18 May
2009
18 May
'09
10:14 a.m.
Hi Crypto,
I'm a Hydrogen dev, and am copying it to the hydrogen dev list. I invite you to
continue the discussion over there.
Crypto wrote:
I was stuck by the fact that an otherwise great
application like hydrogen is
unable to perform a simple thing such as playing a fill-in via MIDI, although
it offers plenty of ways to play all sorts of MIDI sequences (I compare a fill-
in to a sequence here). I know that hydrogen offers some commands such as
"start" and "stop", but that is not enough for what I would like to
do.
hydrogen is like Edward Scissorhands without the human hands he should have
received. hydrogen could do it if it only had a more advanced MIDI handling.
Or to put it short:
Play a sequence as a fill-in: use computerkeyboard or mouse to start playing
it.
How can I do the same thing in a live play environment from my MIDI organ?
Fiddling with mouse and notebook keyboard is no useful option.
The development version (and possibly 0.9.3) of Hydrogen has something very much
like this, although it's totally undocumented as of yet. When you put Hydrogen
in Pattern Mode and allow "Live" mode or "Stacked" pattern mode, you
can trigger
individual patterns to start or stop playing based on MIDI input. In addition,
Hydrogen responds to MIDI program change events... mapping the program change to
the pattern that you want triggered.
Note that this is very similar to features provided by the sequencers seq24 and
non-sequencer, as well as live looping programs like freewheeling and sooperlooper.
* To get pattern mode, there's a widget at the top
where you switch between "Song" and "Pattern".
* To get "stacked" pattern mode...
On the left, there's a listing of all the patterns
that are currently loaded. At the top of this list,
and on the right, is a button called "stacked mode."
Click it so that 3 lines appear (this enables stacked
mode).
* Using the GUI, you can add/remove patterns from
the "currently playing" list by Ctrl+Click-ing
the pattern. The pattern will start playing
on the next cycle (not immediately).
* Using MIDI, sending a program change will select the
pattern for the next cycle. I don't know how well
it works with stacked mode, and I think the patterns
are numbered starting with 0, 1, 2, .... Pattern #0
is at the top of the list.
I've only recently discovered this feature... and I've never used it -- so let
me know how it goes.
FWIW, I'm not a fan of using a PC for this... should have been a CC... but it is
what it is. :-)
HTH,
Gabriel