Recording and overdubbing MIDI - Bitwig Studio Tutorial

- [Instructor] All right, so I've opened up this acoustic drum kit here. And let's find the starting point. (drum beat) Man, it's amazing. There is so much room sound on this drum kit, it actually felt like it was coming out of my speakers. (drum beat) So let's say that I want to record some MIDI, let's do it. If we go over to this play menu here, we have a couple of just very simple parameters that are really going to make a big difference. First of all, we can turn the metronome on and off. Here, all right? Just on playback, which is really handy. Okay? You can also turn the metronome on and off here, just for reference. Now, I'm going to leave overdub turned on for now, we're not going to worry about automation. I have a one bar pre-roll which means it's going to count in one bar for me. Now, default launch quantization is going to make it so that if I'm somewhere in the vicinity of a beat, then it's going to quantize that starting point for me. Let's go ahead and leave these actions and delays and so forth off. I'm going to leave recording quantization off. I want it to leave the passion of my performance. So let's go ahead and get it going. 120 is a little fast for today, let's do 97. That's like Tribe Called Quest territory. So I'm going to hit record to arm it. And then I can either hit the space bar or click on the play button there. So I'm just going to play kick and snare here. (drum beat) All right, so there is some latency. You're not imagining that. We're going to edit that soon, so don't worry about it. But right now I might want to add a hi-hat. So I'm going to make sure that my overdub is turned on. What that's going to do is that's going to allow me to add my hi-hat. (cymbal crashing) There's that closed hi-hat. I'm going to add that, on top, without deleting what I already have in there. So let's go ahead and do that. Overdub is on. Let's go. I'm going to use the space bar this time. (drum beat) Now, this performance does need some work. Don't worry, we'll get there. But, first we just want to record everything, get our ideas out, and so forth. So that's my simple two-bar loop. Just use the little tool there to shorten the region so it's a nice even two bars. I can turn on loop here and just listen to it on a loop. (drum beat) And if I want to, destructively, punch in, then all I do is go ahead and I turn off overdub. And what that'll do is it'll make it so that if I record somewhere, it's going to delete whatever was there before. Keep in mind, this is a MIDI thing and not an audio thing. If we're overdubbing with audio we'll just create a new track, okay? So let's say I want to just add something really simple on top of that. I'm going to go ahead over to my presets. Let's go to Bitwig. Let's go to the category. I'm going to call it... Pad. Let's just do something really sort of simple and fun. Analog rain. Whoop, got to create a new track first there. I'm going to hit Cancel there 'cause I actually already found what I'm looking for. Cancel rather. I'm going to hit Okay without selecting a preset because I have found the preset that I want over here. So let's just drag that on in. Analog rain. (ethereal music) All right, so I'm just going to go ahead and record that. And by the way, if I have my loop on I can just hit record and it'll stay in that loop. So here we go. (ethereal music) All right. So, I've recorded my cord here. Let me just overdub it with a higher note. (ethereal music) All right, here we go. (ethereal music) Well, I made a mistake. I'm going to hit Command + Z, which will only get rid of that most recent pass. One more time. (ethereal music) There we go. (ethereal music) All right, obviously, we're a bit of a mess right now in terms of our timing. We will deal with that. I'm not playing badly intentionally, but I'm not not playing well unintentionally. Let's just put it that way. We got to talk about MIDI editing. We'll get there, don't worry. But that's our basic middy recording and overdubbing.