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MIDI Overdubs vs. Merged MIDI Clips, Hydrogen Transport
Hey Rui!
First of all, I have to say thank you for your wonderful applications (Qtractor and Qjactctl, especially). I have tried LMMS, Ardour, and Rose, and your DAW (excuse me, Audio and MIDI sequencer :) ) is far and away the most straightforward and intuitive Linux option, for my purposes at least. What's more, one of the best features of Qtractor is its close kinship with Qjactctl, which to me leaves apps like patchage and alsa sequencer in the dust in terms of utility. I also found the manual to be very well written and pretty comprehensive , even if some sections (e.g., the How-to bit about bouncing the MIDI to an audio track) is a little outdated.
Anyway, on to business. I'm trying to determine the best option for tracking MIDI input from Hydrogen directly into Qtractor, and I would really appreciate some advice on best practices. My process is basically to loop a bassline or riff, tap tempo or enter the bpm, then use my MIDI controller to lay down bass drum, loop back, do the snare, etc. until I've completed a basic drum track. As such, my questions are:
1. (Forgive the basicness of the question, if you would) . If my intent is to control BPM, time signature, etc., entirely through Qtractor while running Hydrogen MIDI signals into a track, how should I set the Transport (Master?). Also, transport aside, does it make any material difference if I just set the BPM and time signatures in Qtractor and Hydrogen identically, and avoid the transport business altogether?
2. In terms of overdubbing vs. merging clips. To be clear, if I overdub say, a snare MIDI signal on top of a bass drum track, is that preserved as a separate clip, or does it really just become one clip? The reason I ask is that, is there any advantage in recording and then merging separate clips, other than you can change plugins and such on each separate clip? Incidentally, would it be easier, given my process, to simply create a new track for each drum part and never merge the clips at all?
Sorry, I understand that last question especially is very dependent on individual needs, but I would greatly appreciate any general advice you might give on the subject. Thanks so much for all your hard work!
re. MIDI Overdubs vs. Merged MIDI Clips, Hydrogen Transport
hi belder,
many thanks for your support and kind words.
1. If my intent is to control BPM, time signature, etc., entirely through Qtractor while running Hydrogen MIDI signals into a track, how should I set the Transport (Master?). Also, transport aside, does it make any material difference if I just set the BPM and time signatures in Qtractor and Hydrogen identically, and avoid the transport business altogether?
I don't if it's still the case but bydrogen jack-transport implementation has been somewhat plagued with issues before, maybe it's better now, i don't know but you can of course try for yourself and enlight me with your findings ;)
let me also tell that jack-transport is not the best there are for heavy beat/loop-based scenarios; meaning that keeping more than one sequencer application in loop-sync is not going to work well all the time for all the cases; it would work best if you stick with one and only sequencer, either qtractor _or_ hydrogen, but not both at the same time, depending on each other, no matter which one you set as master to the timebase (tempo, time-signature aka. BBT info.) it is going to be a rolling open can of worms at best :)
that said, you probably want to have hydrogen as a pure slave/dumb drum-kit sampler instrument--if it accepts MIDI input, which i really don't know--and forget its sequencer capabilities.
2. In terms of overdubbing vs. merging clips. To be clear, if I overdub say, a snare MIDI signal on top of a bass drum track, is that preserved as a separate clip, or does it really just become one clip? The reason I ask is that, is there any advantage in recording and then merging separate clips, other than you can change plugins and such on each separate clip? Incidentally, would it be easier, given my process, to simply create a new track for each drum part and never merge the clips at all?
when recording qtractor creates brand new clips with the recorded material, be that pcm-audio or MIDI, always; thing is, clips may overlap or overlay each other over the timeline; overlapping clips are merged in realtime on playback; you can also merge any two or more clips into a brand new one that replace the original ones (cf. menu [Edit >] Clip > Merge...)
in qtractor, "overdubbing" is actually only supported at the MIDI clip level: see menu [Edit >] Clip > Record, where you may arm and record directly into an existing MIDI clip (you can arm this either from the main timeline view or from the MIDI clip editor (aka. piano-roll view) from menu File > Record.
hth.
cheers
ps. the user manual and howto's are sourced from the qtractor wiki material which is in fact and praise are authored by users just like you.
Wow! Thanks for the
Wow! Thanks for the informative and timely response. Just like I expected, given your level of activity on the forum. I particularly appreciate the honest counsel on Jack-transport problems with Hydrogen. I've seen other posts on the forum where this Hydrogen transport problem's been listed, but it's just such a handy drum application! Incidentally, Hydrogen does accept MIDI input, which can be recorded in Qtractor I believe using the "slave/dumb" tactic you spoke of. Thing is, it's hard to disentangle Hyrdrogen sequencing from Qtractor sequencing, or to separate Hydrogen sequencing from its own instrument component--at least it has been for me!
I do like your drumkv1 application--which works great as a drum plugin on the fly. I'm probably just too lazy to manually upload all the kits I want :). Incidentally, I did see that post where someone mentioned how to convert hydrogen kits into the drumkv1 file type, but I'm nowhere near sophisticated enough to run a python script to convert all those kits.
Thanks also for the clarity on the merged clip topic. If I think of more questions, I'll be sure to ask! Thanks again so much for your work and help.
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