Richie Hawtin Bitwig Crash Course

US DAW runthrough with free custom scripts 08/07/22

Techno aficionado Riche Hawtin is known for being passionate about technology, and he's recently spoken to Bitwig Studio about his workflow in the modular-friendly environment. He goes into detail about the setup, explaining: "I found that the thinking behind Bitwig -- how I could use plug-ins and modulators (or, later, Operators and Note Receivers and Audio Receivers) to pipe things all over the place -- was very similar to how I'd always recorded," In the article, he offers some custom scripts for 808 style sequencing. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

I first heard about Bitwig probably right after they launched, like 2014 or 15. I was intrigued from the very beginning. It took me some years to keep an eye on how the program was developing to version 2 and then to version 3 -- and that was the right moment for me, with the feature set and also for what I was looking for, to completely take the plunge and go "fully Bitwig." Something drew me back to opening up Bitwig and playing around again, which wasn't happening with other software.

The real plunge into Bitwig happened during Covid. Everyone knows me as being a technology freak and always looking to the future, but I come from the analog world. I feel much more at home with traditional 909s and synthesizers, and although I had done a couple of albums mostly digitally, it was a really hard process. And so when Covid came, it was just the right time for me to dive into Bitwig. I spent nearly two months rewiring this whole studio in a way that was similar to how I recorded in the 1990s, with a lot of analog gear, piping it through Bitwig and other programs and rediscovering how I like to make music.

I really needed and wanted my workflow to be more digital because I wanted to go back into the Plastikman direction. That meant not only making an album and a live show, but also experimenting with virtual reality, and that entails digitizing as many of my movements while performing. I wanted to create pipelines between my creative process and other situations, and that was a big push to jump into Bitwig because it had that kind of architecture. Then The Grid came, and its flexibility really spoke to me and the way my brain works while I'm in the creative process.

Read the full interview, and watch him perform on the setup over on the Bitwig page: https://www.bitwig.com/stories/200/

More Richie Hawtin news on his Website

About the author [midierror]: midierror makes nifty Max For Live devices, innovative music hardware, award winning sample packs and hosts a podcast speaking to people in the music world.

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