Bitwig Studio 3

We take our place on The Grid with the latest version of this inventive DAW, and discover that good things really do come to those who wait…

Six years in, Bitwig Studio finds itself fully bedded in as a prominent fixture on the DAW landscape. Conceived and developed by a team of former Ableton employees, early comparisons of this slick audio/MIDI production system to Live were inevitable and easily made. Nonetheless, the innovations it introduced at launch (9/10, 203), including FX nesting, pernote automation, and the attention-grabbing simultaneous Arrangement and Clip views, were enough to set it on its own path. And the numerous v1.x and 2.x (9/10, 243) updates that followed continued the trend with the addition of an amazing freeform plugin modulation system, voice stacking and more.

However, there’s one particular Bitwig feature that’s always been notable by its absence – and it’s a biggie. The company have repeatedly maintained that one of their primary goals with Studio was the integration of a fully modular device design system, enabling users to build their own instruments and effects directly within the DAW. The aforementioned modulation architecture of Version 2 hinted at the potential for such a scheme, and now, half a decade later, the dream has finally been realised with Bitwig Studio 3, and the results are nothing short of phenomenal. Say hello to The Grid.

Module citizen

Any iterative review of Bitwig Studio 3 is inevitably going to be a review of The Grid, as the rest of the new additions are comparatively minor. So that’s what we’ll be focusing on – see What else is new? for a run-down of the rest.