The Radial Gesture Menu

To both create a quicker touch-screen workflow and preserve screen real estate (by only showing information and interfaces when they are needed), Bitwig Studio has created the unique and starkly intuitive Radial Gesture Menu.

When pressing various locations of the Bitwig Studio interface, a ring of options will appear around your finger (or stylus). By presenting shortcut buttons above, below, to the left, and to the right of your finger, you can then simply drag thru any of those action icons to engage that particular function as you continue dragging your finger.

As you will find, there is a level of consistency between the Radial Gesture Menu configurations. For example, pressing and then dragging right tends to create an object, while pressing and then dragging left often engages an eraser mode for deleting objects.

On top of the cardinal directions, an additional, partial outer ring of functions will appear when appropriate. This comes in handy particularly when you have clicked on an object which you will be acting upon. These outer ring items are meant to be pressed by a finger that you haven't used yet.

The beauty of this system is that once you become familiar with the swipe patterns, you may start moving your fingers before the Radial Gesture Menu even appears on-screen. And if you do so, everything will work totally fine and even quicker.

The context here is important so the following images serve as good "shortcut charts" while you are getting comfortable with tablet computing.

When pressing on a track's header, these options become available (including the option to move your finger slightly to the right to access a vertical track volume fader):

When pressing in the Arranger Timeline Panel either on blank space or on a clip, the following options become available:

When pressing in the Clip Launcher Panel either on an empty slot or on a launcher clip, the following options become available:

Working with notes in the Detail Editor Panel is particularly flexible, providing different menu configurations when you press down in a blank space, when you have notes selected, or when you have made a time selection. In these cases, the following options become available:

When pressing in a track's device chain within the Device Panel, you can press down either on empty space or on a device, making the following options available:

Within the Tablet display profile's Play View is a drum interface that provides drum pads on tracks using the Drum Machine device. On those drum pads, you can press down either on empty pads or on loaded ones, making the following options available:

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