Hydrogen multichannel midi

Is Hydrogen multichannel midi drums possible in Ardour?

A quick search on this forum gave me the following:

Essentially, you need to use JACK and set “create per-instrument outputs” in Hydrogen’s preferences. That’s probably audio not MIDI outputs though.

I haven’t used Hydrogen in forever but I know a midi export is possible. If nothing else, you can assign the different drums to different midi channels in Ardour. That’s certainly not an ideal solution but its a back up.

Okay, now that I’m looking at Hydrogen a little bit (its slow enough at work :slight_smile:)…
You can do multichannel right in hydrogen. Each instrument has a channel parameter in the lower right corner of the screen. So you can set each drum to whatever channel you wish and when you export the midi file, that data should be reflected. If so, Ardour will recognize that.

A couple of things…

If things haven’t changed the Hydrogen Audio outputs are stereo for every kit piece which has never made sense to me at all… (Kit pieces are monaural and should be pannable mono tracks not exported in stereo) and this makes routing the JACK connections to individual Ardour tracks far more confusing than it should be. I’m not sure how this works with regard to exporting MIDI from Hydrogen though…

Secondly if I’m not mistaken doesn’t the LSP MultiSampler now import Hydrogen Drumkits? If this is the case wouldn’t it be much simpler to do all the MIDI stuff on an Ardour MIDI track with the H2 kit loaded and Audio channels mapped with multiple outs from LSP MultiSampler…?

This is from the LSP 1.1.24 Release notes:

Added support of loading Hydrogen drumkits by the Multisampler plugin series.

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Is “create per-instrument outputs” preference MIDI not audio?

As far as I know that option is for Audio not MIDI

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I have recorded all instruments using one stereo microphone, a H1n, right behind me in the studio. You can perceive each instrument in it’s position, ride on the right, hi-hat on the left, etc in a song created with this drumkit. The bass drum is the only one I apply special equalization in Ardour. Hydrogen’s stereo output is important in this scenario. But I agree there should be a configuration to export mono tracks

In my typical workflow, Hydrogen and Ardour are synchronized through jack transport and then I can play the guitar and edit the drums. When it’s finished the Hydrogen drums is exported in multiples files to be imported in Ardour

I like the sound rendering in Hydrogen. It varies, time, intensity and pitch a little, which makes the result very pleasant. I couldn’t get the same results with other multi samplers.

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