LinuxMusicians

Wow! What a great response.

I think that I'll download the kits for Hydrogen and stick with that, as I know it reasonably well already.

The only thing I'm not sure of, is say I want to add some reverb to the high-hat, and only the high-hat, I can't find a way to do that. I can pipe the whole drum kit through, say, Calf Reverb, and it sounds great, but the bass drum might be a little too "reverby" for instance.
Is there a way of adding effects to single drums?
When I return to do more on the song in Ardour, do I have to connect all the effects to Hydrogen all over again?
If I add effects in Ardour, the next time I open the song, the effects are at the same levels I left them at. With Hydrogen being an external application, obviously it doesn't save which effects have been connected through Jack Connections.
Also, once I have the sounds/patterns/song set up in Hydrogen, do I stream the audio of that back into a track in Ardour for the "finished product"?

I hope some of that makes sense!

dchurch24 wrote:The only thing I'm not sure of, is say I want to add some reverb to the high-hat, and only the high-hat, I can't find a way to do that. I can pipe the whole drum kit through, say, Calf Reverb, and it sounds great, but the bass drum might be a little too "reverby" for instance.

Some drum plugins are able to output separate audio channels per drum. I'm not sure if Hydrogen will do that, but Drum Gizmo will.

Another possibility is that you could try using a low cut filter on the reverb to reduce the muddy sound on the bass drum. Dragonfly Reverb has a built in low cut feature, or if you really like Calf reverb you could put a separate low cut in the effects chain after the reverb.

Thanks for the ideas.

So, if I were to use Drum Gizmo, wouldn't I end up in the same situation as I was with the LVI plugins (ie. pattern editing inside Ardour)?

dchurch24 wrote:Thanks for the ideas.

So, if I were to use Drum Gizmo, wouldn't I end up in the same situation as I was with the LVI plugins (ie. pattern editing inside Ardour)?

Yes.

Ok then.

What a shame.

I suppose I'm really after the ease of the pattern/song building in Hydrogen with the functionality (fan out) of the drum plugin inside Ardour.

dchurch24 wrote:Ok then.

What a shame.

I suppose I'm really after the ease of the pattern/song building in Hydrogen with the functionality (fan out) of the drum plugin inside Ardour.

Maybe you can combine best of both worlds by using a session manager like NSM. That should be able to start Hydrogen and Ardour as a saveable and restorable session.

Hydrogen can do one output per instrument. Go to Tools > Preferences and click on the Audio System tab. Tick the box create per instrument outputs. Now you can add tracks in Ardour for each drum, and join them up using the JACK patchbay, accessible through Catia if you use Cadence, or Patchage or the patchbay in QJackctl.

merlyn wrote:Hydrogen can do one output per instrument. Go to Tools > Preferences and click on the Audio System tab. Tick the box create per instrument outputs. Now you can add tracks in Ardour for each drum, and join them up using the JACK patchbay, accessible through Catia if you use Cadence, or Patchage or the patchbay in QJackctl.

Oh! Just checked (on the Windows version - I'm not at home where I use Linux), and yes, I see it!

That sounds like it might actually do exactly what I need to do.

Thank you very much. Itching to get home and play now!

Just wanted to say...thank you.

That works brilliantly! (well almost, I can't hear the drums when the record button is pressed in Ardour, but I'm sure I'll work it out).

The only difference to creating a midi channel with the aforementioned drums is that there's obviously no "fan out" option, but that's a small price to pay.

Cheers!

You're welcome.

If you've got that working you may have realised that it is now difficult to change the level of the drums as a whole. It's possible to get the kit balanced with itself, but how do you turn the drums up and down to fit in with the rest of the mix without having to laboriously change the level of every drum?

Add a stereo bus and call it 'Drums'. Now on the Ardour mixer go to the bottom of all the drum channel strips and click on where it says 'Master'. Change it to 'Drums in'. Now you can use the bus fader to put the drums up and down as a whole.