Writer and educator Dave Linnenbank gave a synthesis workshop for Bitwig at Superbooth18, looking at modular, analog hardware beside digital phase-manipulation techniques. www.bitwig.com
mainly just messing around currently and trying to better understand Bitwig, especially the Phase4! These videos are really helpful and I hope they make more of them.
53:00 This is an interesting phenomenon I read about, and experienced myself. Although not stated explicitly it seems that when you present a certain series of harmonics, the ear (= rather our brain) creates a 'phantom' fundamental: you hear (experience) a ' sound' that isn't there. With headphones I regularly experience very low frequencies that my headphones never could produce.
On a deeper level I wonder whether this ' skill' is something we are born with ('wired'), or that we develop it during childhood, hearing 'natural' sounds (harmonics) every day. I guess FM sounds are not that natural and on an even deeper level of thinking I start wondering what the effects might be on our hearing and brain of experiencing 'unnatural' sounds on a large scale. Just speculating.
I had organ lessons at school, and one thing I learned was that if you want to produce a very low pedal note you play a fifth. For example, the lowest C and the G above it, both pedals together... and the listener hears a phantom C that's an octave lower. Effectively the same phenomenon, I think!
lost me at the very beginning of the video when he said phase modulation is the same as frequency modulation to the user.... You gotta be deaf to not hear the obvious differences between the sound of pm vs fm
I'd really like to know why the harmonics were in pairs with higher ratios. Was it something to do with aliasing? By the way I recognised those PD wave diagrams because I used to have a CZ101 and I still have the manual somewhere...
The Bitwig community has been very good about sharing information, and techniques from what I can tell. I have only been using it for about 7 months, but for every question I have thought of I have found an answer for very quickly.
Fantastic! All principles of sound synthesis are connected because they are take thier own pick out of the box of the general building blocks of sound. It is very difficult to find information on synthesis in which not the gadget is the message (to paraphrase Marshal Mcluhan) but the principles of sound as a whole, thus taking the gadget back to it's proper place; that of a tool. This make sthis masterclass to a real gem. What I for intance learned hereis that Casio style Phase Distortion was basically equal to dynamic reading of static wavetables which builds a bridge between the very first digital "static" oscillators (for instance in Yamaha's E-series Electones) and the first digital music computersynths. That small realisation isin itsef is already an important insight to me because creates a some dots in my holistic concept of sound and the further one gets the more difficult it becoes to get to such Eureka moments. So thank you Mr. Linnenbank for this great workshop full of such wonderfull notions. I wish I could have been there.
The reason I came here is because i wanted to know some more about FM synthesis. After watching videos and tinkering around with some plugins, watching the behavior and profile of the sounds in spectrum analyzers and oscilloscopes it turned out that what you think you'd see is not what you do see, because what is called FM actually is PM. Like it is said in the video, I understand it does not matter for the resulting sounds, but it feels weird that your imaging tools can't show/match by what you're supposed you are doing. I hoped I would see the difference between FM and PM in the scopes (no criticism, but now it stays a bit obscure to me).
Hi! Been using BW since 1.0! Quick question - can you explain if there’s a way to generate a trigger signal using the Steps modulator? Maybe a combination of modulators? I would love to be able to sequence eurorack style instead of in clips. Thank you!
You can sample a trigger from one of your eurorack modules and use that. It will have to be played at high volume from one of your audio interface outputs
Cocker I want to be able to produce triggers from the steps modulator to sequence the bitwig drum machine, that way I can use the output of the steps modulators in two ways, if any of the steps is on then it sends a midi trigger and the level of each step in the modulator can be a cv signal for modulation purposes. What do you think? I could sample a trigger, already have one actually, but not sure how you mean I could use that. Thanks!
Alex Senf stay tuned for bitwig three. I believe all of your problems will be solved then! It will be extremely easy to create gate and trigger signals. Looks like it’s going to be amazing!
