best workflow for flexibly composing drum tracks (A2)

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

Hey guys,

I’m quite new to the Ardour world and to audio recording in Linux in general. I’m looking for a simple solution to get drum tracks into Ardour2. I know there’s MIDI support in the coming version of Ardour, but I can’t use the alpha, because there seems to be a bug in it, leading to unbearable high DSP loads without any apparent reason, while A2 works like a charm for me in this respect.

At the moment, I’m using Hydrogen to create individual drum patterns which I then export to wavs to be imported into Ardour. This works well, but its a quite annoying, because I have to export and import every single pattern, to be able to copy and paste drum patterns within ardour to try things out songwriting-wise in the end. Another point is, that I need measure and tempo changes, which makes it quite impossible to just write the whole drum track of a song in Hydrogen (which would be annoying anyway) and then export it or to syncronize it via Jack to Ardour.

Can anyone give me a hint on which way to go?

I’d eventually love to have some simple way to compose drum tracks within Ardour – ideally without the need to click around to much, slowing eveything down, a way like i.e. GuitarPro and TuxGuitar provide it by just laying down the midi notes in numbers via the keyboard…

#2

Yes you can hook Hydrogen up to Ardour using qjackctrl . Googles our friend here . I think theres some briansbedroom blog about it somewhere ? You can stereo out to one stereo track or per drum output to several tracks . Ardour will record the audio of hydrogen , kind of like rewire on windows and mac , where they connect Reason to Protools .

#3

I need measure and tempo changes, which makes it quite impossible to just write the whole drum track of a song in Hydrogen

Well, you can use jack transport in both ardour and hydrogen, and set ardour as the master. Then hydrogen will follow ardour’s tempo changes.

If the tempo map has a lot of changes and especially if it includes ramps, klick and klick2ardour come handy.

In H2, I suggest you should use “song mode” and sequence the different patterns in the song editor. As for signature changes, you need patterns of different sizes. Use size 8 for a 4/4 and size 6 for a 3/4.

Cheers, Pablo