When using physical modelling/hypersampled instruments (Kontakt, VSL, Spitfire, etc) it’s very common to change the articulation with a note at the very low end of the midi keyboard.
Eg:
C0 will give you stacatto
C#0 legato
Etc.
In Bitwig there is nothing to manage this and users are forced to actually write those notes.
What problem(s) would this feature resolve?
Using articulations with actual midi notes is inconvenient as it requires the user to either remember or look up which note will select the desired articulation and then find it on the piano roll. This would solve that by providing a more transparent way of visually representing the articulations and thereby making it much quicker and easier to automate changes of articulation.
How does this feature fit in Bitwig as a product?
It would make Bitwig more attractive to users of the many VSTs which use articulation switches. It is consistent with existing behaviour such as in Drum Machine wherein note lanes will be named after the devices on the pads to make it easier to see what each note is doing.
Is there already an alternative way to achieve this on Bitwig?
You can use midi notes already to switch articulations, but this is inconvenient for the reasons described above.
Could it be implemented using Bitwig components or APIs, without Bitwig team’s support?
No.
Could it be provided by a VST or something else reasonably integrated with Bitwig?
No.
Are there other products that offer this feature?
I think the best implementation I’ve seen is from Studio One where it’s called Sound Variations:
This feature is high on my wishlist! Fl studio has it also. In Fl studio there is third party plugin designed just for Fl studio pianoroll to use with articulations. It’s named Brso Articulate. You can map different articulations in different notes and then in Fl studio pianoroll, you can draw notes in different colors, each color representing different articulation. Hard to explain it here, but it works so good! Something similar definetly needed in Bitwig.
I second this feature request.
As a workaround : insert a Drum machine before the plugin, with empty but named slots : this will rename the notes in the piano roll. That’s convenient enough
You can build your own custom articulation manager, in detail, fit to your needs, right now. All you need is 20 bucks and a little bit of patience in building it. It isn’t hard, and it is actually quite fun, and rewarding, because it will be your personal manager, absolutely customized to your own needs. You can run Touch OSC on the same machine, so no need for an external android/iOS device, by the way. Also, Touch OSC can be of course controlled without a touch device, just by clicking, too. BUT: don’t get me wrong, i fully understand your feature request, and having it integrated like in Studio One would be much better of course. I just want to show you that there’s a (in my opinion) pretty good workaround which you can use right now, until Bitwig will implement the feature itself (which might take a while).
I’ve set an articulation manager that works really good : before kontakt, insert a note-fx-layer. Insert one empty layer (in order to play your notes), and one layer with a note-fx-selector. In each slot of the fx-selector, insert a midi channel mapper, and change convert chanel 1–>2 in se second slot, 1–>3 in the seconde one, etc.
