Description

This is a collection of heavily specialised experimental tools for Bitwig 4 and above.

PLEASE NOTE THAT “OUTER LIMITS” HERE IS ACTUALLY A REFERENCE TO THE EXTREMELY HIGH CPU USE THAT MANY OF THE SOUNDS FEATURE. Simply put, say good bye to your DSP headroom, explore the final reaches of your free CPU cycles.

It’s best to treat many of these tracks like you would an external modular synthesizer. Tweak, bounce and forget. Another option is to use a very low polyphony and voice stacking number while writing, increasing these only for the eventual bounce.

A programmable glitch sequencer, additive synthesizers, searing leads and visceral bass sounds for those secret forest gatherings and cosmic festival experiences. Flexible tools for microtonal work, which allows finetuning of the individual partials for optimised spectra that minimise dissonance

Selected utility devices which allow analog-like saturation of signals as well as radical morphing of transient dynamics.

Relatively stable pitch trackers which allows morphing solo voices with synth sounds and the turning of them into pithc tracked arpeggio patterns. There is even a fractal based melody generator which creates infinitely morphing melodic sequences with very little input.

Novel ideas like the “unobtainable” basic waveform that only has even partials unlike the traditional saw/sqr pair often offered by subtractive synthesizers. “Neon saw” which is a saw wave where the detune setting is progressively stronger for the higher partials, which allows detuned supersaw-like bass and lead sounds which reatain focus around the fundamental frequency.

Most of all though I wanted to create an inspirational toolkit which is like a launch pad into the deep space of extreme Grid programming verging on the limits of madness.

There is no separate documentation to support the kind of optimisation for microtonal scales which I referenced above, but I have written a tutorial that is a good primer). For an even better resource, check out the incredibly interesting and insightful book by William Sethares. There is also a Facebook group, where the PDF can be downloaded, since the price of the print version is highly prohibitive. I’m under the impression that Sethares is aware of this group and quietly approves the sharing of the bookm but don’t quote me on this.

Prepare for excess!

Along with the presets come new and slightly updated versions of my presets which are included with the Wündertute sound pack in Bitwig. The updates are minor (LFOs etc were updated to current versions, a few very minor mistakes were fixed here and there, etc).

Here is a video actually explaining the Mutant Fist preset a bit:

Another one, detailing the synthesizers and the general design principles behind them:

Finally, here’s a gallery of some of the Grid devices. I’m sorry they really didn’t always fit on my screen even at the lowest zoom level. The additive setups tend to take up a lot of screen estate.

To read the captions on mobile, click on the bottom part of the image, anywhere else it will load up the full image.