are the five Bitwig synthesizers. And if I go up here and click on this X on Bitwig I can actually see all of my synthesizers not just the Bitwig synthesizers. Isn't that fun? I love how easy this makes it to find things and to get moving. And if you really want, you can always just search. So if I want to search for the Polymer plugin, it's right there, okay? Now moving on, we have presets. We can browse presets in the browser. So let's say you want to just skip past looking at instruments or looking at different plugins for reverb or different synthesizers or things like that, you can say, oh, you know what? I need a fat garage bass. I don't even care where it comes from. There you go. You got it. But hey, you want to know where it comes from? It's down here. And then we also have the creator, Rick tick. We can also go ahead and browse our samples here. So we have a lot of different sample locations. You can set your libraries in that dashboard area that we discussed a moment ago. We can also look at the different collections and you can favorite things. It's really, really handy. I'm going to get rid of this polymer search 'cause that was blocking everything up. But you can see, there are a lot of samples here, okay? And then I bet you have even more living on your computer. These are just the ones that were downloaded from the old Bitwig cloud there in the dashboard. We also have multi samples. So these are sort of sampler instruments, sets of samples. We have different music. So let's say you want to put a music location in there to pull in things for your DJ set. You want to reference things. This is where you do it. You don't have to open up a finder window. And then we also have clip locations. So these can be MIDI clips. So this is really handy. Maybe you have like a drum beat that you like as a starting point. Maybe you have some chords that are a nice starting point. MIDI clips are being downloaded just as often as samples these days. So this is a handy thing to have. And then you just have your regular old file browser where you can see everything just in case you want to get thrown in the deep end there. Up top, we have our transport, we have our file menu. We have our playback menu where you have some of the preferences that are just handy for having an enhanced and quick workflow. Play, stop, record, the big three. We've got automation. We have all of our information, our counter information up here. We can loop. We can add tracks, just using this add button. We have edit. It's really, really simple to navigate Bitwig because some of the most important, most used things are right on the front there. And it's really, really easy to manage. If I hit tab, I'll have sort of a mixer view over here. Maybe some of you who have used Pro Tools or Logic are looking at this and you're like, oh yeah, this looks like a mixer view, except up here you're not going to be seeing the plugins. You have to click on the particular track to see the plugins, okay? So up here, these are actually going to be clips that we can fire if we're doing an improvised thing, a live thing, what have you, okay? Now the edit window is super handy and the edit window is basically something that you're going to jump to if you're editing MIDI, things like that. You can also edit audio events in there. And then we can see down below if we want using these sub menus, we can see our mixer on top of that. Or like, say for example, we can take a look at a clips automation by clicking down here. If we have one selected, we can show its MIDI notes. There are all these cool sub menus that are super, super handy so I can have my arrange view but also have the full mixer in front of me. It's really up to you. It's super customizable. And it allows you to be really serpentine in your workflow once you really get the hang of what's going on on all these screens.

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