How to connect Roland e-drums with audo interface and Hydrogen?

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colablicken
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How to connect Roland e-drums with audo interface and Hydrogen?

Post by colablicken »

Hi everyone, a total noob here, trying to set up Hydrogen/MIDI.

I'm currently struggling with setting up my Roland TD17-KV electronic drum kit to work with Hydrogen. My setup is like this:
* Roland TD-17 drum module
* Nativ Instruments Komplete Audio 6 MK2 audio interface
* my laptop (a Tuxedo running Manjaro) with Hydrogen
* Input mode set to drums
* MIDI driver: ALSA
* Input: the audio interface, output: the audio interface

Connections are:
* USB cable going from the audio interface to my laptop
* MIDI cable going from the drum module's MIDI OUT to the interface's MIDI IN
* Headphones in the interface's phones jack

What I want to achieve is that my drum module doesn't play the samples anymore, but only sends MIDI information through the interface to my laptop, so I can use custom audio samples, record my playing, and so on.

The setup I have described above leads to no detected MIDI signals in Hydrogen, though.

Some more observations:
* When playing a demo project, I can hear the sound on my headphones.
* I can also see the MIDI light of the interface flashing when I hit a drum pad.
* Hydrogen *does* recognize the MIDI input when I connect it directly via USB to the drum module.

Is there anyone here that has a similar setup and managed to get it running? Or maybe the way I have set things up doesn't make sense at all?

Thanks
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milo
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Re: How to connect Roland e-drums with audo interface and Hydrogen?

Post by milo »

I've never tried to record midi in hydrogen, but I have used a similar Roland kit with LMMS and it worked fine. The unit I used had a direct USB midi out.

Maybe check if it is a midi channel problem?

Also try recording midi from the drums in another linux app like lmms, qtractor, etc.
colablicken
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Re: How to connect Roland e-drums with audo interface and Hydrogen?

Post by colablicken »

Thanks milo,
Maybe check if it is a midi channel problem?
How would I go about that? Maybe there is a good blog post or tutorial video that you can recommend? I wouldn't know where to start to be honest.

I will check out LMMS, thanks for the tip.
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Re: How to connect Roland e-drums with audo interface and Hydrogen?

Post by milo »

I think channel 10 is standard for drums, as in here: https://rolandus.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/a ... _site=true

I am not a midi guru, though.

Also you might find your answer in the Hydrogen manual: http://hydrogen-music.org/documentation ... #sect.midi
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Re: How to connect Roland e-drums with audo interface and Hydrogen?

Post by merlyn »

colablicken wrote:* MIDI driver: ALSA
I take it then that you're using ALSA only. How are you with the command line? You can use aconnect to see what MIDI ports are available. Here's a sample output on my machine :

Code: Select all

$ aconnect -l
client 0: 'System' [type=kernel]
    0 'Timer           '
    1 'Announce        '
	Connecting To: 128:0
client 14: 'Midi Through' [type=kernel]
    0 'Midi Through Port-0'
	Connecting To: 128:0[real:0]
	Connected From: 128:0
client 20: 'Hammerfall DSP' [type=kernel,card=1]
    0 'HDSP MIDI 1     '
	Connecting To: 128:0[real:0]
	Connected From: 128:0
client 24: 'Hoontech SoundTrack Audio DSP24' [type=kernel,card=2]
    0 'MIDI-1 Hoontech/STA DSP24 2'
	Connecting To: 128:0[real:0]
	Connected From: 128:0
   32 'MIDI-2 Hoontech/STA DSP24 2'
	Connecting To: 128:0[real:0]
	Connected From: 128:0
client 129: 'Hydrogen' [type=user,pid=9091]
    0 'Hydrogen Midi-In'
	Connected From: 128:0
    1 'Hydrogen Midi-Out'
	Connecting To: 128:0[real:0
I've got two soundcards in this machine and Hydrogen is running. If I want to connect the Hammerfall card (client 20) to Hydrogen (client 129) I would type :

Code: Select all

$ aconnect 20:0 129:0
I use JACK most of the time, so if that doesn't work report back and we'll see what can be done.
colablicken
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Re: How to connect Roland e-drums with audo interface and Hydrogen?

Post by colablicken »

Thanks merlyn and milo, I will try this out ASAP! I code for a living, so I'm somewhat familiar with the terminal. :) I'm just getting started with all this audio stuff though and I really underestimated the complexity.
Yesterday, I have tried to connect my drums and the interface to a friend's MacBook and it worked OOTB (we targeted Pianoteq though, he didn't have another software at hand). We then tried Pianoteq on my laptop and it worked very well, too - even with pretty decent latency. That was a major relief to me, now I know that the hardware setup works. So I'm confident that I can make the software side of things work sometime in the upcoming week. I will report back once I had the chance to test it.
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Re: How to connect Roland e-drums with audo interface and Hydrogen?

Post by colablicken »

Hey everyone, quick update. I tried `aconnect -l` and it already showed that the interface was connected to Hydrogen.

```bash
nico@tux ~ # aconnect -l
client 0: 'System' [type=Kernel]
0 'Timer '
1 'Announce '
client 14: 'Midi Through' [type=Kernel]
0 'Midi Through Port-0'
client 20: 'Komplete Audio 6 MK2' [type=Kernel,card=1]
0 'Komplete Audio 6 MK2 MIDI 1'
verbunden zu: 128:0
verbunden von: 128:1
client 128: 'Hydrogen' [type=User,pid=4664]
0 'Hydrogen Midi-In'
verbunden von: 20:0
1 'Hydrogen Midi-Out'
verbunden zu: 20:0
```

However, I mitigated this when I got hands on a very cheap Macbook Pro from 2017. There I put in the drum module directly and it worked OOTB in Garageband with very good latency. I have sold the interface then and I will now mess around with the Macbook... Although I'm not really a fan of the look and feel of Apple, I'm not ready to invest this much time in setting this up on Linux when it's such a PITA.

Thank you very much for your help, though. :)
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Re: How to connect Roland e-drums with audo interface and Hydrogen?

Post by colby65 »

I read that Hydrogen is good for this. I tried using it but I found that I have to manually bind each midi note to a sound, which is annoying but workable. I couldn't get Hydrogen to interpret the velocity of the drum hits this way which I can't do without. I also found that the hi hat sends the same midi note whether the pedal is closed or open. Is it possible to get these things to work? And if so, how? I also read that I can use Drumgizmo for this and I'm going to try that next but I feel like I might face the same problems there and that I might be missing something simple that could make this work.
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Re: How to connect Roland e-drums with audo interface and Hydrogen?

Post by milo »

My guess is that your workflow will be easier with DrumGizmo. Another thing to try is AVL Drumkits LV2, which should be easier still. Watch the demo video here: http://x42-plugins.com/x42/x42-avldrums

If these two tools don't interpret velocities and get the hi-hat right, then I don't know what will.
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