I figured out a way to create dedicated articulation mapping for Orchestral VSTi's in Bitwig (current version of Bitwig at this posting is v5.1.3)
Behold, clearly labeled, independent articulation mapping along side your performance MIDI in Bitwig!
Now this takes a bit of work/housekeeping, but the good news is once you have a VSTi mapped, it's done and you can recall the articulation mapping indefinitely via a saved patch afterwards.
The setup involves the VSTi that needs articulation mapping, a Drum Machine Bitwig device to control it's articulations, and then it all comes together with Bitwig's Layered Editing abilities.
So open a new Instrument Track that will be your designated articulation mapper for a VSTi and insert a Drum Machine onto it. The Drum Machine has a panel to the left side of it that allows you to load samples in from E-2 up to G8. Navigate to the correct octave pad layout where your keyswitches exist, double click a slot, select "OK" without loading any sample into the note # slots needed. Then rename the slots as you want them to appear in your articulation mapping lanes via the slots inspector panel. Once you have all your labeled articulations loaded into the proper corresponding Drum Machine note # slot, point the tracks output to the VSTi track that needs articulation control.
How this works is we are going to utilize Bitwig's Layered Editing option in the Piano Roll. It's that tiny button in the bottom left corner of the Piano Roll editor.
And that's basically it! You can assign a shortcut key to toggle Layered Editing on/off, and this is essentially going to be our "show articulation lanes" for this application.
You work as usual, and can keep your main note performance track clips free of articulation note data. This frees you up to quantize, select all, etc without having to fear of messing with where articulation note switches are placed (they usually need to be placed slightly before a note.) When you want to insert/edit articulations, you go into layered editing mode, bring in the Drum Machine channel to the view along with your VSTi, and change the view to Drum Machine Piano roll so only relevant notes/options are in the roll. Now all you see is the notes that are input, articulation lanes, and everything is nice a close together for editing. (Refer to the top picture of this post.) The articulation lanes are clearly labeled. These are two separate tracks being edited together, the VSTi performance track, and the articulation track, and you can "lock" either one so "select all + quantize" won't affect the locked one etc.
To learn more about Layered editing in Bitwig, I suggest reading the manual and watching a few videos explaining it. I won't put all of that into this post as it is already a wall of text as it is haha. This mode comes in very handy for composing in general. You can view another track/tracks MIDI notes in the background for reference, or bring multiple tracks together to edit them all simultaneously in the same piano roll. (very handy for velocity across multiple tracks etc)
It's not as good as integrated articulation mapping, but it works! In some ways, it's actually better, at least for me personally, because of how closely only the relevant inputted notes and articulation options are viewed when you switch to the Drum Editor roll for reference to do your edits vs an entire Piano Roll with vast empty spaces where note data doesn't exist. You can of course just stay in the Piano Roll, and your articulation mappings will be all the way down at the bottom of the roll (most keyswitching in VSTI's exist starting around C-1 to C0 far away from where the playable samples are mapped.)
This is a repost of a post I made on another forum, but I figured this community would be interested in knowing that Bitwig has this workaround for articulation mapping.
Cheers
Behold, clearly labeled, independent articulation mapping along side your performance MIDI in Bitwig!
Now this takes a bit of work/housekeeping, but the good news is once you have a VSTi mapped, it's done and you can recall the articulation mapping indefinitely via a saved patch afterwards.
The setup involves the VSTi that needs articulation mapping, a Drum Machine Bitwig device to control it's articulations, and then it all comes together with Bitwig's Layered Editing abilities.
So open a new Instrument Track that will be your designated articulation mapper for a VSTi and insert a Drum Machine onto it. The Drum Machine has a panel to the left side of it that allows you to load samples in from E-2 up to G8. Navigate to the correct octave pad layout where your keyswitches exist, double click a slot, select "OK" without loading any sample into the note # slots needed. Then rename the slots as you want them to appear in your articulation mapping lanes via the slots inspector panel. Once you have all your labeled articulations loaded into the proper corresponding Drum Machine note # slot, point the tracks output to the VSTi track that needs articulation control.
How this works is we are going to utilize Bitwig's Layered Editing option in the Piano Roll. It's that tiny button in the bottom left corner of the Piano Roll editor.
And that's basically it! You can assign a shortcut key to toggle Layered Editing on/off, and this is essentially going to be our "show articulation lanes" for this application.
You work as usual, and can keep your main note performance track clips free of articulation note data. This frees you up to quantize, select all, etc without having to fear of messing with where articulation note switches are placed (they usually need to be placed slightly before a note.) When you want to insert/edit articulations, you go into layered editing mode, bring in the Drum Machine channel to the view along with your VSTi, and change the view to Drum Machine Piano roll so only relevant notes/options are in the roll. Now all you see is the notes that are input, articulation lanes, and everything is nice a close together for editing. (Refer to the top picture of this post.) The articulation lanes are clearly labeled. These are two separate tracks being edited together, the VSTi performance track, and the articulation track, and you can "lock" either one so "select all + quantize" won't affect the locked one etc.
To learn more about Layered editing in Bitwig, I suggest reading the manual and watching a few videos explaining it. I won't put all of that into this post as it is already a wall of text as it is haha. This mode comes in very handy for composing in general. You can view another track/tracks MIDI notes in the background for reference, or bring multiple tracks together to edit them all simultaneously in the same piano roll. (very handy for velocity across multiple tracks etc)
It's not as good as integrated articulation mapping, but it works! In some ways, it's actually better, at least for me personally, because of how closely only the relevant inputted notes and articulation options are viewed when you switch to the Drum Editor roll for reference to do your edits vs an entire Piano Roll with vast empty spaces where note data doesn't exist. You can of course just stay in the Piano Roll, and your articulation mappings will be all the way down at the bottom of the roll (most keyswitching in VSTI's exist starting around C-1 to C0 far away from where the playable samples are mapped.)
This is a repost of a post I made on another forum, but I figured this community would be interested in knowing that Bitwig has this workaround for articulation mapping.
Cheers
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