Music often includes patterns of motifs. A widely used example would be a drum beat that plays the same 1 bar beat for 3 bars followed by one bar with a little variation or a break.
The ability to split clips into “subclips” and let them play at some pattern (e.g. AAAB) would greatly improve the workflow for such patterns.
For small changes this is similar to Operators. Things like an open Hi Hat instead of a closed one at the 4th bar, are one of the main use cases of Operators . But this gets messy quickly if the changes are more drastic. (e.g. a completely different melody in the last bar).
What problem(s) would this feature resolve?
This would be a simple workflow improvement. When working with such clips, it would be much faster and less prone to error if one could edit the motifs i.e. subclips directly.
How does this feature fit in Bitwig as a product?
This is somewhat of an extension to the newly introduced operators and thus would fit nicely in the current direction of development.
Is there already an alternative way to achieve this on Bitwig?
- Using multiple clips and Clip Next actions in the clip launcher
This works fine but requires the double amount of clips and thus is not comfortable, especially on a hardware controller. - Using Operators:
Like described above for small adjustments operators are the perfect tool. The request would more be aimed at drastic changes, which would get very messy using Operators.
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?
Many Drum Sequencers offer a simple AB Pattern functionality