Hydrogen/SooperLooper hybrid

Programming applications for making music on Linux.

Moderators: MattKingUSA, khz

Post Reply
User avatar
Digital Larry
Established Member
Posts: 150
Joined: Thu Jan 09, 2014 5:25 am

Hydrogen/SooperLooper hybrid

Post by Digital Larry »

If you pay any attention to my posts, you may have noticed that I am all over the map.
#1 I don't really know what I want, other than to eliminate things that don't work well for me
#2 the journey is fun and sometimes I find the destination wasn't what I was after.

I found that Hydrogen as JACK master to SooperLooper works pretty well for some of the things I like to do. Set up a drum beat then record some stuff on top of it (guitar and bass loops). I did that for awhile yesterday and captured some ideas. Or, start with a guitar loop, time signature and tempo unknown, and try to fit a drum part to that.

The individual bits work OK but as there is no integration I still find it challenging. Even using "Ray Session" (similar to Non session Manager) I am trying to keep track of which drum loop went with which guitar loops and so on. So I think I probably want to realize a SooperLooper UI within Hydrogen and then combine the saved files so it's just "one thing".

Yes, I know you are going to tell me about Ardour and Reaper and Bitwig. Maybe one of those is the answer. I'll check out Bitwig as I've already checked out the other ones. Maybe I'm doing something wrong with these other programs, but I just like the drum grid in Hydrogen and the big looper panels in SooperLooper. I can have this on a laptop on top of my guitar rig and it feels comfortable and I'm not squinting at some tiny thing.

Yesterday I got a drum beat in Hydrogen, recorded a couple loops in SL, then wanted to add some reverb, and thought here we go again with JACK connections and so on, every single time. I know that Carla and Claudia and NSM and Ray Session are supposed to manage all that for you, BUT... it's still excessively complex. So I just took my simple drum beat and redid it in Ableton Live and went from there (now facing the other direction and looking at a 27" screen). That's actually OK as I need to remind myself what I am doing and why (since it obviously seems more complicated than it should be).

Ah so to get to the point here, I have half a mind to make a tab within Hydrogen that is a SooperLooper UI. Then I could more directly couple things like drum beat length, time signatures, looper sync mode, etc. At this point it's driven less by "I ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE THIS OR ELSE I CAN'T BE CREATIVE" (which is how I used to feel) and more of "well this will keep me busy when I'm not as creative musically".

Also as I said somewhere else, that could allow me to show an over/under view of the drum loop aligned in time with the loop waveform display so that I could make drum parts that more closely match the feeling of my guitar parts.
Post Reply