Putting together our drum kit for Hydrogen drum machines + projects in Ardor 4.6

    Hydrogen is a free cross-platform drum machine. A drum machine is a thing that allows musicians to send all percussionists to hell and make “that-thousand pada-boom” independently, on a computer.


    The library is available on Github . As well as phonogram projects (drums + bass , bass projects in lmms here .) Made in Ardor 4.6. And one instrumental project - with guitars, you can listen to mp3 here . The reduction has not yet been brought to mind, there are problems with the sound of the bass and barrel, for example, but I think it’s not worth pulling.




    Why did we need our own library


    Before that, we used the free BigMono library, but it has 2 problems:


    1. The library is not free (can only be downloaded from the site, can be withdrawn at any time)
    2. A reverb has already been wound on drums, therefore there are fewer opportunities for “sound maneuver”.

    So our permanent leader-guitarist, sound engineer and technician selected the best of those samples that I could find, and with the help of a Java script I put together a configuration file for them. We still have no opportunities to record our own, so for now we have limited ourselves to this. As a result, they partially entered Salamander drumkit and SM MegaReaper, as well as a sample stick from freesound.org.


    How is the Hydrogen drum library arranged?


    You can download them in .h2drumkit format and install, but in reality it’s a double archive (.tar.gz), which contains wave- (or flac-) files and a lone drumkit.xml. It contains library settings, a list of tools, a list of the files of each tool and their settings. So you can create a library without the Hydrogen GUI at all, pack it into an archive and change the extension of the resulting file to .h2drumkit. And vice versa, change the extension .h2drumkit to tar.gz and pull out the file folder, drop the drumkits folder into it - it will appear in hydrogen.



    How was the library going?


    I began to build partly through the GUI, partly through the file manager and Geany (code editor). It was convenient to create a new library through the GUI, create a copy of one of the existing ones, edit the settings like volume and pan, listen to the result on the fly, and also create an instrument and add the first pair of samples. Each instrument contained approximately one and a half dozen samples. This is necessary for greater realism - depending on the strength of the impact, not only the volume changes, but also the sound of the instrument. Therefore, the volume (Velocity) is divided into several sections, on each of which the specified sample sounds.




    Sorting samples by velocity (impact force)


    Using a text editor and explorer, it is convenient to delete unnecessary instruments inherited from the source library, and the remaining samples are added to each instrument.


    Well, then already our guitarist-sound engineer wrote a script and eventually assembled the library from scratch, and through the GUI I adjusted the volume and panning.


    Library issues


    Crash15 lags a little bit, you have to slightly shift it in the time editor.



    Samples of volumes 269 and 369 have strong resonances, use only if you cut out resonant frequencies or set a gate. Well, the barrel with the worker is frail, you need to wind it up a lot.


    Projects in Ardor


    About installation and configuration of Ardor 4.6 is already written in detail here , there is also a link to ardor 4.6, in which projects are made. For projects, Calf plugins are required, which is also written in the article. In later versions, they also open, but there may be problems.


    To save resources, all hydrogen tracks were exported to wave groups (barrel, closed hat, open hat, half-open hat, several volume groups.


    Here is a video of the process in Hydrogen, LMMS and Ardor 4.6:



    Video for those who do not know how to work with hydrogen and generally with drum machines:




    Summary


    As a result, it turned out what happened. Download, try, comment - we will be happy.


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