What is Reddit's opinion of Hydrogen?

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1. Learn to embrace JACK, it's the sound transport protocol used by pro-audio linux software.
2. Use Hydrogen as your drum machine.
3. Use Ardour as your recording software.

All the above projects are free software (as in freedom, as in beer), should be available for your distribution, but contributions are always appreciated (and definitely worth it for Ardour).

Effects plugins (reverb, chorus) under GNU/Linux are called LADSPA plugins, or newer ones, LV2 plugins. Ardour natively supports them.

Happy recording!

I often practice with the Hydrogen drum machine under Linux. Sometimes I find it easier, especially if I'm working on a song where some part is swung a little, I'll have my percussionist friend set up the track for me.

There's a free, open-source app called Hydrogen which is pretty good if memory serves (I've not booted the thing up for years, so it's probably even better now).

edit: /u/invertedearth already said this...

If you don't mind running it as software on a PC/Laptop, try Hydrogen. Probably more than you need but you may as well start playing with drum machines sooner rather than later. You're posting on reddit so you obviously have a PC and Hydrogen is free, so there's no reason to not give it a spin. If your amp has a cd-in type input, you could run it through that, but you should probably avoid having it mixed in with your effects loop if your amp doesn't have a separate (and clean) input for it. I usually run it through some external speakers from my laptop. If I just need a metronome for practice, I like putting a hi-hat on the beat and a kick or a snare to accent each bar. I find that to be far more useful than just a click on the beat. And of course you can dial in the BPMs to your heart's content.

Hm, as far as I know mpd is a music player, are you planning to use midi to control a playlist by start / stop / next commands?

If you are looking for a way to trigger a set of samples to make music, i.e. a drumkit check out hydrogen it should be available in any bigger linux distribution.

EDIT: Sorry, I guess you were talking about an AKAI MPD. Looks like the MPD doesn't have native linux drivers for the USB-port, so you will be better off connecting it via MIDI to USB adapter.

Once you connect the pad with your computer enter "amidi -l" in a console and you should see a new midi device.

Try starting hydrogen, load some default drumkit and connect the MIDI ports, a good application to manage MIDI connections would be aconnectgui or patchage.

You say that like it's a downside...? ;)

but seriously, as other commenters say, there should be a windows version now days - have a look here

Edit: windows binary available here: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/node/21

Edit2: Linux actually has a few options for music/audio production: http://www.tecmint.com/free-music-creation-or-audio-editing-softwares-for-linux/amp/

I also don't know much about drumming or drum machines. My first idea would be to watch a few youtube-tutorials and mess around with a software drum machine like Hydrogen.

Hey there! You should give Hydrogen a try. It's a free and open source drum machine. I don't have the time right now to take on another project, but this is what I use in my own recording projects.

Link: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/

Ditto to what everyone else has said on scales.

For drum machines/loops, I'd recommend checking out either Monkey Machine or Hydrogen. Monkey Machine doesn't export the audio file but it can be helpful as a simple practice tool. Hydrogen is a free and open source but it's still in beta so save often!

There's a program that's free called hydrogen. It allows you to write out your own drum tracks. I've used it for a bunch of recordings and I'm always impressed by the quality of the kits that you can download even within the program's interface. I don't have any really good samples because I utilize it for country music, but as a guy who appreciates metal, I know that the program and the drum sounds within it are more than capable of doing what you need it to do.

http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/

Edit: And here's something embarrassing I made with the program. I did it in about 10 minutes so the quality isn't at all good but you can hear some of what the program is capable of. Mind you there are literally dozens of drum sets that you can utilize the sounds from, from drum machines to real sampled kits.

http://youtu.be/Unt54nUfrAU

Get some recording software like Audacity and maybe a drum software like Hydrogen. Both are free but you mostly only need Audacity. For me I find having it and starting small will allow you to get used to thinking how to structure songs just by recording a verse and chorus and being able to hear it played back.

Ran it from terminal but I haven't gotten a crash since installing some additional packages (further details in the update I just made). I did however get these messages:

Hydrogen 1.0.0-rc1 [Jun 11 2020] [http://www.hydrogen-music.org]

Copyright 2002-2008 Alessandro Cominu

Copyright 2008-2020 The hydrogen development team

Hydrogen comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY

This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. See the file COPYING for details.

(E) Filesystem::check_permissions Audiophob is not writable

(E) Filesystem::file_copy unable to copy /usr/share/hydrogen/data/drumkits/Audiophob/drumkit.xml to /usr/share/hydrogen/data/drumkits/Audiophob/drumkit.xml.bak, /usr/share/hydrogen/data/drumkits/Audiophob/drumkit.xml.bak is not writable

(E) XMLDoc::write Unable to open /usr/share/hydrogen/data/drumkits/Audiophob/drumkit.xml for writing

There's more but too many for a reply. Could you explain to me what the (E) means, I couldn't find anything about it.

Playing scales along with a drum machine is kinda fun. I haven't played with the open source drum machine program Hydrogen in years, but it's still around - you might find it useful. http://www.hydrogen-music.org

beatmaker 2 isn't bad for an iphone/ipad. It costs $9.99, has lots of samples, you can record your own samples, and i think you can write midi and what not. You can record / make loops too. Check it out

edit: sorry, brain fart forgot you said fee. check out hydrogen: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/node/21

Fuzzy Bumps is a one minute loop I made tonight trying Hydrogen. I have no idea what I'm doing, so I'd love to some feedback. I enjoy how different this sounds low vs full volume, and on monitors/speakers vs headphones.

I've been using an older Yamaha keyboard with a zillion pre-programmed drum patterns that allows tempo adjustments (speed up/ slow down tempos w/o changing drum sounds). It's a pain to set up, select the drum pattern, adjust the speed, and meter it out to fit the song length, but it's better than two coffee cans and a maraca. (Example). I use the headphone out jack on the keyboard into my audio interface, using Audacity for recording.

There's a free downloadable program called Hydrogen that I hear good things about; I just haven't had the time to sit down and work with it... yet.
Maybe it's what you seek?

If you want software drum machine, I recommend Hydrogen. It's an open-source program that's pretty damn good, and available for all platforms. Download it and give it a try.

There's lots of examples of what people have created with it on YouTube

http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/

OK, so the simple answer is that you play the appropriate scale & position for the underlying chord sequence. So if you're in Cmaj, then playing Am pentatonic will theoretically be tonic. If it's a I-IV-V, then play within the scales for that progression (i.e. ionian, lydian, mixolydian).

Minor pentatonic is nowhere near the same as the major scale - penta has five, while major has seven notes. Even the minor scale has seven notes and no direct relation to pentatonic.

Dunno which sick solo's you've been listening to, but from experience I can say that Slash, Eddie Van Halen, and Kirk Hammet all use pentatonic judiciously. The 'sick' part comes from the phrasing, and not necessarily the notes.

The right direction is to learn the modes (ionian, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian, aolian, and locrian) of the major scale, as well as the "shapes" of the minor pentatonic simultaneously.

Then practice playing any of those scales over common chord progressions.

Oh, and check out the hydrogen drsum machine: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/

Im a big fan of Hydrogen. It's an open-source drum machine written by one dude, so not a lot of support, but it's amazingly deep for such a small package. I've found it quite good for achieving a more "realistic" drum kit sound by making heavy use of different velocities and mixing various samples of live drum kits.

LMMS is supposed to be close to FL Studio (i use neither, so i have no idea of how close they are). Maschine Pads are tied in with their proprietary software and i never saw one running with anything else, but i saw quite a few AKAI and Korg Pads being used with Ardour, Hydrogen, SooperLooper ...

http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/node/21

"Download Stable release:

Linux 0.9.5 binaries: Debian Wheezy (i386) Ubuntu (PPA)

MacOS X 0.9.5 binaries: please use 0.9.6-beta1 (Intel only)

Windows 0.9.5 binaries: use the 0.9.6 snapshot below"

Not really sure about free Drum Vsts apart from Hydrogen however some good paid ones are:

• EZdrummer
• Addictive Drums
• Superior Drummer

As for how to program drums, check out this video I found it very helpful! Also you should check out /r/WeAreTheMusicMakers!

I usually use Guitar Pro or Hydrogen to create a drum track, export it to wav, and sync it with my recordings in Audacity.

I found that I was never able to just play for that long at a time - until I started watching stuff while I was playing. Generally, I watch documentaries or cartoons, but whatever. Go to http://guitarcardio.com/ (more for guitar, but it's still useful for bass), have it generate a bunch of random scales, and just mess around with the notes on the scales. Eventually, you learn what notes sound good together.

Also, if you can get a drum machine, that will help out a lot. There's a program called Hydrogen, which is a free software drum machine, at http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/

Ableton and FL Studio especially have a large following, and YouTube tutorials are plentiful (and often very specific to the style of music you're trying to make), so take advantage of those if you end up going with either of those software packages. Also, it seems a lot of USB midi controllers come with lite versions of Ableton, so it might be a good entry point.

You said below you were a drummer, so I'm not sure if this will be as beneficial to you as it was to me, but there's an excellent book on drum programming that I learned several techniques from which apply to pretty much any DAW or hard/soft drum machine you may choose:

http://www.amazon.com/Drum-Programming-Complete-Program-Drummer/dp/0931759544/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324166524&sr=8-1

It's dated but it's still very applicable to most software you'll end up working with for techno, dubstep, or hip-hop.

If you're into Linux at all, I'd also like to plug one of my favorite compositional tools, the Hydrogen drum machine: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/

Hydrogen is a very flexible, easy to use, open source Drum sequencer.

http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/

It says it's for Linux only, but I swear I heard they were working on a Windows version.

LINUX: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/

WINDOWS: http://supercoldmilk.com/drumtrack/features.htm

found those on page one of a google search for Open Source Drum Machines

Edit: Another

http://www.ordrumbox.com/

Try creating some pattern on a drum machine, such as Hydrogen.

I use a bunch of mp3s created using a drum machine that simply goes: tum-tah-tumtum-tah at different speeds.

I have used Hydrogen in the past, it's open source. I found it intuitive and pretty robust, although, I've never used any other perc software to compare it too.