The Edit View

Now that we have exhaustively covered both the Automation Editor Panel (in chapter 9: Automation) and the Detail Editor Panel (in both this chapter and chapter 10: Working with Audio Events), we can now take a look at the Edit View, the last of Bitwig Studio's three views.

As we've discussed before, each view is a curated layout of Bitwig Studio's panels that is meant to serve a particular musical task. The Arrange View is purposed for assembling music, placing the important Arranger Timeline Panel centrally and giving you access to all panels around it. The Mix View centers around the Mixer Panel, focusing on the mixing board capabilities of each track while also streamlining the Clip Launcher Panel to facilitate improvisation.

Both of these views are oriented to show your project's tracks side by side, letting you craft a balance between them. But the Edit View is focused on the details of single tracks and clips.

The description just given and the image above should both be familiar at this point. The Edit View has two central panels: the Detail Editor Panel with an optional Automation Editor Panel fused beneath it. Aside from their positioning and the Automation Editor Panel view toggle, these panels work exactly as we have already learned them.

This combination allows you to focus on either the track or clip level so that you can work with the note/audio events contained there, the attached expressions, and the automation all beside each other. And putting the Detail Editor Panel front and center gives you much more display space for seeing more notes at a time — or, in the case of layered editing mode, more tracks. These are all welcome additions to the toolbox.

As a final point, the Edit View also strengthens the utility of display profiles. Since these profiles are meant to enable you at various stages of music production, you can probably imagine situations for having the full project on one screen (the "big picture") so that you can select a single clip or track and have its contents presented on the second screen (the "close up"). Again, once you scratch the surface, you will find uses for these functions in your workflow.

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