Re: [LAU] Hydrogen questions

On Tue, 28 Dec 2010 13:31:18 -0600 (CST)
Brent Busby <brent@email-addr-hidden> wrote:

> My old MPC2000 (non-XL) is starting to act oddly, and it has got me
> thinking about whether I should even continue depending on the Akai
> hardware, which generates rock solid sequencer time, but is eventually
> going to be unmaintainable, and leave me with a lot of sequences and
> sample libraries in various odd proprietary formats.
>
> So while I'm working on getting my MPC working again, I'm also checking
> into the possibility of replacing its usefulness with a mixture of
> Hydrogen, Jack, Linuxsampler, and Ardour. There are a few questions
> though:
>
> 1) This is probably pretty basic, but...can you send each
> drum/instrument in a Hydrogen kit out a different physical audio
> output in Jack? My whole setup is very much based on physical
> hardware -- a real mixer board, real rack effects, etc. I haven't
> heard a Ladspa plugin yet that offered EQ that really satisfied me
> much, and I'm used to being able to do EQ on my mixer from the 10
> outputs of my MPC, individually, per track, and also using rack
> effects from the effects loops and a real hardware patchbay. I could
> keep doing that if I can send individual Hydrogen tracks out to audio
> outputs on my RME Multiface. I could also add more outputs as
> needed. It'd be ideal if you could just route individual tracks to
> hardware outputs via Jack.

Not directly but you can have multiple instances of hydrogen so your could send
groups of sounds to different effects.

> 2) Hydrogen seems a lot like the Roland TR-series drum machines, based
> on putting notes on "ticks" on a grid. I didn't see much mention of
> free-form human feel drumming though. Is there a way to just not
> quantize at all, and realize at least a standard 96 ticks per quarter
> note type of resolution (or more)?

It accepts normal MIDI messages, so an external keyboard can directly control
it, so can a sequencer like Rosegarden.

> 3) Also, all the discussion of entering rhythms in the documentation
> seemed to involve using the QWERTY keyboard, which obviously isn't
> going to be velocity-sensitive. Is there a way to have an outboard
> synthesizer keyboard (or even better, my Simmons drumset with Roland
> PM16 pad-to-midi) play or sequence Hydrogen patterns via midi, with
> full velocity sensitivity? QWERTY keyboard is an awful way to have
> to sequence.

See above!
 
> 4) If these are things that are beyond Hydrogen's abilities, would I be
> better off trying to go through Muse or Rosegarden to achieve these
> things? Or maybe just stick with hardware samplers for now? I'm
> mostly attracted to the idea of doing sampling and sequencing on FOSS
> software rather than on hardware samplers because the saved data
> doesn't have orphanhood in its future that way.

See above again :)

> Any ideas on how best to go about making Linux audio software replace an
> Akai MPC?

Not a clue - never had one!

-- 
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.
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