THE UBUSTU FEED

We’re going to skim over a few things we’ve already discussed in the last Ardour tutorial, so if things get confusing please go there first.

This tutorial will show you how to sync up the digital audio workstation, Ardour, and the advanced drum machine, Hydrogen. This will allow you to have a full featured drum machine playing in perfect time with your Ardour session. Or, one hell of a fancy click track.

Learning to play nice

First, start up JACK. Open Ardour and create a new session. Near the top of the window in Ardour, make sure that Time Master is enabled (green) and is set to JACK rather than Internal:

Now, open Hydrogen. For simplicity’s sake, go ahead and load of one of the demo tracks from the File menu :

Before you jump back to Ardour, make sure that Jack Transport is enabled (light blue) at the bottom of the screen :

Maximize Ardour and click play. Viola! Now you have a groovy backing track, or a fully orchestrated drum bonanza for your recording pleasure.

Click stop and try pressing play in Hydrogen. Viola²! This is a great feature as it allows you to rework the drum beat after the session recording is done.

You can even press play from JACK Control :

Recording Hydrogen’s output in Ardour

Sometimes you need an actual waveform to manipulate inside Ardour. Luckily, its very easy to turn your Hydrogen song into a recorded track. First things first, create a new audio track. Make sure to set it to Stereo and select Add. Rename the track to ‘hydrogen’ :

Press Shift-E to bring up the Editor Mixer panel. With the ‘hydrogen’ track selected click the Input button :

From the right side of the window, set out_L and out_R from the Hydrogen-1 tab :

Enable recording for the ‘hydrogen’ track. Finally, enable recording from the main transport and press play to record your Hydrogen loop :

That’s all there is to it! We would like to note that the tempos between the two programs do not sync up. This means that if you want to change the tempo to 62 BPM you’ll have to change it in both Hydrogen and Ardour. Now get to work!