After my first half hour or so playing with Bitwig and the E1, here’s some early feedback:
This is a very cool combination. Very inviting to turn knobs and play around. The workflow works and flows after spending your few minutes understanding how everything is organized. In my case I was also in my first minutes learning about the E1 workflow, but after the initial bump things startt landing into place. Thank you so much!
The shortcut pressing the three knobs is very convenient and easy to get used to. However, the entire knobs seem to be touch sensitive, which means that if you have your fingers in two knobs and you touch a third one accidentally, you may end up in a different screen by surprise. I’ll keep watching at this, to see whether the usability problem is resolved with awareness and practice.
Suggestion: a double tap on the knobs sets the value back to its default, just following what Bitwig does with the mouse. Especially convenient in pan and volume. Once you move the pan, it isn’t trivial to bring it back to exactly -50, and a double tap (equivalent to double click with the mouse) would be convenient.
Hi Moss,
do you have any interest in using more than 8 controllers of the Electra to simultaneously control parameters of different remote control pages in Bitwig?
For instance, it would be nice to have an Electra page with 3x8 controls mapped to three remote control pages of Bitwig and maybe use the 12 remaining controls for track stuff like level, arm, sends and next 3x8 controls…
The layout could be like this (o = remote control, t = track stuff/control):
o o o o t t
o o o o t t
o o o o t t
o o o o t t
o o o o t t
o o o o t t
I found a little script discussion on KVR for mapping 16 controls to two remote pages in Bitwig, but that is of course without automatically updating the labeling or bi-directional values on the controller:
Can someone tell me if that REAPER script is able to recall all the mixer parameters (volume, pan, send, etc.) when opening a project? So that everything remains in sync all the time.
I know it’s plugin-dependant when working with parameter plugins (and this is a pity), but I am wondering if this is also the case with the mixer (controlled by the script) or if it’s automatic (no jump values).
… I am still jumping to other pages accidentally. Especially from the Devices page, where it is more usual to be tweaking two knobs at once, one with each hand. Are other people finding themselves hitting three knobs in a row accidentally and frequently? If there is no way to differentiate top of the knob from body, another idea would be to require a longer simultaneous touch of the three knobs before jumping page.
Then, about the E1 in combination with the Launchpad Pro (I’m using Bitwig’s integration and I haven’t tested Moss’ one)…
The Launchpad Pro side works as expected. If you are in i.e. Notes and i.e. Polymer in Track1 is selected, that’s what you hear when you press the pads. If you select a different track with the E1 and you land in a different device (i.e. FM-4 in Track 3), the Launchpad Pro just follows and the pads now play FM-4. Very well, two controllers complementing each other.
The other way around isn’t as smooth, though. If you are in the E1’s Device page, tweaking knobs for Polymer Track 1, and then you change to Track 3 with the Launchpad Pro, the E1 will be still stuck in Track 1 Polymer, instead of moving automatically to Track 3 FM-4. Ideally the E1 would follow the Launchpad pro just like Launchpad Pro follows the E1, being both always in sync.
Regarding knob touch, it is already on my todo list to make this configurable.
I tested the track/device selection in both direction with the Bitwig an my implementation and it works fine.
Check if you enabled “PIN” on the Electra device page, then it will not change.
I have a few questions regarding E1 used in REAPER mixer (please note that I don’t have an E1 yet) :
Is it possible to create a remote control page only for specific named tracks?
Example 1 : whatever their order, I want those tracks to be control on the same page (DRUMS, GTR, PNO, VOX).
Example 2 : I want all the tracks containing the term “BUS” on the same E1 page
If I hide a track from the MCP, is it also hidden from the E1 mixer?
is good news because we can use snapshots to do whatever we want to approach 1.
Another question, please: can we have 3 rows of 6 tracks to control volume/pan on the same page, instead of only 6, which is not enough in mixing sessions?
I have another question: is it possible to control REAPER track controls (the plugin parameters that we manually put in the TCP, one by one) in the same way we control Bitwig device/track/project remote controls?
Bitwig track/project remote controls will be supported in the next release. Since these map to track controls in the Reaper version, yes, this will be work soon.
