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When I was relatively new to using Bitwig I found that I wanted to have a more intimate sense of what how the Touché was working with native devices in Bitwig and with VST instruments. I had been inspired to do this after seeing that several other people had done similar things, but the most promising of leads was a YouTube video which was in French (and my French is barely conversational). This video showed that what I wanted to do was possible, but I did not understand the signal routing being used and could not get it to work.
So I built my own setup. It is remarkably basic.
In Bitwig (v5.2.5) you first you need to create a new instrument track and at the bottom of the inspector panel you need to set the monitoring (tiny speaker icon with pull down menu) to "All ins". Make sure that the speaker icon is illuminated to indicate that it is active. If it is not then you will likely not hear any results.
From there you need to add some MIDI modulators which are mapped to the four primary CC data channels of the Touché (CC16=Down, CC17 = Up, CC18=Left, and CC19=Right). These can be assigned however you want so that you can get the performative expression that works for you. You can mix and match however you wish - so in some cases I might have more than one axis modulating the same parameter. This requires much experimentation and practicing the voice so that you can get it to react in a way which brings life to the instrument.
I have also seen some cases where an Note Grid is placed upstream of the instrument (VST or Bitwig stock device) and you can have further signal processing inside to modify the signals being passed through to the voice. If you should decide to do this you will need to disable the Control Thru routing of the Note Grid. If you leave this enabled then you will get conflicting CC data which will make the resulting signal jumpy and erratic.
Above you can see how I set up the Note FX Grid with CC signal management. You can add some smoothing with the Average (Level) nodes and the Curve (Shaper) nodes to act as a transfer curve for the incoming data. The great thing is that you can manipulate these in a great many ways to achieve interesting results. Much as you can with Lié, but natively inside Bitwig.
If you like what you have set up and want to reuse it then you should consider making it a preset. If you have included the FX Grid into the signal processing then you will need to group the Note Grid and VST together by first selecting them and then right click and choose "Group". This packages the different parts into an Instrument Layer which can be then saved as a preset.
I have found that when I record a performance with lots of expression in Bitwig that it is best to not loop the playback and to halt recording so that you don't accidentally overwrite your CC data when the loops back on itself.
It also seems that if you use the native Bitwig method as described above that you will have far less CC data in your tracks vs continuous data on every time tick. This makes it way easier to clean up and manually edit things should you with to. It also means that there is enough organic muscle input "noise" and variation that you can fairly convincingly bring lots of life to your performances.
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