AI is everywhere, so why not in Bitwig?
NO, I’m NOT proposing an AI tool which would autonomously create music!
I’m suggesting something like SIRI but as AI: Wiggy!
It would have two main purposes:
24/7 private tutor! Always available, you can ask it about Bitwigs functions, about general music theory, synthesizers theory, about things you don’t understand in the video tutorials, etc.
while you’re composing and there’s something which you don’t know how to achieve, you can ask Wiggy “hey, I’m trying to make this part here sound more xyz, how can I do it?”.
Wiggy will analyze your file, look at what instruments and effects and settings you’re using, and suggest you what to try.
Or maybe you’re like me and you get your ideas by doing rhythms and weird sounds with your voice, but then you have no idea how to recreate that with synths & Co, and you can ask Wiggy to listen to your demo and help you out.
And if one day finally Bitwig will have an integrated audio-to-midi (my ideal creative tool), Wiggy could be at its core!
What problem(s) would this feature resolve?
… Bros, I’ve been CRAVING to create electronic music since so long, I’ve tried Ableton, then Bitwig, but it’s always so overwhelmingly complicated, and I’m not good at learning by myself with video tutorials. I need something conversational but a tutor costs so much…
Wiggy would greatly help people like me but also pretty much everybody to faster and better learn how to use Bitwig and so greatly increase the UX satisfaction about even the most complicated functions, therefore also ultimately significantly increasing sales
How does this feature fit in Bitwig as a product?
… It would perfectly complement both the video tutorials and the help tools, integrating with pretty much Bitwig as a whole.
Is there already an alternative way to achieve this on Bitwig?
… NOPE.
I refuse to consider videos and help prompts as even remotely comparable to Wiggy.
Nothing compares to Wiggy!
Could it be implemented using Bitwig components or APIs, without Bitwig team’s support?
… In your dreams.
Could it be provided by a VST or something else reasonably integrated with Bitwig?
… You wish.
Are there other products that offer this feature?
Not that I’m aware of.
If there are tell me and I’ll sell my Bitwig license immediately and buy that one no matter how much it costs.
tbh, for this AI tool to actually understand what Bitwig can do in relation to how every possible combo can sound, it would take forever to train I’m afraid. if we take Synplant for example, it was developed by one guy as I understand, and he used his own system with powerful GPU for machine learning, and it took like a month to train on each iteration of the synth, despite it having rather simple engine and not too many paramters to tweak. although Bitwig could probably afford more resources, and only train their AI for release versions, it would still probably take too much time and resources, even with more modern and scalable hardware.
this is just my thoughts as to why we don’t see anything like this yet. it’s one thing to have just LLM built-in, and completely another to have it multi-modal, trained on actual good quality audio for feedback. I don’t know how much optimization on model itself needs to happen, but even recent DeepSeek ‘miracle’ is not miracle enough for such use cases, as it’s only a language model and it still requires lots of resources to run locally with decent results. Without being multimodal, that is also being trained on audio, it won’t be able to help with actual tips on how to recreate sounds you feed to it. And such feature would make it impossible to run locally with current technology.
I don’t think so.
I don’t have concrete technical or statistical knowledge to prove my claim, but I think that with what they can do now, painting, creating videos, super real deep fake, coding, designing chips which we don’t even understand, etc, if you feed them technical knowledge of music theory, synthesizers theory, all the history of music from classic to modern, and Bitwig’s user guides and tutorials (videos too, if technically possible), it shouldn’t be difficult. Definitely possible.
But hey, at least it could start as a virtual tutor.
I mean, not as a composition assistant able to tell you what you could try to get the sound you want, but at least as a conversational (ideally voice, but text would already be something) virtual tutor to learn how to use Bitwig.
Like an AI version of the user guides and tutorials.
I swear this would give me so much immediate impulse to try again.
I get a knot in the solar plexus when I think about trying to learn my myself again.
the only thing you could implement with current progress is just LLM that would give you some tips with possibility that it’ll hallucinate and assume something that’s not acutally possible or doesn’t exist in current Bitwig version. I also doubt it could make sense of and keep track of some changes that happened from one version to another (if it’s trained on tutorial videos among other things), where things may work a little different, depending on what version you use.
current ‘AI’ is absolutely prone to produce garbage in one from or another, maybe not every time, but it can happen anytime, so it’s not something you can depend on. especially with coding, if you’re not expert yourself, you won’t be able to make anything complex work with it.
that’s sad to hear, I feel like I get most of the joy from music/sound design when I learn by myself. sure, there are tons of ‘dead ends’ to learn, but even that is not useless.
Well, I don’t have enough knowledge to either confirm or deny your perspective.
But correct me if I’m wrong, I understand that you refer mostly to the more complex “composition assistant” aspect of Wiggy?
I presume you’d agree that the mere virtual tutor to learn how to operate Bitwig is already more than feasible?
It wouldn’t require the complex training and thinking ability as the composition assistant.
It would just be a conversational information giver, which would imo immensely lighten the load of the learning phase.
I’m glad for you, I wish I had that ability.
No idea if it’s ADHD or fear of failure or the dark side of being a compulsive perfectionist, or a mix of all, but whenever I start learning something so complex and new to me, and each thing I learn is connected to and at least in part dependent on many other things which I haven’t learned yet, like a Matrioska where you don’t know how many more layers of complexity are left…, I feel like if a weight is pressing me down more and more, and the initial fun and excitement fade away while my mind feels increasingly foggy and heavy.
And I quit. Every time.
In theory I could try to focus on each step and keep it simple and maybe entirely renounce to some aspects like mastering/mixing and concentrate on composition/creativity.
MAYBE that would work.
Atm I gave up on learning a DAW, and I’m trying to find someone with enough technical knowledge who’d want to make a duo with me, where I contribute with my creative ideas (I’m really good there) and they fill-in with the technical aspect of making it happen, while also being more than welcome to bring their creativity.
Just, where I live there’s not many people doing electronic music.
Long distance isn’t impossible, albeit limiting, but Bitwig doesn’t have a remote collaboration feature like Ableton afaik?
I just wanted to give more context about why Wiggy could be an immense help even only as a virtual tutor in cases like mine, although imo it would help pretty much everybody…
stuff like AI being able to analyze the audio you give to it and even give some advice on what you can do based on what it picked up, that’s definitely not something you can expect in a DAW anytime soon, way more complicated than ‘plain’ LLM’s.
As ‘tutor’ and interactive manual? to some extent maybe possible, but it would demand huge resources if run locally, which is not at all what you want when working with real-time audio processing. idk if Bitwig can afford infrastructure to provide such feature cloud-based.
afaik Ableton doesn’t have anything like that either. Bitwig supports Ableton Link, which provides alternative to midi synchronization between devices, Link can work across local network. But this is more useful for jamming with friends IRL, or utilising more than one PC or piece of compatible gear.
All the tools for online collaboration currently exist in form of plugins, that allow more midi and audio data transfer, but not project data. Bitwig actually announced that they would deliver online collab feature before 1.0, along with some other features that were never implemented, but I bet they didn’t want to ship half-baked solution, and it’s a complicated thing to pull off.
You can do this with a custom gpt or something, I tried. It’ll be pretty useless, hallucinate lots and is far outmatched by simply ctrl+f ing in the manual ^^
I think what you want need is a teacher, a human one.
