Hydrogen: hihat openness

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Quirq
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Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by Quirq »

Is there a way to program hihat openness within Hydrogen?

At the moment I'm having to do all programming except hihat openness in H2, export a midi file, then automate the hihat in Ardour. It'd be good to be able to do everything within H2 if possible and only import into Ardour once everything (hihat included) is finished.
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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by bluebell »

When I last checked Hydrogen the instruments had mute groups. So if you want to stop an open hihat by a closed one then this might be the way to go.

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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by Quirq »

Thanks but this isn't anything to do with mute groups.

The openness of a hihat can be controlled by a particular MIDI CC (I forget the exact number), triggering different samples depending on the CC value. The samples I use have seven or eight degrees from fully closed to fully open: I'm not at my DAW so I can't remember whether it's actually degrees of openness or degrees of closedness! The sample set has pedal, open and closed samples and one or other of open or closed (I forget which) has the varying degrees in between fully open and fully closed.

There doesn't seem to be any way to programme a MIDI CC alongside the usual programming of drum hits in Hydrogen, unless I've missed something – that's ultimately what I was asking.

I can draw automation in Ardour, but it would be good to be able to hear differing degress of openness whilst actually programming in Hydrogen.
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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by ssj71 »

IDK about hydrogen but I know an SFZ can be written to do this. The HISE tool might be a good one to assist in that too. With an SFZ you'd have to host the samples in linuxsampler but you could then have Hydrogen output midi to LS (I have done that before).

Sorry my post doesn't really answer your question, but I've been looking for a drum kit with better hat expression so I had to comment. Where did you get the sample set?
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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by Quirq »

It's SFZs that I'm using. I'm used to programming in Hydrogen, been doing it longer than Ardour has had MIDI support and I particularly like the ease of entering velocities compared to Ardour.

I have the SFZs loaded in Carla-rack on a channel in Ardour and the two sync'd together whilst I'm programming. Once I'm done I export a MIDI file from Hydrogen (it's a shame it ignores lead/lag in the export) and load it into Ardour. At the moment I'm having to do the last bit of programming (CC4, foot controller) in Ardour using automation.

It is the open hihat sound that has eight levels of openness, 10 to 16 velocity layers and five round robins. The samples I'm using are from Voxengo. I'm really pleased with them so far, though I've not got as far actually mixing anything.
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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by Quirq »

Thanks, I'm aware of how to use Hydrogen but I'm happy using the SFZs and don't want to spend ages loading WAVs into H2 – I'd also lose the round robin capabilities because AFAIK H2 doesn't support that.

That also still doesn't address how to programme MIDI CC4 to trigger different samples: SFZ already does this, the question was just whether there's a way of programming CCs in H2 rather than having to do it as automation in Ardour.
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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by Quirq »

I find Hydrogen mostly fine for my purposes and I'm programming complex progressive rock drum parts in unusual time signatures and with every single bar different (i.e. programmed individually).

My only complaints are not being able to programme CC4 in Hydrogen and the fact that lead/lag (which is very useful) isn't applied when exporting a MIDI file.
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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by chaocrator »

actually, Hydrogen can handle hicat openness via CC #4.
but no one knows, how exactly to do it.
i've been googling this about a year ago — seems like this feature is totally undocumented.

so i've completely switched to a hardware drum module :mrgreen: (a second hand Yamaha DTXPress III — it's importand that it does have MIDI IN, but most modules don't)
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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by Quirq »

So are you saying that it can handle CC#4 if it's fed to it, but there's no way of programming it within the Hydrogen sequencer?

I did at one point manage to feed automation from Ardour into Hydrogen, which was sending MIDI back to the samples loaded in Ardour, but it didn't work reliably. So I gave up and now leave hihat openness programming until I've imported a MIDI file into Ardour.

To be honest, if Ardour handled velocity in the same way as Hydrogen, with the vertical slider window at the bottom, I'd probably ditch H2 completely. In Ardour, the colour distinction between notes with similar velocity isn't easy to see and hovering over notes to read the velocity level is a pain, whereas the visual representation in Hydrogen is much quicker to read.

I love the lead/lag feature in H2 but sadly that doesn't get written during export so I no longer use it. It'd be great if in Ardour you could nudge MIDI notes backward/forward a tiny amount like you can with regions. I probably need to have a play with doing it manually, but it could get quite time consuming :lol:
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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by ssj71 »

Quirq wrote: I probably need to have a play with doing it manually, but it could get quite time consuming
That is actually why I moved to "performing" all my drum parts on a keyboard, rather than sequencing them note by note. I usually just do a couple runs (2 fingers at a time), but it sure generates plenty of lead/lag! ;)

Actually now I have a drumpad that I'm using in the same way, but I'm a terrible drummer so there's a fair bit of cleanup after. Still I think its much faster than click click clicking each note in.
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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by blablack »

Hi there,

I am the dev who worked on hihat openness in Hydrogen.
Before anything, I am sorry :) the functionality works but it's not the most intuitive (while I am at it, another sorry because it is not documented properly).

In the latest version of Hydrogen, you have to define different instruments for different openness (say one instrument for "closed hihat", one of "half open", etc.). Then in the GUI of each instrument, you can setup Hydrogen to chose the right instrument based on the hihat openness received from the midi instrument.

To make it clear, this was designed specifically for eletric drum kit via midi.

Hope that answers your question, but if you have more please let me know.

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Re: Hydrogen: hihat openness

Post by chaocrator »

wow! it's cool that you are here.

actually, if this feature is not intuitive, one screencast with a practical example would save thousands of human-hours over the world
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