I use DrivenByMoss for Bitwig with Electra One, but I want to mainly use the Electra One to program my complex plugins with the visual layout of the 36 available slots per page, rather than Bitwig’s 8 encoders per page. Of course I can do this by midi mapping a single channel of 128 CC (105 to be safe from overlapping standard messages).
I would like to midi map every parameter in all of my plugins to their own presets, so I can use them like hardware. Some plugins have over 400 mappable parameters reported to Bitwig. I want to map them all for the purpose of programming INIT patches from scratch easily.
I can map parameters directly to my plugins or via Bitwig’s per-project mapping.
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to best do this?
I would suggest you ask this in the Bitwig discord, There is a “Controllerism” thread there with lots of knowledgeable people.
As far as I know , unfortunately, what you are asking for is not possible due to the limitations of MIDI 1.x that you mention. Maybe it’s possible to midi control some plugins with multiple midi channels, but that would have to be supported by the plugin developers. Bitwigs remote api is clever and capable, but is restricted to pages of 8 controls per page. Maybe when MIDI 2.0 gains adoption……
If you do find a solution, please post it here, thanks!
Thank you! Without any scripting, I’ve discovered that most plugin brands do not support multi-channel MIDI learning/mapping directly to the plugin. Arturia, Spectrasonics Omnisphere, and u-he DO support multi-channel MIDI learning, provided the DAW track passes the channel thru.
Bitwig will let you map more than 128 parameters (not sure of the limit) to the PROJECT level by channel, but theyre always active project-wide. So I can map all 12 pages of Electra One across multiple MIDI channels to Bitwig, if I saved a project per plugin. It does not report back the current state of the knob without scripting. This is less than ideal, but a worthwhile option none the less. This is looking like the best option for programming synths from scratch.
Using multiple MIDI CC note FX modules could be useful with scripting potentially. We’ll see.
The controllerism discord seems to be a bunch of like-minded coders having coding conversations above my head. They did point me in the direction of using Bitwig’s API controller script to maximize integration of plugins with bi-directional communication.
It can be done two ways:
Display and Control multiple pages of Remote Controls, by tagging the pages and referencing the page tags in the API script. I don’t want to do this because it relies on Bitwig’s generic labeling and layout… and I like Electra One’s more specific approach when programmed direct for each synth.
Controller Script made for direct MIDI Mapping contained within the script. This exists currently for 32 knobs, but its a fairly complex extension to modify.
Controller Script thru API direct to MIDI Learn. Theres some simple script to get this working bi-directionally for 7bit CC across 16 channels. I have this working, but the Toggle button bi-directional display are inconsistent on Electra One currently. I also have it working for Twos Complement relative Encoders (without acceleration) on faders only.
I’m going to have to learn a lot more about scripting than I honestly want to commit time to, but it does look possible to pursue any of these 3 options. My plan is to pursue option #3 and then get Electra One presets made for each of my synth plugins, saving a mapping for each plugin to a separate project as my Synth programming bubbles (and to save presets). I want this working 100% with Relative CC OR 14-bit absolute CC with acceleration… for fine control of the parameters.
Later down the line, I’d like to add the ability for Bitwig to ONLY control the focused device and map the plugins within my script.