Cardinal Drums – an 8 Channel Groove Box with SV Modular Kit for Bitwig Studio and Cardinal VST

Brought to you by https://soundcloud.com/EnigmaCurry

Example mixdown: https://soundcloud.com/enigmacurry/lurid-and-scram-cardinal-drums

This is a Bitwig Studio preset file (“Cardinal Drums.bwpreset”). Along with Bitwig, you must also install the Cardinal VST3 (free/open source) from:
https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/releases

Unzip and copy “Cardinal Drums.bwpreset” into your “~/Bitwig Studio/Library/Presets/Cardinal” folder (or you can just drag it into your project).

Channels:
* BD Synthetic Bass Drum
* SN Snare
* CH Closed Hi-hat
* OH Open Hi-hat
* TM Tom
* CR CompuRhythm 78
* AX Auxilary 1
* AY Auxilary 2

Sequencing is done entirely in Cardinal with uGraph or zOu MAi, selectively:

* uGraph is a self-generating drum sequencer like Mutable Instruments Grids.
* zOu MAi is a programmable sequencer like Elektron Digitakt.

Additional automation can be done from Bitwig Studio,
make sure to visit all of the 10 device pages …

* Switch between the two sequencers on the fly.
* The gates for BD,SN,CH,OH,TM,CR are re-routed to the selected sequencer:
uGraph OR zOu MAi (the OctaSwitch flips based on host param 8,
mapped to the uGraph “Enable” switch on the device).
* The gates for AX and AY are always connected to zOu MAi ch 7 and 8.

The BGA offsets have been fine-tuned for the kit CV (don’t touch!)

All the pitches are controlled per-step by zOu MAi CV1
(even when uGraph is enabled and producing the gates).

Known bug: zOu MAi does not save the pattern when you save the project. Treat patterns as ephemeral! Bounce tracks to audio if you want to save them.

Cardinal outputs the raw sound from the kit to Bitwig.
Control the filters, panning, sample selection, and mix levels
all from the Bitwig device pages.

Important device settings per page:

uGraph:

* Enable – If greater than 10% uGraph will self-generate gates for BD,SN,CH,OH,TM,CR. If less than 10%, uGraph is disabled and the zOu MAi will do all of the sequencing instead.
* Map X, Map Y, and Chaos – Control the uGraph algorithm to create new beats automatically.
* BD Fill, SN Fill, HH Fill – Control the density of the generated sequence per voice.

Level
* Control the level of each voice

Panning
* Control the panning of each voice

Tuning
* Control the tuning of each voice

Sample selection:
* Choose the sound for each voice

BD/SN CH/OH TM/CR AX/AY Filtering pages:
* Per voice Frequency, Resonance and filter type.

zOu MAi:
* Choose the current pattern (up to 8)

The device pages are designed to have each voice use the same knob on most pages, which is ideal for using with an external controller (tested on Ableton Push 2).

The Cardinal VST3 plugin outputs four stereo tracks to your DAW. These are split into 8 mono tracks using the Bitwig Stereo Split device placed on each track. These 8 sub-tracks are therefore two levels deep inside the device and are labeled: BD,SN,CH,OH,TM,CR,AX,AY. Each mono track is converted back to stereo and pannable with the Tool device on each track. Finally a standard Bitwig filter is placed on each track.