Well the vibe I’m getting from various people’s comments seems to match my own first impression: It’s nice, but it’s not $400 nice. Not yet at least. Also it didn’t take me long to remember why I hated programming drums in piano rolls.
in some next hours… i love it.
So fast and clean.
same here. To a tracker user’s eye, regular DAWs and drum programming seem to be existing in some kind of primordial stupidity, for decades. And what’s weirder still is how nobody’s bothered with that, at all.
Well… “nobody” 
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Exactly. Other instruments, piano roll is fine. Heck, for 2 handed instruments like piano I even prefer piano roll. But after tracking drums there’s not going back, I can’t go back… no matter how much I would like to have audio tracks, I’m not going back to programming drums on a piano roll.
IMO programming drums on piano roll is only bad if too much not used “note-lanes” are visible at once. I don’t know if Bitwig supports it, but Ableton and e.g. Reaper are able to reduce the number of note lanes. And if there are only 3-5 note lanes, it’s comparable to a step sequencer. And in this mode drum programming is even better than in a tracker: everything is compact and one can see all elements related too each other.
Moreover, all trackers have a huge disadvantage compared to piano roll: modifications of note start position and length are really cumbersome to do in a tracker. E.g. Renoise: it’s totally easy to create a beat when all notes are quantized to 1/4,1/8,1/16. The same with the note lengths. BUT: if those positions have to be altered because of swing, groove, human feeling, etc. the trouble starts: you have to modify the delay column, modify the note-off events and so on. AND the worst: you have to do this note for note. It’s not possible to micro-shift or lengthen a group of notes.
Totally different in a piano roll editor: just press shift, select multiple notes and fine-adjust the start position, or note-length. Also DAW’s like Ableton and Bitwig are capable of applying groove patterns to a number of notes, which are non-destructive.
Think about that, and don’t forget that the most important factor in drum programming is the groove / human natural feeling. Think a little more and you will see that a tracker is not better for drum programming
Just my 2cent
The piano roll in Bitwig can hide lanes for unused notes. It’s the tiny button with the “F” in it (“hide irrelevant notes”) in the left lower corner of the roll.
^ I didn’t realize some DAWs had that feature, I might have to revisit some sequencers. That actually was one of my biggest gripes. Can you label the note lanes, like “kick” and “snare” etc.?
Just had a quick look as well. I like the overall modular approach a lot! You can easily build very powerful instruments. Everything can contain everything. For drums, for instance, you can put samplers (or any other instrument) into (virtual) drum pads. For layering you can first put several samplers into a layering device and then this one into the drum pads. Beautiful! And the sampler is pretty powerful, too (more powerful than the Renoise sampler…)! I couldn’t test it on Linux, though, since they only support 64-bit Ubuntu (and they call this Linux support…a bit funny). But if this will work for me, and once I know more about their updating policy, I might actually consider getting this…
The only downside of Bitwig is that I now have too many DAWs, and I seem to spend a lot more time on learning stuff than actually being creative. 
Still prefer Renoise as my electronic “instrument” and probably should focus on it instead of being all over the place.
For what its worth, I started using Excel as my main compositional tool,
then later translated to Renoise, after a hefty chunk has been written in Excel.
Which probably means in early speculation, that I could just do it paper and pencil,
with a few select charts as guides, possibly printed out in the size of a deck of cards.
The idea is that I shouldn’t be trapped by a single DAW model, including the update loop.
For me, Renoise has the best update loop in terms of price for features,
which means I can actually look at other things music related or not,
without the thought of ill maneuvers to get that “thing” for free.
This whole DIY music game from an instrument buyers point of view becomes a logistics game,
quite possibly involving not only financial matters, but my moral decision making as well.
Just my personal thoughts, take it with a grain of salt.
It is, except that you can only shift one direction, so if you’re on the first line and want to offset backwards a tiny bit you can’t do it without going to the previous pattern. Negative track delay can usually take care of that handily though.
since you’re talking about it now, my concerns and why i was using fl studio lately…
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when i record my keyboard playing, i just record something like 30 or 60 minutes. i don’t know if/how to do this in renoise, getting one piece in the end, so that i won’t have to glue parts together (i think i could lower the resolution/ppq and increase pattern length, but i don’t know yet what’s a good way there…). is there a way to do long midi recordings in renoise at all?..
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in fl studio i record my playing with drifting tempo, i don’t use the metronome at all (i’m to bad, or i play different songs just because). then i shrink/expand the parts i like by a non-integer number, that O-handle on the right side will allow me to make it fit to the rhythm
so, in fl studio you don’t have to worry about these two precautions when doing a midi recording. if renoise could provide that, wow. i mean, not by changing the tracker at all, just by:
- record as long as you want
- shrink/expand by a non-integer (maybe implement that O-handle from fl studio?)
yeah, that’s been on my wish list for ages. The only real disadvantage of trackers is the lack of ‘self-expanding’ pattern, which expands as you record. If only, oh, if only Arguru’s Aodix was not abandoned… It was the only tracker with so much innovative stuff, including infinite patterns and pattern calls.
shrugg, Toїvo:
For long midi recording sessions I recommend this tool:
http://www.renoise.com/tools/auto-clone-patterns
That’s true for one note shifted to the right. Shifting multiple notes at once, or shifting to the left - as mentioned from Carbonthief - is the problem.
Interesting, I like your approach. Composing outside the box should give at least different - probably better - results.
I read an interview with Rob Hubbard – Wikipedia lately. Hey composed everything on piano and transfered the result finally into C64 SID tunes.
Nvm, way tool late.
I don’t think you can rename the regular piano roll’s lane labels, but if you slice samples to the built-in drum machine (or put samples manually), I believe the lanes are named after the slices/samples. Haven’t tested this yet, only seen here in this video (which is all about making drums):
Yes, seems that renaming of note lanes is not possible (it’s possible in e.g. Reaper). But one can use seperate tracks for Kick,Snare,etc. and then Fold them together. That’s awesome.
Apparently there is no way to route any MIDI signals in or out of Bitwig Studio via JACK-MIDI or ALSA-MIDI on Linux. This is very disappointing…