Re: [Rosegarden-user] what's the difference between the matrix editor and a drum editor?

[Silvan <dmm...@us...>]

On Friday 14 May 2004 12:09 pm, Chris Cannam wrote:

> I'm wondering is: what differences do people expect to find between a drum
> pattern editor and something like our matrix editor?

The pattern tracker is what makes Hydrogen work so well.  It's not just a 
pattern editor, but a drum *sequencer*.

I could already do the same thing with the Matrix I guess.  Set the duration 
to something short, set a particular short bit to loop while I edit it.  Then 
copy bits of this and that here and there to put it together.

Doing, say, three bars of the standard A pattern and then a fill (B), then six 
bars of A and a fill (C) and then three bars of A again would be tedious, 
though not impossible.

> I should add that I'm not offering to code a drum editor -- point (1) above
> is already much harder than it sounds, because you have to get the drum
> names from somewhere.  I'm just interested.

I think it would be a waste of effort, personally.  If anything, better 
integration with Hydrogen.  I haven't actually done anything serious with 
Hydrogen yet, or tried to import patterns...  Let me try that.

That sounds pretty bad.  The rhythm is really borked.  A simple thing with a 
tambourine doing 16ths over a vanilla bass and snare on the beat.  Not rocket 
science.

The quantizer doesn't seem able to do anything with it either.

OK.  In order to be useful:

* import the rhythm correctly (!)
* import into an existing file instead of a new document

Hrm...  We import the patterns, but not the song.  So I have pretty much the 
scenario envisioned above, but now I have it spread out into umpty scadillion 
individual segments.  Arranging this into something would be even more 
tedious than I imagined before.  Maybe an option to merge everything into a 
single segment, for starters.

Or how about importing the whole Hydrogen song into one segment?

Or synchronized transports so we could start Hydrogen on demand and just let 
it do its thing independently?

I see your point.  Hydrogen is a good noise maker (takes its MIDI in, and 
makes noise, so we can play it), but we really can't currently make good use 
of it as a drum sequencer, and we don't have any good facility for sequencing 
the drums ourselves.  Something like a pattern palette would be extremely 
more convenient than dragging segments around.  Especially bunches of 
segments.

Well, anyway, off the cuff brainstorming.  Take it FWIW.

What *I* need is a bunch of drums sequenced by somebody who knows how to play 
drums.  My best efforts are pretty sad, and none of this is going to be 
terribly useful no matter what.

-- 
Michael McIntyre  ----   Silvan <dmm...@us...>
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek;  registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/