2 ways to use Hydrogen drums in your Ardour Session

How to use Hydrogen drums in your Ardour Session. (Easy way and Hard way)

Introduction

Hydrogen is a FOSS drum machine application that provides an intuitive interface for designing drum beats for any style of music. It’s powerful enough to create some nice sounding drums for your song. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you two ways to incorporate Hydrogen into your Ardour workflow. One way that is very simple, and another that is very flexible.

Easy Way: Export the drums as a .WAV file from Hydrogen and import them into your Ardour session.

After writing your drum pattern, navigate to Hydrogen’s “Project” tab and click on the option labelled “Export song”. You can also hit “Ctrl + E” as a shortcut to open up the export window.

In the export window, click on the “browse” button and head to the directory where you want to save this drum beat. After selecting your export directory, pick a template from the dropdown menu that closely resembles the delivery specs for your Ardour session. If you have no idea what I just said, just pick the “WAV, best mixdown quality” template and Ardour will take care of downsampling it to your session specs.

In Ardour, click on the “Session” button on the top-left and find “Import” on the dropdown menu. You can also open the import manager by hitting “Ctrl + I”.

Find the drum pattern you exported from Hydrogen in the manager and select it. Before hitting import, make sure “Mapping” is set to “one track per file”, this will create a new track for your audio sample.

Now you have a drum beat from Hydrogen, inside your Ardour project.

Pros:

  • Quickest way to get drums from Hydrogen

  • Can manipulate this sample like any other sample. (Reverse, Slice, Pitch Shift, etc)

Cons:

  • Can’t change drum pattern in Ardour, need to re-export changes from Hydrogen and re-import.

  • Session tempo must match in order for drum sample to work without time stretching.

Hard Way: Sync Hydrogen and Ardour through JACK.

This section assumes that you already have JACK setup with the necessary bridges needed for Pulseaudio. For this section, we are going to take advantage of JACK’s transport system. This allows JACK compatible applications to be synced up to one master timecode controlled by JACK itself.

In order to access this functionality, you will need an application like qjackctl , Cadence , or for this tutorial Carla on your system.

Preparing Ardour

Before we start syncing any JACK application with Ardour, let’s make sure Ardour is using JACK as it’s external sync. Navigate to the “window” button on the top bar and find “Preferences” in the dropdown menu then click “Show”. The preference window should appear.

Select the “Transport” dropdown on the left side of the window and a list of “transport masters” should appear to the right, bottom third of the window. Click on the bubble next to “JACK” to select it. The bubble should be filled to indicate your selection.

Back in the main session window, at the top left next to the playback controls, click on the button labelled “Int.” and it should turn green and read “JACK”. This means that JACK is now the sync reference for Ardour. If this button doesn’t appear green or say “JACK”, check the “transport masters” list under your Ardour preferences. Otherwise, Ardour is ready to sync with JACK.

Preparing Hydrogen

For this demonstration, I’m using an older version of Hydrogen from the Ubuntu repositories. There’s a newer version on Flathub, but I can’t seem to get JACK to work correctly with Flatpaks, so we will have to use the system package instead. Sorry, Fedora Silverblue users.

In Hydrogen, go to “Options” and click on “Preferences” in the dropdown menu. Go to the “Audio System” tab, click on the dropdown menu and select “JACK” from the list. Click “Ok” and restart Hydrogen. To the right of the Tempo box, there should be two buttons labelled “J. TRANS” and “J. MASTER”, click on them to activate them if they are not activated already. The buttons should appear blue. Hydrogen is now ready.

Match Tempo

Make sure the tempo on Carla, Hydrogen and Ardour match. When you press play on Carla’s JACK transport, Hydrogen and Ardour should start playing together.

Recording Drums

To add drums directly from Hydrogen, you need to connect the audio output to an Ardour audio track.

Create a new audio track in Ardour. Go to Carla and connect Hydrogen’s 2 output channels to the new track’s inputs. Set the track to record by pressing the red record button on it. Pres the record button on the Ardour controls. Then it will start recording when you hit play.

Pros:

  • Drums are flexible. Can change them while working on it.

  • Live playback of what they sound with the session before committing.

  • Useful for live performances.

Cons:

  • Setup takes some time.

  • Relies on external sync and audio routing.

  • Doesn’t work outside of JACK.

Conclusion

While Ardour and Hydrogen offer different ways to be used while making a song, flexibility comes at the cost of simplicity. Both ways are still valid ways to use the programs, you just need to decide which method best fits your audio workflow.