[LAU] Hydrogen questions

[Folderol]

On Tue, 28 Dec 2010 13:31:18 -0600 (CST)
Brent Busby <brent at keycorner.org> 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.