What a Year! A New Year's Toast from Bitwig HQ

Before we wring out the old year and ring in the new, we want to look back at what we achieved in 2022. Consider this a New Year's toast from Bitwig HQ!

For us, it was the year of audio FX, as all three updates that landed in the past 12 months introduced new ones. 4.2 proved that “We Do FX” with Chorus+, Flanger+ and Phaser+, not to mention the long-requested addition of Note Grid to design your own note signal pathways. Convolution and Delay+ followed in 4.3, and none of us will soon forget the launch of our Spectral Suite audio FX bundle.

No release is complete without a sound package and complementary videos. Notes In Bloom (4.2), Perfect Drift and Bitwig Impulse Responses (4.3),  Outer Spectra (4.4) ,and last week Orchestral Woodwinds dumped hundreds of new presets, note clips and audio content into our ever-expanding factory library. Over in video land, we explored the concepts of Note Signal Flow and Voice Stacking, and we showed you how to build a Powersynth or your own, personal Stewart Copeland within the Bitwig ecosystem.

We also debuted a series of videos with Richie Hawtin demonstrating his hybrid live/DJ setup using Bitwig Studio and custom API scripts for his controllers. Come to think of it, live performance with Bitwig became a theme of our conversations with musicians this year. Electro stalwart Carl Finlow shared his workflow for using Bitwig Studio in his sets, as well as his decades-long journey from vintage music software Music-X to Bitwig Studio. Likewise, audio-visual artist Keijiro Takahashi told us about his early days using tracker software and how he now combines Bitwig Studio with the game engine Unity to create 3-D live experiences. From the studio side of things, Yuri Urano gave us some tips on patching in The Grid.

Of course, we couldn't have gotten through the year without a little help from our friends — both those who joined the Bitwig Circle (Cableguys, Splice, and AskVideo) and those who contributed to the launch of the new plug-in standard, CLAP. We offer a huge round of applause to our collaborators at u-he, and to those soon joined the party by releasing their software via this new open-source format, such as AudioThing, VCV, Audio Damage and more.

And a BIG THANK-YOU to all of you who supported Bitwig in this very busy year. Now it's time to collapse into a warm pile of blankets for some rest and relaxation before we hop back to it in January. Bis bald!

The Bitwig Team