This is the first post in hopefully what might become a series in the long run about useful AI applications for music, meant for people who are not coders or data scientists. First, we’ll look at a very useful case: automatic (high quality!) separation of music to stems.
Outer Limits is a set of experimental tools and sound generators for Bitwig 4 and above. It includes 40+ highly specialised chains mostly based on the Grid. There’s not a lot of curated packs of presets for Bitwig around, so here’s a place to start!
Originally I have been creating these sounds for my own use, but since there’s been a bit of interest, I went through the (considerable) trouble of cleaning and setting everything up for a proper release.
There’s a glitch sequencer, additive and phase deformation synthesizers, pitch trackers, faux-analog saturation and dynamics tools, and so on.
I know many people are interested in this, and especially under Linux there’s not a lot of choice in commercial tools, so I decided to write this tutorial.
First of all, I want to say that in general I’m quite critical of tools like this for studio monitoring. No amount of corrective filtering can change the mass-spring characteristics of a headphone driver element. But I do believe that it can be useful to give at least more perspective. I assume that people reading this will know what headphone correction means, so I’m not going into any discussion on the fundamentals here.
The AutoEq project uses various freely available headphone measurement data to automatically calculate correction settings for both parametric and static-band EQ devices. It also creates impulse responses for convolution processing.
Continue reading Audio crafting #9 – Headphone correction with native Bitwig tools
With microtonal music the sound of intervals and chords can be more or less dissonant or alien-sounding. Partly this is due to us being used to hearning acoustic music in 12-TET, with timbres that almost without exception share the same harmonic series. The acronym stands for twelve tone equal temperament, where each octave is divided into twelve equal steps. The temperament has has dominated western music for the last hundred years or so. Before that all music was in practice tempered some way, to make chords and intervals more consonant for any given peformance.
Let’s venture deeper into the territory though, and look at the effect the harmonic series has on different tunings and scales. We shall construct a completely novel harmonic series based on the golden ratio instead of the usual integral series. We will also adapt our tuning so that the new timbre can be played consonantly. It will sound like this:
Download the project from here, if you just want to hear the sounds or use the additive synth.
Continue reading Audio crafting #8 – Xentonal and Xenharmonic tutorial for Bitwig 3.1+
In this tutorial, we will learn how to calculate semitone values for the individual partials in the harmonic series, and create a filter effect based on this, as well as modify this effect so that we can remove partials at will from sounds.
The tutorial assumes knowledge of Bitwig’s basic functionality.
Continue reading Audio crafting #7 – Harmonic effects for Bitwig 2.x
Originally this was just an experiment that got a bit out of hand, but eventually I found the instrument to be so useful to me that I went through the considerable trouble of cleaning it up for release.
Continue reading Audio crafting #6 – Poly modal impulse resonator synth for Bitwig 2.5This will be a tutorial on a way to create generative music on Bitwig.
It will sound like this:
Everything here is written from the point of view of version 2.5 and upwards. Later versions might have different tools with what to expand of this considerably (The Grid in V3, etc). There’s a link to the completed project at the end of the post.
We need:
Notes.
Pitches.
Movement.
Continue reading Audio crafting #5 – Bitwig 2.5 generative music primer
I saw many people requesting that Bitwig would get a native wavetable synth.
So here’s just how to do one yourself, and also load wavetables from Komplexer, Serum and other wavetable synths.
(Notice that this was written before the new Sampler with the cycles mode, which pretty much does this internally, so you’ll probably just want to use that! I’ll leave this here since Audio-Term is useful on it’s own right and great for generating wavetables!)
Continue reading Audio Crafting #4 – Building a wavetable oscillator in Bitwig
Hello!
Have you ever lamented how all synth sounds are so similar in timbre? And how sometimes using effects still fail to lose that uni-sound digital sheen on everything?
Today I will teach you the single most effective way to bring up and transform sounds in a mix that I am aware of, without using any effects. Continue reading audio crafting #3 – Physical filters
Hello, and welcome to the second installment of my audio crafting series.
This series aims to teach you about the fine craft of sound design by hand, and promote free non-commercial tools.
Ever wondered how it would be to be able to edit sounds in a more visual way just like paintings?
In case you are not yet familiar with the technology, I have good news: you can! Continue reading audio crafting #2 – Image editing of sounds