Bitwig has announced Bitwig Studio 4.4, incorporating Spectral Suite, which is now available to anyone with a current Upgrade Plan.
It was originally announced as a separate product, but based on customer feedback, has been rolled into Bitwig Studio:
“Anyone with a current Upgrade Plan now owns Bitwig Studio 4.4 and the four Spectral Suite devices. We will contact everyone who purchased Spectral Suite to offer a choice of a refund or an extension of their Upgrade Plan.”
Spectral Suite Devices
The Spectral Suite audio FX are tools for new sonic exploration. Each device focuses on a different musical element (like loudness, harmonic content, transients, frequency), and then gives you individual controls for those different aspects of a sound. Where you need detailed mix tweaks or creative sonic ruptures, this work is now possible within each sound.
Spectral Suite works in the frequency domain, which separates the incoming sound into hundreds of frequency bands for analysis. Each moment of a sound isn’t simply loud or quiet, for example, because there are always frequencies that are loud and those that are quiet. Bitwig does the math and then groups related signals into “channels”. From there, you mix the channels as you normally would: adjust the volume, move the panning, or insert any Bitwig devices or VST/CLAP plug-ins.
All four devices have an identical structure for each of their channels, and the same output section (with Pre FX and Post FX chains, as well as a Mix control for blending dry signal back in).
What makes each device unique are the musical/sound qualities it gives you access to.
- Transient Split – Transient Split divides percussive transients from tonal sounds.
- Freq Split – This device distributes a sound across four channels, like a set of filter banks.
- Loud Split – Loud Split separates the quiet, mid, and loud elements within a sound.
- Harmonic Split – Harmonic Split spreads harmonics into two groups, and collects non-harmonics into a third channel.
See the Bitwig site for details.
Good idea not posting this until after the debacle was over about having this as a separate add in product…anyway, Bitwig did the right thing in the end and this is now included to anyone who buys Bitwig or has an update plan and it is an amazing bunch of creative fx, really impressive and nothing else quite like it (as in you can put any FX in the split).
As a standalone product, it was pretty tenuously connected to the site’s focus, but we regularly cover DAWs.
Such in insanely impressive suite of audio manipulation tools– a sound-designers dream rig. Sort of at a Melodyne-DNA-level of ground breaking. On one hand it is cool that Bitwig can lay claim to this as it’s own powerhouse tool; but I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing such a thing was more broadly available as a standard plugin. I’m not going to start using a new DAW just to get at a few plugins.