Hey guys, in this video we’re going to go over how to use Hydrogen Drum machine to make
tracks and loops for your music.
Hydrogen is completely free and is available on Windows, Mac and Linux.
It has support for a variety of different drums sounds and effects, and isn’t too
difficult to learn.
We’ll cover the basic on how to make a few patterns and then we’ll show you how to
combine these patterns into a song.
When you go to open Hydrogen for the first time you’ll be in pattern mode.
You’ll see the layout for your pattern on the bottom section of the screen here.
All you need to do is at a time point for each part of the drum kit and it will add
it to the pattern.
Just click it again if you want to remove it.
Now we’ll start building our first pattern.
In this pattern, the shortest note we’ll need is an eighth note, but you can change
that by clicking on the resolution button.
We’ll start with just eighth notes on the high hat and we’ll make a simple rock beat.
Then we’ll add a few snare and kick beats.
Right now we’re in pattern mode, so if we play it back it will just keep repeating.
We’ll start working on our second pattern now.
Click on the button for pattern 2, and you’ll see that beat we just created below disappears.
Now let’s just try something with the ride cymbal for this beat.
We’ll add eighth notes on the ride again and just a few snare and kick beats.
I also want to have a variation of pattern 2 every second time it plays.
To do this right click on pattern 2 and select copy.
This will create an identical copy as a separate pattern that we can edit without affecting
the first one.
Now we’ll just remove the last few snare notes and switch to triplets.
Click the resolution menu and switch to 8T if you want to do this.
Then just add the notes.
Keep in mind that while you’re in this mode you won’t be able to edit regular eight
notes that don’t line up with the grid.
Ok so now I’m happy with these 2 patterns we’ve made.
Now we’ll switch the mode at the top to song mode and start combining patterns.
You can use as many of these as you want and repeat them to create a full song if you had
the time to program it, but we’ll be keeping it fairly simple for this example.
We’ll play the Pattern 1, 4 times and then alternate between the 2 variations of pattern
2.
To program this, you click on the little squares beside each pattern and they’ll light up;
like with the notes just click them to undo it.
Now we can play back the beat we’ve made with all the patterns combined.
There’s just a few things you may want to do to make the programmed drums sound a little
more natural.
First we’ll adjust the velocity of some of the notes.
This can be done to make it sound a little less consistent otherwise they’ll all be
exactly the same.
We’ll also increase the pitch variation.
This with give each of the notes a slightly different pitch which will also make it sound
a little more natural; just be careful not to go overboard with it.
Now that we’re done, we can save the project so we can come back to it another time.
Hydrogen has the option to either export it as a MIDI file or audio file.
If you’re planning on using another DAW to work on your song, the MIDI file would
work great and give you the most control in that program as you’re mixing.
Otherwise, you can just export as a WAVE file.
Thanks for watching this video on how to use the hydrogen drum machine.
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